The vicious campaign of hatred and terrorism against queers continues. In Hawaii, a pair of anti-gay attempted mass murderers were arraigned in May on charges of attempted murder and related offenses. The two men, one 19 and the other 18, from Kauai, attacked a campsite of gay men marked with a rainbow pride flag. They set fire to one tent in which two men were sleeping, poured kerosene on a second tent, and tried to run down several of the campers with their car.

Take action! Write your legislators supporting positive action against anti-gay hate crimes. If you can get out to Atlanta on September 15th, protest anti-gay bigotry by attending demonstrations against Focus on the Family’s homophobic Love Won Out conference.

Have I mentioned how much I am drooling over my reading list for History of Philosophy III: 19th & 20th Century Philosophy? Read it and weep (I know I will when I am spending hours on single pages of Hegel):

• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
• Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (ed. Walter Kauffman)
• William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism
• Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
• Individual xeroxed articles from Frege and Bertrand Russell

Now, one semester is only barely enough time to start talking about the Critique of Pure Reason or the Phenomenology of Spirit in any depth, so we will be moving really quickly and glossing over a lot. But it’s all OK: I’ll get the chance to dip into a lot of amazing work that I haven’t had the opportunity to until now, and when I need some more meat on my studies, I can take the Kant seminar that Dr. Jolley is offering next semester! Rock on!

Many thanks to Salon for providing the best picture of Jesse Helms, ever:

Thumbs up, jackass!

StopFamilyViolence has established a new petition urging the post office to make child abuse prevention the beneficiary of the US Postal Service’s next fund-raising stamp (similar to the Breast Cancer fundraising stamp, which has raised $21 million for breast cancer research). Please sign their petition to the postal service to support this awesome chance for working to end family violence.

Just two days after the women of Sirt’s month-long strike strike from sex with their husbands hit the international AP newswire, and attained global celebrity, the striking women declared victory [CNN] in their efforts to improve the village’s abysmal water system. As the strike pressed on, the men of the village finally frantically lobbied the government for help in fixing the system, and the Directorate of Rural Affairs has agreed to provide the men of Sirt with five miles of piping so that water can be brought directly to the village from a nearby source. The men of Sirt will work to lay the pipe themselves. Although some women have decided to end the boycott immediately with the announcement, others will continue to refuse sex until the pipe-building project is completed.