Rad Geek People's Daily

In the wake of Obama’s big announcement on expanding deferred-action status, I am glad to see something, anything happening at last on immigration. And I am immensely happy for the families that have been able to sleep a little easier the last couple nights. But after millions deported, this so little too late, and it is not nearly enough.

No one should face deportation. Not the families and not the singles. Not the straight immigrants and not the queer immigrants. Not the hard workers and not the no-account. Not the good immigrants, not the bad immigrants.

It doesn’t matter when you got here and it doesn’t matter whether your parents brought you here or whether you came, on your own, for reasons of your own. It doesn’t matter whether you are pure as the driven snow and it doesn’t matter if you couldn’t pass a criminal background check. It doesn’t matter whether you are a gang member. That is absurd. Nobody should be threatened with being shot at the border, thrown out of their home, turned out of their job, cut off from their life, just because of where they were born.

That is ridiculous: of course people should be left alone, free, to live their own lives, without needing a permission slip from the United States government. No one should be threatened with deportation. Not just 400,000 a year (!), not even one more. No human being is illegal. Not one.

Here is a good analysis of who might be helped by expanding deferred-action, and who the president is still throwing under the bus, in the name of respectability politics:

Shared Article from Autostraddle

Obama Rolls Out Plan For Executive Action On Immigration; The St…

Is the President's plan enough? As long as there are people whose lives and families are in the US remain vulnerable to deportation, is not enough, bu…

Maddie @ autostraddle.com

Advocates for immigrant rights and immigration freedom must keep pushing. We can’t stop; we can’t even slow down. This is an important mile-marker but it is not even a victory so much as a very temporary, and very partial reprieve. The goal is a world without borders, without barriers, without checkpoints or papers, without detention or deportation or citizen-privilege. A world where everyone who moves is an undocumented immigrant, because happily there are no border guards left to demand anyone’s documents, and no immigration enforcers left to police people’s residency or citizenship status.

End international apartheid, now and forever.

Also.

• GT 2007-11-12: Sin Fronteras
• GT 2007-11-17: International Apartheid in Roswell
• GT 2014-09-07: Progressive Politics
• GT 2014-04-02: Alabama Sin Miedo
• GT 2013-11-26: No higher law
• GT 2012-10-24: Change You Can Believe In: Mass Deportation Edition

Shared Article from studentsforliberty.org

I'm Just Asking Y'all to Burn It Down

In a recent Students For Liberty blog post, my fellow campus coordinator and close friend, Wade Craig, wrote of how the torch in SFL's logo rep…

Kelly Kidwell @ studentsforliberty.org

Fire is bright and full of power. Fire is ungovernable and unafraid, passionate and even angry. Perhaps most importantly, fire has no masters. To become truly free, we lovers of liberty need to push for radical, meaningful change. We must channel our inner fire to burn down that which keeps us from living as freely as possible.

Burning it down means freeing oneself from the chains of the State and the culture that allows it to thrive. It means questioning everything, not accepting things as they are, but trying to discover what they should be. Burning it down means challenging oppression, rejecting the idea that people need masters, and taking control of your own life. It means loving fiercely, living virtuously, and speaking out against injustice. Burning it down means taking the rage that you have at those that steal, murder, and enslave without recourse, and channeling that rage into something constructive. It means innovation, learning, and even a little dancing. Burning it down means spreading liberty like wildfire.

Forest fire, though it may seem vicious, is an important ecological process. It destroys the old and the outdated, and makes room for succession forests, which become vibrant ecosystems, full of new life. So too must we destroy the State, eradicate oppression, and make way for complete liberation. The time has come for liberty-lovers to shift their focus from policy-making, getting out the vote, and cautiously stepping towards small government. Let's burn it down already!

–Kelly Kidwell, I’m Just Asking Y’all to Burn It Down
Students for Liberty Blog (17 November 2014)

National borders are a military phenomenon, not a natural or a social or a cultural one — the product, and also the source, of conquest and war. The nations they circumscribe are political lies, and the fortified frontiers they impose are bloody scars cut across the face of the earth.

Abolish borders. Destroy all nations.

Shared Article from loiter.co

Watch as 1000 years of European borders change

loiter.co

Liberals always think that the process of getting their favorite policy enacted is just like this, simple:

$ patch < reform.diff

But that is never how it works. Your reform is not written up in the right format. This will just get you an error message. Actually, what you’re doing is always, necessarily, going to be this:

$ cat reform.txt | nationalism | patriarchy | gender‑binary | racial‑fear | paternalism | party‑politics | plutocratic‑interest | entrenched‑bureaucracy | regulatory‑capture | patch

But what you get at the end of all those filters is always something quite different from what you were hoping for. Or if it was just what you were hoping for, your hopes and dreams are kind of terrible. In either case, it’s questionable whether this actually counts as the more practical approach to social and political change. In either case, you should broaden your horizons. In Anarchy, there is another way.

SEE ALSO

• progressive-politics(1)
• direction-of-fit(1)
• senators-and-surveillance(5)
• personal-money-holes(1)
• shorter-bonaduce(1)
• shocked-shocked-politics(1)

Here’s some things as they can and ought to be.

Shared Article from CityLab

Photographing Europe's Abandoned Border Crossings

After nearly 20 years of passport-free travel in parts of Western and Central Europe, many former checkpoints resemble ghost towns.

citylab.com

People, and liberty, are more important than any nation. We don’t need any military frontiers and we don’t need any guard-posts. Every border ought to be as easy to cross as the street in front of your house or the highway from Auburn to Opelika. Abandon all the checkpoints. Open all the borders. End international apartheid, now and forever.