Umechan

I got offered a job on a cruise line starting next year. I have plenty of criticisms about the industry, but they were the only employer who thought my time living abroad and language ability would be useful after 18 months of looking for full-time work.

Unfortunately, this meant I had to apply for an American crew visa. I'm the kind of person who's surprisingly fine when the shit has really hit the fan, but in a mildly stressful situation, I will panic, needlessly try to predict all potential outcomes, and worry about the worst-case scenarios. So naturally, dealing with American immigration is my own personal hell.

If you don’t know, the US requires anyone applying for a visa (as well as visa-exempt tourists starting next year) to share all email addresses and social media accounts active in the last 5 years so they can scrutinize your online presence and make sure you’ve never said anything mean about America or poor little oppressed Trump. I do not think I should have to give up my privacy, especially not to work a job where I’ll spend barely more than 24 hours on US soil, so I only shared the bare minimum (obviously I didn’t share my Hexbear account, but I’m sure one of the feds that post here is getting ready to squeal).

Obviously no Neoliberal hellhole is going to dedicate the time and resources to find anything that doesn’t turn up with a Google search (unless social media companies agree to handover all data they have for their users, which wouldn’t be a surprise considering the current state of the world). The people who work in administrative roles at the embassy are also just normal people, not Trump ideologues chosen for the loyalty and adherence to the party line, but the current administration still has massive influence over their decisions, and with news stories of people being denied entry to the US just for posting memes, or being denied visas just for having undeclared social media accounts, I knew that I couldn’t expect a reasonable decision, especially not as a queer leftist.

I needed to know what I was in for, so I spent hours researching potential pitfalls, finding why people got rejected, and what I needed to do to pass. I knew that I was more likely than not to be accepted as approvral rates for crew visas from the London embassy had been over 90-95% for the last decade, with only a small dip during the first year of Trump’s first term as president. Crew visas applications are also not scrutinized as much as work or student visa applications, but as a leftist, I knew I wasn’t the average person, and anything anti-capitalist I’ve said, even as a joke, might be interpreted as an attack on America. I’d also recently returned home after more than a decade abroad, so they could abitrarily decide that I don’t have strong enough links to my home country.

So I went through my Facebook posts to make sure there’s nothing they could use against me. I also had to make everything public, as they will see a private profile as an admission of guilt. I then found out that my newly public profile would remain blank without new uploades, so I had to make a couple of performative “Look at me just living my life as an apolitical normie with no strong opinions on America’s increasing authoritarianism; surely I pose no threat to the status quo”type posts.

I also have a Mastodon account I use for horny posting, and a Reddit account I use for kinky stuff, so I needed to make sure they couldn’t be found. “Will the increasingly fascist world power be upset with me if I don’t share my nudes?” is something I never thought would be broached by even the most absurd dystopian fiction, but I seriously asked myself that question. I’d also made so many comments on small penis humiliation subreddits (consensually) aimed at men with 3.5 inch dicks about how they’re naturally designed to be subservient to real men and can’t orgasm without permission, and US Immigration could have easily accused them of being a personal attack on Trump if Stormy Daniels was telling the truth.

I had a much better idea of what I needed hide, but having too much time caused me to overthink. The night before every flight I always inevitably end up googling “Is x a liquid?” because I get paranoid that the lip balm in my pocket or something else will contain enough moisture to be classed as a liquid. This time I googled “Is x social media?” I heard that immigration has the right to deny your application if you don’t show them your phone. How could I be sure that Discogs for example wouldn’t be classed as social media? I see it more as a database and marketplace, but it has elements of social media, like a review system and forums. What about OnlyFans? Would they want to make sure any horny comments I’d left were not subversive propaganda designed to undermine America? Could I even recoup some of the visa application fees by starting my own OnlyFans and having them subscribe to make sure I’m not posting anti-fascist masturbation videos? Wanting to be as safe as possible, I decided to delete any app that had the option of user generated content.

So after a night of googling my declared email addresses and social media details to make sure I had carefully curated my online presence, I created a to-do-list for all the apps and email addresses I needed to remove from my phone. The next morning I headed into London not even remembering where I was going as I had the embassy address saved to a Google account I hadn’t declared on my application. The first member of staff I encountered at the embassy was a South Asian lady. It was reassuring to know that America’s anti-DEI had its limits, but that was most likely due to UK worker protections, as bare thin as they are. Everyone was perfectly nice, but I’d completely resented everything up to that point that I was tempted to tell the kind American lady who asked me how my day had been that I was thinking about becoming a terrorist out of pure spite. But at least they were quick, and I got through to the final stage, an interview with an immigration officer, in around an hour. There are 15-30 minute long prep videos from Black and South Asian YouTubers from the global south that give detailed breakdowns of the questions and how to correctly answer them. I knew I wouldn’t face the same scrutiny as them, but I was still surprised that my “interview” was simply just them asking what job I would be doing on the cruise ship and asking me to show them the letter from my employer. After barely 30 seconds, they told me I was successful, and I could collect the visa in around a week.

I left feeling that maybe I had made everything too hard for myself, and that the US would probably love to have a British citizen like me on one of their cruise ships if it meant they’d have one less Indian, Filipino, or Latin American person in their waters, but with them making it harder for tourists to visit, I’m not so sure.

I know what you're thinking. "OMG, how could Ireland get more based!?" But I regret to inform you that they did not in fact imprison someone for life for transhobia. They didn't even make him face the firing squad.

This is the most ridiculously fake claim I've ever seen, but it looks like conservatives are actually sharing despite the article being fake. The actual source appears to be this Facebook post.

This kind of bullshit always triggers my ADHD hyper focus, so I couldn't help but find out what the actual story was.

So needless to say, Enoch Burke (an appropriate name as berk means twat in UK slang) was not imprisoned for transphobia, but for contempt for court.

You can find the details on Wikipedia, but here's a summary.

Enoch Burke is a member of a family of evangelical activists, who appropriately come from County Mayo.

He was fired from his job as a teacher after refusing to use they/them pronouns for a student because he: 1: Interrupted a school event to go on a transphobic rant. 2: Harassed the head teacher so aggressively other teachers had to intervene in order for her to leave. 3: Brought his sister along to his disciplinary hearing and kicked up a fuss rather than act like an adult.

The school then had to hire security to prevent him from trespassing, and had to involve the police. He was told multiple times he had to leave them alone, and refused each time. He has been imprisoned multiple times, and others claim that all he needs to do to stop going back is to agree to follow the court order. He says he will never agree, so people are claiming he's been imprisoned of life when all he needs to do is stop being a dick. Even Westboro Baptist Church literally said he went too far, so you know he's unambiguously in the wrong.

I honestly thought there had to be something more complicated behind his. I thought maybe reactionaries were making fake photos of themselves falling for obvious lies so they can claim some kind of own. "LMAO, leftists are so dumb. They actually think we have the media literacy of a toddler." But no, some people are really that gullible.

I admit it. Cisgenderism is a CIA backed psyop.

I have pelvic floor tightness that has been exacerbated by starting Elvanse/Vyvanse, which means I often go from feeling nothing to suddenly feeling that I will wet myself if I don't find a toilet within 10 minutes, which is how I found this, the most persuasive argument I've ever seen against neoliberal austerity.

The main criticism of these kinds of urinals (yes, it's not the only one in London) is that they only serve able bodied and mostly cis men. I get the argument, but as an able bodied cis man (albeit one with a history of social anxiety) myself, I'd rather piss in the bushes. Going in the bushes is at least discreet, whereas this urinal may as well have a billboard saying "This motherfucker's got his cock out."

Edit: I did some further research and found this article from the BBC that says Westminster (the London borough containing Soho, Oxford Street, and many other major shopping and nightlife areas) only has 8 public restrooms for it's 8.3 square miles. That's terrible, even if this isn't counted as one of those 8, which it shouldn't be.

Unions are centrist. Don't you know the anarcho-syndicalists of revolutionary Catalonia all voted for Andrew Yang? And only far left anarchist democrats like Bernie Sanders want universal healthcare.

Think about it! People never used to conflate correlation with causation. Nowadays people do it all the time, and we're all unhappier, unhealhier, and leading less fullfilling lives. You can't tell me that's a coincidence.

Or maybe it's Neoliberalism. IDFK; I'm not a sociologist.

Am I just imagining it, or does he look like he belongs here?

It was part of Queer Britain's exhibition on Clause 28 (obligatory fuck Thatcher because the whole thing was her idea).

Taken from Red Ruin Bar in Budapest in case anyone's wondering. I wanted to take a look inside, but it was a Saturday and looked really busy when I went back.

And of course, they only serve drinks, because communism = no food.