This touches on an interesting facet of contemporary society, which are the "social justice" orgs that work to help support prisoner rights and living conditions. Now, obviously helping people being abused and repressed by the state is a good thing, and I thought about maybe volunteering to help out with one of these organizations. But after doing some reading I had to reluctantly conclude it might not be a good use of my effort – we can't free prisoners from their cages, and many of them are as hateful and evil as the agents of the state that put them into prison in the first place. For many this is not their fault, but the results of an abusive, horrible system that has put them in a bad position. I wish the brutality most prisoners face could be undone, but I don't see how.

I also want to second your idea that the "means affect the ends" – trying to change society by hatred and death will not accomplish anything good in the long run, even if it seems to have good results in the short run. There is a saying I heard somewhere – "The hater and the hated are two sides of a cracked mirror" – we should fight evil without becoming evil ourselves.

Also, I can't tell you how many times I've tried to explain that just because I identify with anarchism and I do my best to support cooperative achievement or independent artisanship, doesn't mean that I don't need to live. "If you're such an anti-capitalist, you wouldn't work for a company," is what I get. That doesn't make me or anyone else a sell-out. People always fail to realize that we aren't really given the option to leave a broken system, so all we can do is co-exist peacefully and do what we can to uphold anarchist and social values. It's nice to hear someone else say that out loud for a change.