@HeavenlyPossum been thinking a lot lately about "radical households" that have rules, explicit or otherwise, about what residents can consume/buy/use (veg*an, only ethically sourced, no amazon, must recycle, etc etc), and how that obviously keeps out the sick, the poor, the racialised, the queer... And like, how these houses are so often little oases of people who don't have to work long hours, aren't constantly angry and stressed, get on really well, know how to use therapy words to solve conflict well, peaceful little places of kind gentle calm people who think those traits are the results of their values and character...

what if the ethical consumption policy IS how you have a place like that. Not because it attracts/selects for good people, but because it selects for people who aren't "difficult" (oppressed, struggling), who don't create "drama" (complicating your privileged stories about how the world works), aren't "unethical" (making visible the ways that your "kindness and gentleness" are conditional on pushing out desperate people). What if the insistence on ethical consumption is the point? The whole point? It's nothing to do with how that consumption changes the world, but with the fact that people who cannot ethically consume, or who are too busy resisting evil to bother with ethical consumption, need to be made absent/invisible to the liberal in order to maintain the fiction that the good feelings they have about/in their home are the result of their virtue and not their privilege.