Illegal Immigrants

The meaning of words is important.What does the word “illegal” mean? My thesaurus offers: unlawful, dishonest, criminal. So if an immigrant is illegal, the state has an obligation to repatriate them, or to declare them refugees and process them in some other legal fashion. They cannot simply be dumped into already suffering communities.

Burning people to death, whatever their origin, is also illegal. And the state has an obligation to charge, prosecute and punish.

This government has some work to do.

March to Protect Immigrants.

Given that immigrants are people, and that xenophobia is another word for savage racism, I think that this information, received by SMS from the painter, Herman Niebuhr, should be publicized as much as possible:

March to defend immigrants.

Joburg, Saturday May 24.

Gather at 9am,
Marks Park, Empire Rd, near Hillbrow.

Bring placards, banners, friends
etc.

Zimbabwe Does it like Rwanda

The snippet below is from Breaking News at the times. Interesting, because this is how the trouble in Rwanda started, with people on the radio saying, kill the cockroaches.

"The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ) said that over the weekend, Spot FM aired a number of "political songs" ahead of the country's coming Independence Day celebrations. One of them, "Mr Government" by Man Soul Jah, celebrated the government's land seizures and called for the decimation of perceived political sellouts.

The song said: "We are living like squatters in the land of our heritage... give me my spear so that I can kill the many sellouts in my forefathers' country."

Boycott Amazon

Here's the location on the brand new Boycott Amazon group on FaceBook.

You can find pointers on other ways to take action at The BookShed.

Keep Politics Out of Sport

Interesting to hear people who are complaining about the anti-China Olympic protesters use the above phrase. Last time I heard it was when white South Africans were complaining about the sports boycotts in the 1980s. After making a political decision that only white people could play sports, they said, “keep politics out of sport.” The phrase is as absurd now as it was then.

Fight the Amazon Monopoly

YouWriteOn.com is taking on Amazon over its controversial decision that all Print-On-Demand (POD) books will now have to be printed through Amazon's printing company BookSurge, and Amazon’s attempts to stifle competitive book prices.

You can find the full story, and learn out how to put pressure on Amazon to change their policy, at The BookShed.

Warning! Racist Joke!

This could be construed as anti-Inuit, but...

An Eskimo takes his car to the garage. The mechanic says 'Have you blown a seal?' and the eskimo replies 'No, that's frost on my moustache.'