With Jesse Jackson hurting from recent scandals, Al Sharpton may be trying to establish himself as the leading Black candidate in the Democratic Party, as he announces that he is forming an exploratory committee for a possible Presidential run in 2004 [evote]. To which I say: good. Although he is an amazing speaker and voices ideals which are strongly progressive, Jesse Jackson has long since ceased to pose any challenge to the Democratic Party power structure, and has simply faded into the role of party hack.

Many radicals and progressives will never forgive Jackson for his decision to hamstring Rainbow/PUSH Coalition after politicos such as Al Gore Jr. hatcheted Jackson’s Presidential bid in 1988 and it began to look like Rainbow/PUSH might be moving to act as an independent, grassroots coalition rather than a caucus within the Party. Jackson has become well-known for his Faustian bargains to salvage his personal access to power within the Party. On the other hand, Al Sharpton is still scary to the Right-wing elite within the Democratic Party and outside of it – as evidenced by the constant derision he faces from the Punditocracy. I have limited hopes for Sharpton personally, and for anyone to be able to change the Democrats without massive changes in the basic structure of elections (such as, say, Instant Runoff Voting, lowered ballot access requirements, and other pro-democracy ballot reforms), but I think that Sharpton could help check the Right-ward tilt much more than Jesse Jackson over the next few years.

Tom Tomorrow weighs in on that den of revolutionary Left-wing militancy, CNN, and its attempts to shift towards the Right-wing zealot news market.

For further reading:

• GT 8/7/2001 reported on CNN’s Right-wing market research

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!

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.