Immigration freedom is a civil rights issue. “[Melissa] Murrell joined five other members at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to introduce the project to the public. She says the organization already has collected some twenty stories from immigrants and their families, both documented and undocumented. ‘To kind of put a face on the issue to help people understand that every time we talk about immigration reform we’re talking about real people,’ she said. Over the next several months the coalition will compile more stories. Those stories will then be archived at the BCRI. . . .”

From Salon, “With gun nuts hoarding bullets, will cops be disarmed?” (*) (* Yes please.) “But what those rushing to stockpile guns and ammo seem to miss is that their actions have consequences on the people [police] whose job it is to keep us safe. . . .” http://www.salon.com/2013/03/27/cops_are_running_out_of_bullets_thank_the_nra/ I have no real idea what “those rushing to stockpile guns and ammo” think about or don’t think about. Maybe if you want to know that, you could ask some, instead of spending the entire article interviewing cops. But I do know that many of us would be much safer if police had no bullets at all. Did police bullets keep Kimani Gray safe? Emma Hernandez? Angel Alvarez? Alonzo Heyward? Sean Bell? Amadou Diallo? Who seriously believes that “keep[ing] us safe” is what police do? Who’s the “us” they have in mind when they think that?

This is the best thing I’ve heard all day about “NRA fans.” Good on them. I don’t own any guns but this makes me wish I had the money to run out and buy boxes of ammunition right now. Because I have no use for it, but the cops do. And that’s the problem with the cops. Disarm your local police.

From the comment section in a thread elsewhere on Facebook: “So here’s something that I truly don’t understand about radical libertarianism. If we were to get rid of police entirely, who would protect the poor.” . . . The problem with pragmatic anti-radicalism is that it so often, the questions being asked by people who consider themselves practical actually depend on some background presumptions about what practical, day-to-day reality must really like. Background presumptions which, with even a little bit of investigation, turn out to be pretty hard to distinguish from a bad joke.

Now available for pre-order. Yessssss…. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544115899/ref=pd_csr_tt_t1_detai_b_t

Big Government is Big Business’s most dangerous weapon. Big Business is Big Government’s most profitable cash-crop.

is scanning and sheet-protecting a big box of collected (A), feminist and general global-justice flyers from summer 2001. Not sure about what to do about getting a digital copy of “A Citizen’s Guide [*] to the World Trade Organization” [* Meh.]

“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. “Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. . . . “. . . Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” – Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” reprinted in SISTER OUTSIDER (1984) http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/margins-to-centre/2006-March/000794.html

Compiling a small list of not-too-ancient state atrocities for a friend. What do you think is the worst-but-hardly-ever-talked-about atrocity committed by state forces (especially the U.S. government and its wholly owned subsidiaries, but doesn’t strictly have to be) in the last couple centuries?

To-day @ Rad Geek People’s Daily [radgeek.com]: http://radgeek.com/gt/2013/03/23/really-social-safety-net/ Toward a Really Social Safety Net