text:
SOURCE: Data Storage Corp.
March 26, 2012 09:45 ET
LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwire - Mar 26, 2012) - (Channel Partners Conference & Expo, Booth #205) -- Data Storage Corporation (DSC) (OTCBB: DTST), a cloud storage and cloud computing company focusing on data protection and business continuity solutions, and WTG a nationwide master agency, today announced that they have dramatically increased the level of involvement of the existing strategic partnership between the two companies. As partners, the companies will be able to expand their offerings to a wider target market.
"WTG is a master agent that has been recognized for its outstanding customer service and customer satisfaction," said Matthew Grosso, executive vice president at DSC. "Partnering with an organization that has such a strong reputation and such a wide reach will prove extremely beneficial to the growth of our company."
"Data Storage Corp. offers an important set of mission critical cloud products and services that is in demand by organizations of all shapes and sizes," said Vince Bradley, president and CEO, WTG. "This partnership will enable our more than 1,000 agents to offer cloud-based data protection and recovery solutions to their markets and answer a very important need in the market."
The two companies will be participating together at the Channel Partner Conference & Expo in Las Vegas from March 26-29, co-exhibiting in booth #205.
About WTG
WTG is the #1 Master Agent in the US, providing exceptional service to agent partners since 1996. WTG has the most diverse portfolio in the industry with over 100 providers, including local, long-distance, data and Internet. WTG agents have the ability to sell and consistently expand their business without revenue commitments or quotas. WTG is 100% partner driven and pays top commissions in the industry. WTG exceeds expectations with a dynamic approach to automation, partner support and its commitment to success.
About Data Storage Corporation
DSC provides cloud storage and cloud computing focused on data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity solutions that assist organizations in protecting their data, minimize downtime, ensure regulatory compliance, and recover and restore data quickly. DSC's clients save time and money, gain more control and better access to data and enable the highest level of security for that data. The company's solutions include: data backup and storage, replication; high availability data replication services; email archive and compliance solutions for e-discovery; continuous data protection; data de-duplication; virtualized system recovery; and telecom recovery services. Headquartered in Garden City, N.Y., DSC offers its solutions and services to healthcare, banking and finance, distribution services, manufacturing, construction, education, and government industries. For more information on DSC, visit www.datastoragecorp.com.
Cautionary Statement on Risks Associated with Data Storage Corporation - Forward-Looking Statements: This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 by Data Storage Corporation that are subject to risks and uncertainties. The words "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "estimate," "may," "should," "could," and similar expressions are intended to identify such statements. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are to be interpreted only as of the date on which they are made. Data Storage Corporation undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement except as required by law. Data Storage Corporation advises investors that it discusses risk factors and uncertainties that could cause Data Storage Corporation's actual results to differ from forward-looking statements in its periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"). Data Storage Corporation's SEC filings can be accessed through the SEC's EDGAR Database at www.sec.gov (Data Storage Corporation has EDGAR CIK No. 0001419951).
Data Storage Corporation, SafeData and the Data Storage Corporation logo are trademarks Data Storage Corporation. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are properties of their respective owners.
Media Contact: Karen Higgins
A & E Communications, Inc.
(610) 831-5723 Email ContactInvestor Contact:Chuck Piluso
Data Storage Corporation
(212) 564-4922 x102Email Contact
Media Contact: Karen Higgins
A & E Communications, Inc.
(610) 831-5723 Email ContactInvestor Contact:Chuck Piluso
Data Storage Corporation
(212) 564-4922 x102Email Contact
See all RSS Newsfeeds


text:
Momma D'sNot that long ago, I wouldn't eat French toast if you paid me. But somewhere along the line, while I was staying with my girlfriend, her mom made French toast for us. I didn't want to be rude, so I (reluctantly) ate a piece.
Instant addiction.
Well, at first it was just Momma D's toast. For a long time I still wouldn't eat it unless Momma D made it. Then Fey (my GF) and I were eating at an IHOP, and she suggested I get the special. It was (you guessed it) French toast. I tried to refuse. "But Plaid," she protested, "you eat my mom's French toast all the time. How can you say you don't like it?"
She had a point.
I ordered it. And while it wasn't as good as Momma D's French toast (nothing is) it was pretty darn good.
Plaid 31-35, F 1 Response 0 Mar 25, 2012
great story

subset: commoncrawl


text:
With Sarah Palin back in the front of our minds as she launches the Going Rogue book tour, I have spent the week examining the reactions of those paying the closest attention: her most ardent fans and her harshest critics.
Both have been whipped into maximum froth by the release of her memoir, which has made headlines with its detail of her criticism of how the McCain team navigated her through the 2008 campaign.
Her admirers will be newly annoyed by a McCain campaign that refused to "let Sarah be Sarah." Her detractors will view the handlers as tortured souls burdened with the impossible task of trying to win the White House with a running mate who was half diva, half idiot.
So who's right? Many of the people who made Going Rogue a bestseller with pre-orders before it even hit store shelves will tell you that we'd have a Margaret Thatcher starter kit if she were simply left to her instincts. They are eager to see her run for president in 2012.
But Palin's enemies insist that they, too, would love to see her run, since they believe it would guarantee a slam-dunk Barack Obama re-election. They predict an embarrassment for her in a hopeless matchup against a far more articulate and accomplished opponent.
But as Obama's actual accomplishments repel increasing numbers of Americans who actually voted for him, the once-dead Republican brand is on the rise. Palin's return is accompanied by the return of the question of whether she is that brand's best standard bearer in 2012.
As a member of a small group - a Palin admirer actually willing to admit to her shortcomings - I would suggest that the opening days of her coming-back-out party have been beneficial for her.
Her TV appearances show that she, too, recognizes the moments that did not help her in 2008, which is the first step in getting better on the campaign trail. And her book reveals the abject failure of the McCain campaign to take advantage of the attributes she brought to the table from the moment she was announced as the vice presidential candidate.
While absorbing the story of this compelling woman, her ascent and her possible future, readers should notice one of the best examples of a basic political truth revealed far too infrequently: You cannot win at the highest levels of politics without good handlers, and bad handlers can kill you.
And from a timid message to the failure to address the negative Obama aspects that the nation has now harshly realized, the McCain campaign was shot through from top to bottom with bad handlers.
This does not mean that's why the McCain-Palin ticket lost. With the economy tanking, voters were even more eager for change than they ordinarily are after a two-term presidency.
After the Palin announcement, I was often asked: Do I think she's ready for the presidency? My answer then: not really. But I considered her worthy of the vice presidency, where four years as McCain's understudy would have seasoned her superbly to become the 45th president of the United States.
Now her path to that job is harder. When the crowded Republican race to end the Obama era kicks off - and that will be the morning after the 2010 midterm elections - her fate will be tied to perceptions of whether she can win from a private-sector springboard filled with book tour stops and campaign events for off-year GOP candidates.
I believe she will excel at both, placing her squarely amid the leading 2012 aspirants. But will she outperform Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, should they return with appreciable support bases? Will she shine as brightly as other new possibilities, from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to U.S. Reps. Mike Pence and Paul Ryan?
Only time will tell. But if this is the beginning of a year filled with evidence of her passion and clarity - and largely free of deer-in-the-headlights moments - she will land squarely where her fans want her and where her critics say they want her. And that's in a position to argue that she should succeed Obama.
Then her fans will get a chance to see if she can rise to that mighty occasion. If she can, those who have mocked her with such glee will eat those words, washed down with a large gulp of an appropriate adage: Be careful what you wish for.
Mark Davis is heard weekdays from 8:30 to 11 a.m. on WBAP-AM, News/Talk 820. His e-mail address is email@example.com.


text:
Anthony Gill said it on Thursday -- "As you keep playing, you get a lot smarter and you definitely know what to do." He was referring to the foul trouble that has dogged his early career, and how h...
Premium Content
Subscribe today to read the full article and get everything Rivals has to offer.
- Member-only message boards
- Exclusive highlights and recruiting interviews
- Exclusive coverage of Rivals Camp Series
- Breaking recruiting news


text:
I tend to ignore the world of pro wrestling because it's essentially soap operas for men, but Nicole "Snooki" Pollizzi was on WWE Raw last night, where she got to be on the other side of a punch for once. She was only supposed to be the show's guest host, but some taunting and a shove led to a wild girlfight that you can watch below in both video and GIF form.
The beef will get resolved on April 3rd, when Snooki and Trish Stratus will team up with John Morrison in a six-way match against some people I've never heard of.
[Snooki] managed to get involved during a match between Vickie Guerrero and returning former WWE Women's Champion Trish Stratus. Guerrero won the match with some assistance from boyfriend Dolph Ziggler and pals Layla and Michelle McCool, and once the match was over, the women called out Snooki, letting her know that she was now in their world (and not in a club on the shore). Snooki apparently took exception to their rant and attacked McCool. Stratus and John Morrison (who is currently feuding with Ziggler) helped Snooki clear the ring, and when all was said and done, Guerrero laid down a challenge that Snooki gladly accepted.
That means that at WrestleMania XXVII (which airs live from Atlanta on Sunday, April 3), Snooki will team up with Stratus and Morrison to take on Ziggler, McCool and Layla in a six person mixed tag match. [MTV]
I've never watched a second of any WrestleMania, but I would drop a cool hundred on Pay-Per-View to see a surprise appearance from Brad Ferro.
Something to remember:


text: This program is over. Hope you didn't miss it! Use the links in the left-hand column to find upcoming programs. DISCOVERY THEATER: Science Spectacular with Eric Energy Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - 1:00 p.m. Code: Tickets Text Size - + The educational content in this program is recommended for children ages 5 and up.Get ready to "wow" your kids with a science spectacular! Eric Energy is a wacky scientist and he will perform visual science experiments that deal with topics like the weather and matter. Kids will be seeing things like vortex fog rings, bubbling potions and more. This is an interactive show so volunteers will be needed!Please Note:-EVERYONE must have a ticket to enter; including children under the age of 2 (select 'Child Under 2' from above price types).-Seating is at the discretion of House Management based on theater size and the number of people attending the show. You may be asked to sit in a designated section/area of the theater or auditorium.-For groups of 10 children or more (ages 2-16) please call Discovery Theater at 202-633-8700 for a group discount. S. Dillon Ripley CenterDiscovery Theater, 3rd Sublevel1100 Jefferson Drive, SWMetro: Smithsonian (Blue/Orange Lines)


text:
Tuesday's NHL playoff game in Phoenix again brought to the fore an issue that has accompanied the league's entire season: violent play causing needless injuries.
Losing to the Los Angeles Kings, the Phoenix Coyotes apparently tried to make up in penalties for what they could not accomplish on the scoreboard. The issue already has been a dominant one for Phoenix in these playoffs, with Raffi Torres being suspended for 25 games for a vicious hit on Marian Hossa of the Chicago Blackhawks. Torres has appealed the length of his suspension, and there is a hearing scheduled for Thursday. On Tuesday, the Coyotes' Shane Doan and Martin Hanzal were both ejected from the game for driving their opponents into the boards, and teammate Derek Morris was penalized for the type of knee-on-knee hit that can cause serious injury.
We are now well accustomed to the aftermath of such incidents. The referee's decision is scrutinized — did he make the correct split-second decision? Was it only a bona fide hockey play that went bad, or was it outside the bounds of fair play? Was the malefactor just that, an actor with malicious intent, or was it an innocent mistake? Then come the league disciplinary officials, who have taken to explaining their decisions with the precise distinctions usually reserved for more advanced cases in moral theology. An enormous discussion follows about whether the league got it right or wrong.
All of which is generally salutary, as far as it shifts the range of acceptable behaviour away from wanton violence disguised as intense play. Yet what seems oddly missing from such affairs is the moral agency of the players themselves. Cleaning up violence in sport seems unduly focussed on coaches, and referees, and the league, and reforming the system. Yet at the heart of every violent attack is an individual player, a moral agent responsible for his own actions.
Over in the NFL, the off-season has been dominated by discussion of the "bounty" program run by the New Orleans Saints — whereby players could earn cash by hurting players on the other team. Heavy penalties were administered by the NFL to the coaches and managers involved, but when it came to the players, the players' union more or less took the position of advocating for the accused. Shouldn't it have been the other way around? Shouldn't the players' union have been the party calling for the most severe penalties against those who put a price on the head, or arm or knee, of the very players whose welfare the union is supposed to defend?
The whole treatment of violent play on the field or in the rink glides past, for the most part, the very agents who are most able to stop it. Dirty hits would stop tomorrow if players simply ceased assaulting their fellow players.
Too simplistic? Perhaps, but the problem should not be made needlessly complex either.
Players hurt players. Players ought to take the lead then in defending their own welfare. Player unions ought to be in the forefront of advocating more severe discipline, not attempting to forestall it. More to the point, locker rooms have strong internal cultures that can serve to shape what behaviour is considered acceptable and that which is beyond the pale. Changing that culture through fear of external sanctions from the league is possible, but more effective would be leadership from the players themselves.
Hockey and football are tough sports, and injuries are part of the game. But the ethos is changing, as we learn more about the long-term effects of those injuries. It is not too much to say that it will be the dominant issue the NHL and NFL face over the next decade. Already, it is preoccupying the leadership of minor and college officials in both sports. Serious change is very likely on its way, including things that were previously thought a step too far — changes in player uniforms, elimination of certain kinds of contact, and perhaps even an examination of the size of rinks and fields in light of players who are bigger and faster than ever before.
All of this is to the good, but it is the players who play the game, and are responsible for how they do so. Making the game safer is primarily their responsibility.
National Post


text: As the title says.....during todays meet we were discussing new locations and feel a dealership meet is out of the question due to their disorganisation so we thought of other outward locations........Powmill was great and will be used again so afew of us decided that Moffat could be a good venue with the large public carpark next to the open park at the bottom of the town. So please discuss.....possible dates could be 26th October or 2nd November but open to change as we always like to try and accomodate everyone. If anyone is from around that area please have a scout about and let us know about the parking situation Moffat ASN meet on 02 Nov 2013 @ 12:00 Attending 1. Brodster 2. R90 STL 3. Deanosabby 4. JG51 AUD 5. Manor13 6. Scottm4 7. ChallonaTTer 8. Turbonutz 9. Cowan99 10. PsYcHe 11. S3_Jacko 12. Andy1 (prov) 13. JimmyF 14. gfermer 15. Seafar99


text:
The other side of the nearly-half-time report
Last week I listed all of the albums I've really loved so far in 2014 - a really long list. So many great albums already - and over half the year to go. So now it's time to list the giant let-downs, the stink-buzz, the ones I wanted to like but hated, the ones that maybe never stood a chance. Here's the shorter list at any rate - click on the links for the full review of each item.
Here is the other side of the nearly-half-time report, the albums I could not enjoy (so far) this year.
Pixies, EP-2: The second EP from the Pixies, eventually it would be turned into a crummy album - but both EPs 1 and 2 offered nothing at all. One of the saddest "comeback" attempts ever.
Shaun Kirk, Giving: The ugly Playstation tone of this crayon-traced "blues" guitar put me off. Instantly. Horrid.
Bruce Springsteen, High Hopes: Speaking of horrible crayon-scrawling guitar - the splatter-paint approach of Tom Morello really doesn't work here. And, yeah yeah, everyone that went to the gigs raved - including talking up Morello. But for me the gap is increasing - Springsteen hasn't made a worthwhile album in quite some time now. This is filler-fodder, he was milking it for the tour.
Brockaflower, Build It: A bit of talk about this as a Wellington "supergroup". But there are no songs here, no real ideas either. They can play. Sure. But who can't? That's not winning the battle. That's treading water.
Madlib, Rock Konducta Vol. 1: Not the worst thing I've heard but very close to the laziest/worst thing Madlib has offered up. Nothing to see (or hear) here.
The Bamboos, Fever In The Road: I remember seeing The Bamboos a few years ago, tight little funk band - not doing anything new, but doing it very well. They've since given away anything they had and opted for a horrible, plastic-pop sound. Very sad to hear this album - it was a different band altogether. And not in anything even approaching a good way.
Broken Bells, After The Disco: Sometimes I feel like I'm alone in the world when I don't like something. But that's okay - everyone was gushing about this band and this album and I just couldn't hear it.
Breaks Co-Op, Sounds Familiar: Very close to the absolute worst load o s**t ever. Surely an embarrassment for all concerned.
Nostalgia 77, A Journey Too Far: A smug and boring album.
Pharrell Williams, G I R L: I don't see the thrill here - or rather don't hear it. But people love Pharrell. Hey, fair enough. He can sing a bit, sure. But I'm not sure he'll ever find anything to sing about. This just feels like a cynical compilation of soundalike-highlights too - get a Daft Punk-sounding track, a few pop bits to rival his hook-singing for others. But no real bite.
Band of Horses, Acoustic At The Ryman: When your band doesn't have great songs already the worst thing you can do is strip right back to acoustic treatments to offer some apparent essence. This is phoney and pooey-smelling. At best it's (very) bad Ryan Adams. At worst, it's, well, worse...
Shayna King, The Day Is Young: People contact me - ask to send a CD. I say sure. I listen. I write what I think. Do I feel like a big bully and a meanie not liking the young Kiwi girl? No. Because if I loved the album I'd say so. It's really not as personal as people often think.
Elbow, The Take Off And Landing of Everything: This one will likely end up on a lot of the Best of The Year lists. But it won't be on mine.
Johnny Cash, Out Among The Stars: There's a reason - most of the time - why "previously unreleased" songs/albums were in fact previously unreleased. It's because they weren't good enough. This is the case here. But oh that clever single, that was good enough to sell it to most fair-weather Cash fans no doubt.
Nathan East, Nathan East: Prolific session guy releases debut solo album after 30 years of backing some of the world's biggest stars. It is predictably tasteless and dull.
Thievery Corporation, Saudade: Hey, I liked a few Thievery Corp albums. Probably still do. But it was hearing this album that made me think that most people who own Thievery Corp albums probably care more about the furniture in their house than music. That's utterly absurd obviously. But then so is this.
Wilko Johnson/Roger Daltrey, Going Back Home: A bit sad really.
Holly Golightly and The Broke-Offs, All Her Fault: There was a time there - about a decade ago - when I thought Holly Golightly was fantastic, bought up all that I could find. But this album doesn't offer a lot - I wish I hadn't heard it.
Real Estate, Atlas: One or two okay songs but ultimately it's all very boring.
The Bad Plus, The Rite of Spring: I love this band but this album felt like a gimmick, a clever little exercise that, ultimately, is so by-rote as to mean very little. It's a bit like all those Jacques Loussier recordings of Bach. You'd just rather hear (some version of) the real thing.
Pixies, Indie Cindy: I don't think the full album was any better than the EPs. Sure, they changed the order, you had more to sink your teeth into - I guess. But sometimes more is just a chore. Any Pixies fan claiming this to be anything other than a lame, sad attempt at recapturing a former glory is too blind to see, too deaf to hear...one of the big-time embarrassments, but 10 years of playing the "hits" has them with a devoted, lap-it-up fan-base I spose...
Estere, Estere: Actually a member of Brockaflower, and so subject to much the same hype - and then some. There are no tunes on this at all. Just vapid.
The Afghan Whigs, Do To The Beast: Another case of shaming the legacy, not quite as blatant - and sad - as with Pixies, but close. Especially because Greg Duli has released a lot of great material via his various projects since the previous Whigs albums.
Eels, The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett: I like the guy, I like a lot of his music but this sadness is feeling phoned-in now, it's all just the same song.
Flip Grater, Pigalle: Her Feist-meets-Cat Power shtick has to end. She's certainly given up even trying to attach a melody to her songs it seems. Woeful.
The Black Keys, Turn Blue: I mentioned this here last week also but really not feeling this album at all.
Michael Jackson, Xscape: Another bit of grave-robbing so that the label can get its pound of, er, flesh. And some exec producer/s can buy a new boat or island - or both. Ridiculous.
So that's the list - short, and not so sweet. But there are two good things to note here. Firstly there's a long list of really great albums already this year. And plenty more to come. Secondly, I listen to these so that you don't have to.
Anything on this list that you have really loved? And what are your dud album releases of the year? Any big disappointments so far for you?
Blog on the Tracks is on Facebook and Twitter.
You can also check out Off the Tracks for The Vinyl Countdown, reviews and other posts


text:
Man accused of sexually assaulting 3 women appears in court
PORTLAND, Ore. - Police say getting the face of a man they accuse of sexually assaulting three women before the public is important for their investigation because they believe there may be more victims.
Shane Kavantzas is charged with eight felonies, including rape, sex abuse, sodomy and kidnapping and six misdemeanors for public indecency - the result of witnesses telling police they saw him fondling himself near Madison High School and along 82nd Avenue in Northeast Portland.
Police say Kavantzas approached many women along 82nd and say that's how he met the women he's accused of sexually assaulting.
Kavantzas made a short court appearance Monday and didn't enter a plea.
He appears to have recently moved to Portland. He just changed his Facebook profile last month, listing himself as a Portland resident and as the general manager of the U-Haul on Foster Road.
Most of his online activity comes from the Charlotte, N.C. area and from Florida.
Kavantzas showed off his tattoos on a dating website writing, "I am looking for someone who likes to have fun either doing outdoor activities or relaxing on the couch I am also looking for a woman who is ready for a charming, nice and real man to share life's ups and downs with."
Now he's in jail with a bail set at more than $2 million. His attorneys want him released but prosecutors plan to fight that.
Police want to hear from anyone who had a sexual encounter with him.


text:
Venable LLP: FTC's Updated .com Disclosures Guidance
March 25, 2013
In this piece Venable LLP discussed the recently updated Federal Trade Commission (FTC) .com disclosures guide, designed to help digital advertisers make disclosures clear to avoid deception.
Restricted Content
Access to this content item is restricted to:
- ANA Corporate Marketer Members
Please login below or create an account.
You may already be a member. Find out if your company is already an ANA member.


text:
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. ... We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
A Nation At Risk, 1983
Nearly a generation has passed since this landmark report was published, and much has changed. The cold war has ended in victory. After years of stagnant growth in Japan, the economic threat Japan once posed seems a distant memory. America's fear of being overtaken as the world's leading economic superpower has, for now at least, abated.
Yet, concern about America's schools has not abated, or not much. The precipitous dive in the quality of our schools--if it ever really existed--has bottomed out, and signs of improvement in certain areas are visible. The sense that America's schools are critically ill has faded, but that sense has been replaced not by satisfaction, but by a widespread impression of pervasive and unremediable mediocrity. Despite some positive signs, no one thinks America's schools are as good as they should be. Math and science programs are, on average, especially weak. Prescriptions for improving schools come and go as fast as political administrations, but study after study shows, and almost everyone agrees, that there is one sure way to make schools better: Make teachers better.
But no one knows how to pull that off--or, rather, everyone has a different idea about how to pull that off, and no single idea, or set of ideas, has garnered the political support required to sustain needed changes. Indeed, even maintaining the status quo is likely to be a challenge, considering that the demand for teachers in the coming years is expected to increase, especially in high-need areas such as science and mathematics. Since 1983, the number of children educated each year in America's schools has more than doubled, and their teachers have gotten older and closer to retirement. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) estimates that 2 million teachers will be needed over the next decade (though some dispute this figure)--and that assumes we keep most of the ones we've already got, instead of replacing the current crop. Even now, it's a struggle to find qualified math and science teachers. Many teaching slots go unfilled, or get filled by teachers with insufficient training in the discipline.
In short, it would seem to be a good time for scientists to enter teaching.
But not so fast: Making the transition from bench to K-12 classroom isn't a no-brainer, even for the amply motivated. Helping young people learn is a difficult job even in the best circumstances and, in the areas of greatest need, it can be onerous. In rural and inner-city schools, salaries are low, resources are limited, respect is hard to come by, and even an orderly classroom--or a constructively disorderly one--is difficult to attain and maintain. Furthermore, some say the predicted teaching shortage is exaggerated. Indeed, the head of one prominent think tank says that we're producing more teachers than we can use.
Despite the job's difficulty--or perhaps because of it--America continues to send the message that teaching school is a second-rate career. Everyone agrees in principle that teaching school is noble, but somehow that has failed to translate into the perception that teachers are noble--and that lack of respect can be hard to swallow for young scientists with the highest aspirations. Shifting from a research career to a career teaching at the primary or secondary level will appear to many as a step down, a sign of weakness--a notion reinforced and amplified by graduate-school and postdoc mentors and peers. They often send the message that teaching, even at the college level, is a job for people who can't cut it in "real" science.
It's time to put that notion for rest once and for all. Although scientific researchers, if they are both very lucky and very skillful, may have a hand in creating new knowledge, a typical school teacher has a hand in nurturing many young minds over a career, and some of them will go on to do extraordinary things. Both jobs--teaching and research--involve a fair amount of unrewarding work, but the two careers share another feature: both are intrinsically creative. What differs is the nature of the thing created (some would say discovered)--external knowledge on the one hand; knowledge of self through character, passion, and curiosity--human potential--on the other. The view that teaching is less valuable than research is, quite obviously, little more than an unexamined prejudice.
Even young scientists who manage to overcome these psychological and cultural barriers can find the logistical barriers daunting. Unless you seek a job at an independent school (where working conditions are generally good but salaries tend to be low), you'll need to get a teaching certificate. Teacher certification occurs at the state level, and requirements vary widely. It's rarely easy, except in an emergency. In Arizona, for example, the traditional route to certification requires 45 semester-hours of education classes, along with 8 weeks of student teaching. Indiana requires a whopping 60 hours of education classes. Secondary-teaching certification in New Jersey requires both a degree in the subject area (a bachelor's degree will do) and 200 clock-hours of pedagogy training.
To scientists with impeccable knowledge of their chosen field, these requirements can seem silly and artificial. Although the folks who make the regulations undoubtedly mean well, and although a knowledge of pedagogical theory is no doubt valuable, it's obvious--to those of us with subject degrees, anyway--that existing regulations value teaching theory too highly and subject matter not highly enough.
Parts of the education establishment--influential parts--share that opinion. In mid-June, the U.S. Secretary of Education issued a report to Congress concluding, as dozens of reports have before it, that schools of education should put more emphasis on discipline-based training and less on the theory of education. The report proposes a radical restructuring of the nation's teacher-training system that would include rigorous testing in subject areas and the reduction of "cumbersome requirements not based on scientific evidence."
The report recommends lowering barriers to entry for professionals who wish to enter teaching from other fields. "Many academically accomplished college graduates," says the report, "and mid-career professionals with strong subject-matter backgrounds, are often dissuaded from entering teaching because the entry requirements are so rigid." The report makes several recommendations to the states--for example, a reduction in the number of education courses required for certification--that would ease the move from bench to blackboard.
Alternatives to traditional certification already exist. Forty-five states have so-called alternative certification programs that aim to be more attractive to career changers than traditional certification. But these programs can be almost as burdensome: In Colorado, for example, new teachers must put in 225 clock-hours of professional training during their first year, while also teaching full time. Other states have similar criteria.
Traditional and alternative certification programs are supplemented by a third approach: emergency certification. Emergency certification is a sort of safety valve: When a school district fails to find a qualified, certified teacher, most states allow it to use an uncertified, unqualified teacher on a short-term basis. Emergency certification has little political support--everyone from teacher unions to the Bush Administration blames emergency certification for lowering the quality of America's teacher corps--but sometimes it is used to help teachers with strong qualifications--but no certification--jump right in and begin teaching. Indeed, despite the lousy reputation of these programs, about half of all emergency certifications are granted to highly qualified specialists who lack certification. So, getting rid of emergency certification will make it harder for some mid-career professionals to enter teaching, unless it is replaced with a good, solid alternative.
Widespread political support is no guarantee that anything will change, and even if it does, no one knows what any new system will look like. It's easy to oppose a program that lets lousy teachers enter the profession (along with some good ones); it's harder to come up with something better to replace it with. The education secretary's report is short on specifics, and, anyway, the federal government isn't a major player in teacher-training policy. There, the rules are made at the state level, teachers are hired by the nation's 5000-plus local school boards, and contracts are negotiated between local school boards and local teacher unions. The teacher unions agree with the Bush Administration that emergency certification should be eliminated, but they don't agree about what should replace it--as a rule, teacher unions would like to see more certified teachers (and union members), not fewer, and conservative policy-makers would like to see the unions weakened. Still, given the state of the labor market, the state of America's schools, and the set of ideas already on the table, better-than-even money says that making the jump from bench to blackboard is likely to get easier in the coming years.
Never mind the future--what about the present? Considering making the leap into teaching soon, before the imminent changes take shape? Then be sure to read the accompanying article on the current state of teaching certification in the U.S.


text:
Dark Enigma *C-Star*
Credits & Info
- Uploaded
- Dec 29, 2010 | 4:22 AM EST
- File Info
- Loop
- 2 min 25 sec
- Score
- 4.41 / 5.00
Related Content
Heard in 3 Entries!
View all submissions featuring this audio file.
You might also enjoy:
Licensing Terms
Please contact me if you would like to use this in a project. We can discuss the details.
- Score:
- Rated 4.41 / 5 stars
- Plays & Downloads:
- 21,825 Plays | 3,694 Downloads
- Share Links:
- Genres:
- Electronic - Video Game
- None
Author Comments
Rated 5 / 5 stars
This is the music that plays when Chuck Norris is taking a dump.
Yes. Yes, it is.
Rated 4.5 / 5 stars
Well, I'm no professional, but...
Actually I really like the song.
It would perfectly suit to the animation I'm working on at the moment.
The melody is very catchy and after some time there is a feeling that forces to hum this song while it's playing.
For my ears every little drumbeat is perfectly set and the use of different "Instruments" (Probably you made it with a program?) plays with ones feelings.
I think this song would suit to many fight or escaping scenes, but in my opinion this song could also tell the long story of a long war, with its shadows and (more or less) highlights.
I voted 9, because I think that skilled people should not rest on ones laurels, and better should always try to improve oneself. ;)
(Also I didn't want to look like a crawler, because I only praised this song ;P)
Rated 5 / 5 stars
love it =3
this is an epic song, great for any video game, tv show whatever it ends up in it'll fit within the climax, this really gets things started and sets the mood for an important event, great job
Rated 5 / 5 stars
this is like the introduction/moment for a epic(last?)fight.
i(maybe)told this in an other review that i'm writing a book and want to make a game of it in the future,this is perfect for the end/last fight!
Rated 5 / 5 stars
it could be the music for the most impossible and last level of a game!


text:
Dead Island Riptide gets first CGI trailer; Techland and Deep Silver detail the co-op mode
People went absolutely batty over that cinematic trailer Deep Silver made for Dead Island. Today, the developer released a similar trailer for that game's sequel, Dead Island Riptide. Does it have that same level of cinematic-ness that made its predecessor such a crowd-pleaser? Watch and find out (just don't let the kiddies watch).
A press release from Deep Silver was released today as well, detailing some of the gameplay elements in store for those heading back to the now monsoon-ravaged island of Palanai. In addition to a fifth new character and new types of zombies to take on, Riptide will include new hub defense co-op missions where players need to work together to raise fences, place traps, and set up turrets to hold back the undead hordes.
In addition, the co-op mode will come with brand new communication features that will allow players to easily strategize and keep tabs on one another, which will be important in keeping everybody alive and undead (that is, not a zombie).
Dead Island Riptide will release sometime next year for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC.
Source: Deep Silver press release
|Peter Grimm
A writer, journalist, and aspiring storyteller, Peter Grimm has been gaming since the days of the Nintendo 64, and reporting on the goings-on in the World of Gaming since late 2011. His base of writing operations is located within the void between Here and There, or so he would have you think.
[Other Gaming News +]


text: Hi Folks:Wasn't sure where to put this one. A Company out of Chicago called Skyline Design is advertising a product called 'FOTOglas'. From their website:"FOTOglas is a proprietary process which etches large scale photographic images into the surface of glass. With unlimited custom possibilities, the process may be used creatively to individualize any product.The results are permanent, translucent and formulated for interior and exterior architectural applications. Images can be etched on one or two sides of the glass and combined with Skyline Designs Vitracolor process for more opacity and color options."To see it, go to: http://www.skydesign.com/ Click on Architectural Glass then FOTOglas.Mike.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=151324\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


text:
Geographic tongue is a harmless condition known as benign migratory glossitis, in which smooth red patches which can have a slightly raised border give the tongue a geographic or map-like appearance. It is common for these patches to heal in one place and move or migrate to another. Sometimes the condition can cause discomfort and increased sensitivity of the tongue.
While geographic tongue can't be prevented, discomfort may be lessened by avoiding or reducing exposure to substances that commonly irritate the mouth, including hot, acidic, spicy, and salty foods, alcohol, tobacco, and some toothpastes.


text: Today was Chicago's annual Boulevard Lakefront Tour, organized by and benefiting the Active Transportation Alliance. The tour, Chicago's longest-running bike ride, journeys along Chicago's extensive boulevard system and parks in either 15, 27, 35, or 62-mile routes. A festival followed, with plenty of food, beer and music. This is the second major ride that Active Trans organizes. The other ride is Bike the Drive, which I wrote about here.


text:
Regulating Aversion:
This file is also available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format
Chapter 1
How did tolerance become a beacon of multicultural justice and civic peace at the turn of the twenty-first century? A mere generation ago, tolerance was widely recognized in the United States as a code word for mannered racialism. Early in the civil rights era, many white northerners staked their superiority to their southern brethren on a contrast between northern tolerance and southern bigotry. But racial tolerance was soon exposed as a subtle form of Jim Crow, one that did not resort to routine violence, formal segregation, or other overt tactics of superordination but reproduced white supremacy all the same. This exposé in turn metamorphosed into an artifact of social knowledge: well into the 1970s, racial tolerance remained a term of left and liberal derision, while religious tolerance seemed so basic to liberal orders that it was as rarely discussed as it was tested. Freedom and equality, rather than tolerance, became the watchwords of justice projects on behalf of the excluded, subordinated, or marginalized.
Since the mid-1980s, however, there has been something of a global renaissance in tolerance talk. Tolerance surged back into use in the late twentieth century as multiculturalism became a central problematic of liberal democratic citizenship; as Third World immigration threatened the ethnicized identities of Europe, North America, and Australia; as indigenous peoples pursued claims of reparation, belonging, and entitlement; as ethnically coded civil conflict became a critical site of international disorder; and as Islamic religious identity intensified and expanded into a transnational political force. Tolerance talk also became prominent as domestic norms of integration and assimilation gave way to concerns with identity and difference on the left and as the rights claims of various minorities were spurned as "special" rather than universal on the right.
Today, tolerance is uncritically promoted across a wide range of venues and for a wide range of purposes. At United Nations conferences and in international human rights campaigns, tolerance is enumerated, along with freedom of conscience and speech, as a fundamental component of universal human dignity. In Europe, tolerance is prescribed as the appropriate bearing toward recent Third World immigrants, Roma, and (still) Jews and as the solution to civil strife in the Balkans. In the United States, tolerance is held out as the key to peaceful coexistence in racially divided neighborhoods, the potential fabric of community in diversely populated public schools, the corrective for abusive homophobia in the military and elsewhere, and the antidote for rising rates of hate crime. Tolerance was the ribbon hung around the choice of an orthodox Jew for the Democratic vice presidential nominee in the 2000 presidential elections and the rubric under which George W. Bush, upon taking office in his first term, declared that appointees in his administration would not have their sexual orientations scrutinized . . . or revealed. Schools teach tolerance, the state preaches tolerance, religious and secular civic associations promulgate tolerance. The current American "war on terrorism" is being fought, in part, in its name. Moreover, even as certain contemporary conservatives identify tolerance as a codeword for endorsing homosexuality, tolerance knows no political party: it is what liberals and leftists reproach a religious, xenophobic, and homophobic right for lacking, but also what evangelical Christians claim that secular liberals refuse them and what conservative foreign policy ideologues claim America cherishes and "radical Islamicists" abhor.1 Combined with this bewildering array of sites and calls for tolerance is an impressive range of potential objects of tolerance, including cultures, races, ethnicities, sexualities, ideologies, lifestyle and fashion choices, political positions, religions, and even regimes.
Moreover, tolerance has never enjoyed a unified meaning across the nations and cultures that have valued, practiced, or debated it. It has a variety of historical strands, has been provoked or revoked in relation to diverse conflicts, and has been inflected by distinct political traditions and constitutions. Today, even within the increasingly politically and economically integrated Euro-Atlantic world, tolerance signifies differently and attaches to different objects in different national contexts; for example, tolerance is related to but not equivalent to laïcité in France, as the recent French debate over the hijab made clear. And practices of tolerance in Holland, England, Canada, Australia, and Germany not only draw on distinct intellectual and political lineages but are focused on different contemporary objects—sexuality, immigrants, or indigenous peoples—that themselves call for different modalities of tolerance. That is, modalities of tolerance talk that have issued from postcolonial encounters with indigenous peoples in settler colonies do not follow the same logics as those that have issued from European encounters with immigrants from its former colonies or those that are centered on patriarchal religious anxieties about insubordinate gender and sexual practices. Similarly, an Islamic state seeking to develop codes of tolerance inflects the term differently than does a Euro-Atlantic political imaginary within which the nation-states of the West are presumed always already tolerant.
Given this proliferation of and variation in agents, objects, and political cadences of tolerance, it may be tempting to conclude that it is too polymorphous and unstable to analyze as a political or moral discourse. I pursue another hypothesis here: that the semiotically polyvalent, politically promiscuous, and sometimes incoherent use of tolerance in contemporary American life, closely considered and critically theorized, can be made to reveal important features of our political time and condition. The central question of this study is not "What is tolerance?" or even "What has become of the idea of tolerance?" but, What kind of political discourse, with what social and political effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States? What readings of the discourses of liberalism, colonialism, and imperialism circulating through Western democracies can analytical scrutiny of this talk provide? The following chapters aim to track the social and political work of tolerance discourse by comprehending how this discourse constructs and positions liberal and nonliberal subjects, cultures, and regimes; how it figures conflict, stratification, and difference; how it operates normatively; and how its normativity is rendered oblique almost to the point of invisibility.
These aims require an appreciation of tolerance as not only protean in meaning but also historically and politically discursive in character. They require surrendering an understanding of tolerance as a transcendent or universal concept, principle, doctrine, or virtue so that it can be considered instead as a political discourse and practice of governmentality that is historically and geographically variable in purpose, content, agents, and objects. As a consortium of para-legal and para-statist practices in modern constitutional liberalism—practices that are associated with the liberal state and liberal legalism but are not precisely codified by it—tolerance is exemplary of Foucault's account of governmentality as that which organizes "the conduct of conduct" at a variety of sites and through rationalities not limited to those formally countenanced as political. Absent the precise dictates, articulations, and prohibitions associated with the force of law, tolerance nevertheless produces and positions subjects, orchestrates meanings and practices of identity, marks bodies, and conditions political subjectivities. This production, positioning, orchestration, and conditioning is achieved not through a rule or a concentration of power, but rather through the dissemination of tolerance discourse across state institutions; civic venues such as schools, churches, and neighborhood associations; ad hoc social groups and political events; and international institutions or forums.2
When I commenced this study in the late 1990s, I was almost exclusively concerned with domestic tolerance talk. My interest in the subject was piqued by the peculiar character of the discourse of tolerance in contemporary civic and especially pedagogical culture in the United States. As multicultural projects of enfranchisement, cooperation, and conflict reduction embraced the language of tolerance, clearly both the purview and purpose of tolerance had undergone changes from its Reformation-era concern with minoritarian religious belief and modest freedom of conscience. In its current usage, tolerance seemed less a strategy of protection than a telos of multicultural citizenship, and focused less on belief than on identity broadly construed. The genuflection to tolerance in the literatures, mottos, and mission statements of schools, religious associations, and certain civic institutions suggested that what once took shape as an instrument of civic peace and an alternative to the violent exclusion or silencing of religious dissidents had metamorphosed into a generalized language of antiprejudice and now betokened a vision of the good society yet to come. And if this vision was promulgated by actors across the political spectrum, its praises as likely to be sung by a neoconservative American president or attorney general as by a United Nations chief or a leftist community organizer, tolerance was clearly having a strange new life at the turn of the century.
In the context of this profusion of subjects and objects of tolerance, this uncritical embrace of tolerance across a diverse ideological field, and this apparent conversion of tolerance from a particular form of protection against violent persecution to a late-twentieth-century vision of the good society, my questions were these: What kind of governmental and regulatory functions might tolerance discourse perform in contemporary liberal democratic nation-states? What kind of civil order does tolerance configure or envision? What kind of social subject does it produce? What kind of citizen does it hail, with what orientation to politics, to the state, and to fellow citizens? What kind of state legitimation might it supply and in response to what legitimation deficits? What kind of justice might it promise and what kinds might it compromise or displace? What retreat from stronger ideals of justice is conveyed by giving tolerance pride of place in a moral-political vision of the good? What kind of fatalism about the persistence of hostile and irreconcilable differences in the body politic might its promulgation carry?
The original project, then, was to be a consideration of the constructive and regulatory effects of tolerance as a discourse of justice, citizenship, and community in late modern, multicultural liberal democracies, with a focus on the United States. However, in the aftermath of September 11, political rhetorics of Islam, nationalism, fundamentalism, culture, and civilization have reframed even domestic discourses of tolerance—the enemy of tolerance is now the weaponized radical Islamicist state or terror cell rather than the neighborhood bigot—and have certainly changed the cultural pitch of tolerance in the international sphere. While some of these changes have simply brought to the surface long-present subterranean norms in liberal tolerance discourse, others have articulated tolerance for genuinely new purposes. These include the legitimation of a new form of imperial state action in the twenty-first century, a legitimation tethered to a constructed opposition between a cosmopolitan West and its putatively fundamentalist Other. Tolerance thus emerges as part of a civilizational discourse that identifies both tolerance and the tolerable with the West, marking nonliberal societies and practices as candidates for an intolerable barbarism that is itself signaled by the putative intolerance ruling these societies. In the mid–nineteenth through mid– twentieth centuries, the West imagined itself as standing for civilization against primitivism, and in the cold war years for freedom against tyranny; now these two recent histories are merged in the warring figures of the free, the tolerant, and the civilized on one side, and the fundamentalist, the intolerant, and the barbaric on the other.
As it altered certain emphases in liberal discourse itself, so, too, did the post–September 11 era alter the originally intended course of this study. The new era demanded that questions about tolerance as a domestic governmentality producing and regulating ethnic, religious, racial, and sexual subjects be supplemented with questions about the operation of tolerance in and as a civilizational discourse distinguishing Occident from Orient, liberal from nonliberal regimes, "free" from "unfree" peoples. Such questions include the following: If tolerance is a political principle used to mark an opposition between liberal and fundamentalist orders, how might liberal tolerance discourse function not only to anoint Western superiority but also to legitimate Western cultural and political imperialism? That is, how might this discourse actually promote Western supremacy and aggression even as it veils them in the modest dress of tolerance? How might tolerance, the very virtue that Samuel Huntington advocates for preempting a worldwide clash of civilizations, operate as a key element in a civilizational discourse that codifies the superiority and legitimates the superordination of the West? What is the work of tolerance discourse in a contemporary imperial liberal governmentality? What kind of subject is thought to be capable of tolerance? What sort of rationality and sociality is tolerance imagined to require and what sorts are thought to inhibit it—in other words, what anthropological presuppositions does liberal tolerance entail and circulate?
In the end, the effort to understand tolerance as a domestic discourse of ethnic, racial, and sexual regulation, on the one hand, and as an international discourse of Western supremacy and imperialism on the other, did not have to remain permanently forked. Contemporary domestic and global discourses of tolerance, while appearing at first blush to have relatively distinct objects and aims, are increasingly melded in encomiums to tolerance, such as those featured in the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance discussed in chapter 4, and are also analytically interlinked. The conceit of secularism undergirding the promulgation of tolerance within multicultural liberal democracies not only legitimates their intolerance of and aggression toward non-liberal states or transnational formations but also glosses the ways in which certain cultures and religions are marked in advance as ineligible for tolerance while others are so hegemonic as to not even register as cultures or religions; they are instead labeled "mainstream" or simply "American." In this way, tolerance discourse in the United States, while posing as both a universal value and an impartial practice, designates certain beliefs and practices as civilized and others as barbaric, both at home and abroad; it operates from a conceit of neutrality that is actually thick with bourgeois Protestant norms. The moral autonomy of the individual at the heart of liberal tolerance discourse is also critical in drawing the line between the tolerable and the intolerable, both domestically and globally, and thereby serves to sneak liberalism into a civilizational discourse that claims to be respectful of all cultures and religions, many of which it would actually undermine by "liberalizing," and, conversely, to sneak civilizational discourse into liberalism. This is not to say that tolerance in civilizational discourse is reducible to liberalism; in fact, it is strongly shaped by the legacy of the colonial settler-native encounter as well as the postcolonial encounter between white and indigenous, colonized, or expropriated peoples. This strain in the lexicon and ethos of tolerance, while not reducible to a liberal grammar and analytics, is nonetheless mediated by them and also constitutes an element in the constitutive outside of liberalism over the past three centuries.3 Tolerance is thus a crucial analytic hinge between the constitution of abject domestic subjects and barbarous global ones, between liberalism and the justification of its imperial and colonial adventures.
Put slightly differently, tolerance as a mode of late modern govern-mentality that iterates the normalcy of the powerful and the deviance of the marginal responds to, links, and tames both unruly domestic identities or affinities and nonliberal transnational forces that tacitly or explicitly challenge the universal standing of liberal precepts. Tolerance regulates the presence of the Other both inside and outside the liberal democratic nation-state, and often it forms a circuit between them that legitimates the most illiberal actions of the state by means of a term consummately associated with liberalism.
As will already be apparent, the questions with which this study is concerned place it to one side of contemporary philosophical, historical, political-theoretical, and legal considerations of tolerance as a benignly positive, if difficult, individual and collective practice. In philosophy and ethics, tolerance is typically conceived as an individual virtue, issuing from and respecting the value of moral autonomy, and acting as a sharp rein on the impulse to legislate against morally or religiously repugnant beliefs and behaviors.4 Political theorists debate the appropriate purview and limits of tolerance and probe the problem of nonreciprocity between more and less tolerant individuals, cultures, or regimes.5 In Western history, while scholars have unearthed premodern pockets of tolerance practice, tolerance as a political principle is mostly treated as the offspring of classical liberalism and, more precisely, as a product of the bloody early modern religious wars that initiated the prising apart of political and religious authority and the carving out of a space of individual autonomy from both.6 In comparative cultural and political analysis, the standard contrast is between the millet system of tolerance famously associated with the Ottoman Empire (also practiced in limited ways in ancient Greece and Rome, medieval England, medieval China, and modern India), which divided society into communities grouped by religion, and the form of Protestant tolerance, with its emphasis on individual conscience, that flowered in the West. In American law, tolerance is either First Amendment territory or is placed on the relatively newer legal terrain of group rights and sovereignty claims.7 In international law, tolerance is among the panoply of goods promised by a universal doctrine of human rights.
While benefiting substantially from these literatures, this study also works to one side of them. Rather than treating tolerance as an independent or self-consistent principle, doctrine, or practice of cohabitation, it aims to comprehend political deployments of tolerance as historically and culturally specific discourses of power with strong rhetorical functions.8 Above all, it seeks to track the complex involvement of tolerance with power. As a moral-political practice of governmentality, tolerance has significant cultural, social, and political effects that exceed its surface operations of reducing conflict or of protecting the weak or the minoritized, and that exceed its formal goals and self-representation. These include contributions to political and civic subject formation and to the articulation of the political, the social, citizenship, justice, the nation, and civilization. Tolerance can function as a substitute for or as a supplement to formal liberal equality or liberty; it can also overtly block the pursuit of substantive equality and freedom. At times, tolerance shores up troubled orders of power, repairs state legitimacy, glosses troubled universalisms, and provides cover for imperialism. There are mobilizations of tolerance that do not simply alleviate but rather circulate racism, homophobia, and ethnic hatreds; likewise, there are mobilizations that legitimize racist state violence. Not all deployments of tolerance do all of these things all the time. But the concern of this study is to consider how, when, and why these effects occur as part of the operation of tolerance, rather than to ignore them or treat them as "externalities" vis-à-vis tolerance's main project.
Does such a relentlessly critical set of concerns mean that this is a book "against tolerance"? Comprehending tolerance in terms of power and as a productive force—one that fashions, regulates, and positions subjects, citizens, and states as well as one that legitimates certain kinds of actions—does not lead to a roundly negative judgment. To reveal the operations of power, governance, and subject production entailed in particular deployments of tolerance certainly divests them of a wholly blessed status, puncturing the aura of pure goodness that contemporary invocations of tolerance carry; but this fall from grace does not strip tolerance of all value in reducing violence or in developing certain habits of civic cohabitation. The recognition that discourses of tolerance inevitably articulate identity and difference, belonging and marginality, and civilization and barbarism, and that they invariably do so on behalf of hegemonic social or political powers, does not automatically negate the worth of tolerance in attenuating certain kinds of violence or abuse. Without question tolerance has been adduced at times for such purposes, from early modern efforts to stop the burning alive of religious heretics and bloody civil wars to the contemporary willingness of people who disapprove of racial mixing to forswear attempts to impose their views on others or enact them as law. Conversely, all encomiums to tolerance need not be aimed at limiting violence or subordination for some to have this aim, and degrees and forms of subordination and abjection in tolerance discourse vary substantially. For example, though tolerance of homosexuals today is often advocated as an alternative to full legal equality, this stance is significantly different from promulgating tolerance of homosexuals as an alternative to harassing, incarcerating, or institutionalizing them; the former opposes tolerance to equality and bids to maintain the abject civic status of the homosexual while the latter opposes tolerance to cruelty, violence, or civic expulsion.
To remove the scales from our eyes about the innocence of tolerance in relation to power is not thereby to reject tolerance as useless or worse. Rather, it changes the status of tolerance from a transcendental virtue to a historically protean element of liberal governance, a re-situating that casts tolerance as a vehicle for producing and organizing subjects, a framework for state action and state speech, and an aspect of liberalism's legitimation. Yet the initial counterintuitiveness of this claim, our commonplace inclination to view tolerance as a moral rather than political practice, reminds us what an unusual figure tolerance is in liberal democracy today. Like civility, with which it is often linked, tolerance is a political value and sometimes even a dictum, but it is not precisely formulated or enshrined in law.9 While the First Amendment may be understood as a constitutional codification of tolerance in the United States, it is significant that the word appears nowhere in the amendment itself; in addition, most contemporary domestic iterations of tolerance pertain to race, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, or "lifestyle," none of which is among the freedoms expressly guaranteed by this amendment. Moreover, liberal democracies feature no "right to tolerance," although their liberties of religion, assembly, and speech may together be considered to promote a tolerant regime or a tolerant society. Nor is there a "crime of intolerance," even as intolerance is often linked to "hate crime" and is also invoked to cast aspersion on regimes or societies figured as dangerous in their orthodoxy or fundamentalism. Thus, within secular liberal democratic states it is safe to say that tolerance functions politically and socially, but not legally, to propagate understandings and practices regarding how people within a nation, or regimes within an international system, can and ought to cohabit. So while tolerance may be a state or civic principle, while it may figure prominently in the preambles of constitutions or policy documents and may conceptually undergird laws and judicial decisions concerning freedom of religion, speech, and association, tolerance as such is not legally or doctrinally codified.10 Nor can it be, both because the meaning and work of tolerance is bound to its very plasticity—to when, where, and how far it will stretch—and because its legitimating goodness is tied to virtue, not to injunction or legality. Virtue is exercised and emanates from within; it cannot be organized as a right or rule, let alone commanded.
Conventionally, tolerance is adduced for beliefs or practices that may be morally, socially, or ideologically offensive but are not in direct conflict with the law. Thus, law constitutes one limit of the reach of tolerance, designating its purview as personal or private matters within the range of what is legal. Laws, of course, may be changed in the name of greater tolerance, as in the repeal of antimiscegenation or antisodomy laws, or in the name of less tolerance, as in laws banning same-sex marriage or restricting abortion. But in each case, the negotiation is between what is deemed a private or individual choice appropriately beyond the reach of law (hence tolerable) and what is deemed a matter of the public interest (hence not a matter of tolerance).11 Again, tolerance is generally a civic or social practice that may be sanctioned by law but is not precisely encoded orregulated by it; we are tolerant not by law but in addition to the law. Nor are there today laws of tolerance as there are laws, say, of equality, liberty, or the franchise; and when we glance back at edicts of tolerance in past centuries, they appear incompatible with contemporary standards of egalitarianism, since they did not merely protect but simultaneously stigmatized and overtly regulated the group they targeted. This suggests that the legal codification of tolerance necessarily recedes as the purview of formal equality is expanded. But it does not follow that tolerance as governmentality therefore declines or disappears; rather, it is resituated to the para-legal and para-statist status described above.
What are the implications of the fact that the cultural-political field of tolerance as a civic practice is largely inside the domain demarcated as legal? First, that position makes it difficult to see the extent to which tolerance at times functions as a supplement to liberal legalism and liberal egalitarianism, a function discussed at length in chapters 3 and 4. Second, the identification of the virtue of tolerance with voluntary rather than coerced or mandated behavior makes it difficult to see tolerance as a practice of power and regulation—in short, as a practice of governmentality. Third, insofar as the legal and the political are generally conflated in liberal democratic thought, the practice of tolerance occurs off the radar screen of the formally political, in a space remaindered by liberal legalism. All of these factors contribute to the de-politicizing functions of tolerance and the depoliticization of tolerance, matters to which we now turn.
Some scholars of tolerance have attempted to distinguish tolerance, the attitude or virtue, from toleration, the practice.12 For this study, a different distinction is useful, one that is both provisional and porous but that may stem the tendency, mentioned earlier, to mistake an insistence on the involvement of tolerance with power for a rejection or condemnation of tolerance. The distinction is between a personal ethic of tolerance, an ethic that issues from an individual commitment and has objects that are largely individualized, and a political discourse, regime, or governmentality of tolerance that involves a particular mode of depoliticizing and organizing the social. A tolerant individual bearing, understood as a willingness to abide the offensive or disturbing predilections and tastes of others, is surely an inarguable good in many settings: a friend's irritating laugh, a student's distressing attire, a colleague's religious zeal, the repellant smell of a stranger, a neighbor's horrid taste in garden plants—these provocations do not invite my action, or even my comment, and the world is surely a more gracious and graceful place if I can be tolerant in the face of them. Every human being, perhaps even every sentient animal, routinely exercises tolerance at this level. But tolerance as a political discourse concerned with designated modalities of diversity, identity, justice, and civic cohabitation is another matter. It involves not simply the withholding of speech or action in response to contingent individual dislikes or violations of taste but the enactment of social, political, religious, and cultural norms; certain practices of licensing and regulation; the marking of subjects of tolerance as inferior, deviant, or marginal vis-à-vis those practicing tolerance; and a justification for sometimes dire or even deadly action when the limits of tolerance are considered breached. Tolerance of this sort does not simply address identity but abets in its production; it also abets in the conflation of culture with ethnicity or race and the conflation of belief or consciousness with phenotype. And it naturalizes as it depoliticizes these processes to render identity itself an object of tolerance. These are consequential achievements.
In cautiously distinguishing an individual bearing from a political discourse of tolerance, I am not arguing that the two are unrelated, nor am I suggesting that the former is always good, benign, or free of power while the latter is bad, oppressive, or power-laden. Not only does tolerance as a public value have its place, and not only does the political discourse give shape to the individual ethos and vice versa, but even an individual bearing of tolerance in nonpolitical arenas carries authority and potential subjection through unavowed norms. Almost all objects of tolerance are marked as deviant, marginal, or undesirable by virtue of being tolerated, and the action of tolerance inevitably affords some access to superiority, even as settings or dynamics of mutual tolerance may complicate renderings of superordination and superiority as matters of relatively fixed status.
Again, if tolerance is never innocent of power or normativity, this serves only to locate it solidly in the realm of the human and hence make it inappropriate for conceptualizations of morality and virtue that fancy themselves independent of power and subjection. Of itself, however, this revaluation does not yet indicate what the specifically political problematics of tolerance are. These are set not by the presence of power in the exercise of tolerance but, rather, by the historical, social, and cultural particulars of this presence in specific deployments of tolerance as well as in discourses with which tolerance intersects, including those of equality, freedom, culture, enfranchisement, and Western civilization. Tolerance as such is not the problem. Rather, the call for tolerance, the invocation of tolerance, and the attempt to instantiate tolerance are all signs of identity production and identity management in the context of orders of stratification or marginalization in which the production, the management, and the context themselves are disavowed. In short, they are signs of a buried order of politics.
Part of the project of this book, then, is to analyze tolerance, especially in its recently resurgent form, as a strand of depoliticization in liberal democracies. Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and political solutions, as personal and individual, on the one hand, or as natural, religious, or cultural on the other. Tolerance works along both vectors of depoliticization—it personalizes and it naturalizes or culturalizes—and sometimes it intertwines them. Tolerance as it is commonly used today tends to cast instances of inequality or social injury as matters of individual or group prejudice. And it tends to cast group conflict as rooted in ontologically natural hostility toward essentialized religious, ethnic, or cultural difference. That is, tolerance discourse reduces conflict to an inherent friction among identities and makes religious, ethnic, and cultural difference itself an inherent site of conflict, one that calls for and is attenuated by the practice of tolerance. As I will suggest momentarily, tolerance is hardly the cause of the naturalization of political conflict and the ontologization of politically produced identity in liberal democracies, but it is facilitated by and abets these processes.
Although depoliticization sometimes personalizes, sometimes culturalizes, and sometimes naturalizes conflict, these tactical variations are tethered to a common mechanics, which is what makes it possible to speak of depoliticization as a coherent phenomenon.13 Depoliticization involves removing a political phenomenon from comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce and contour it. No matter its particular form and mechanics, depoliticization always eschews power and history in the representation of its subject. When these two constitutive sources of social relations and political conflict are elided, an ontological naturalness or essentialism almost inevitably takes up residence in our understandings and explanations. In the case at hand, an object of tolerance analytically divested of constitution by history and power is identified as naturally and essentially different from the tolerating subject; in this difference, it appears as a natural provocation to that which tolerates it. Moreover, not merely the parties to tolerance but the very scene of tolerance is naturalized, ontologized in its constitution as produced by the problem of difference itself. When, for example, middle and high schoolers are urged to tolerate one another's race, ethnicity, culture, religion, or sexual orientation, there is no suggestion that the differences at issue, or the identities through which these differences are negotiated, have been socially and historically constituted and are themselves the effect of power and hegemonic norms, or even of certain discourses about race, ethnicity, sexuality, and culture.14 Rather, difference itself is what students learn they must tolerate.
In addition to depoliticization as a mode of dispossessing the constitutive histories and powers organizing contemporary problems and contemporary political subjects—that is, depoliticization of sources of political problems—there is a second and related meaning of depoliticization with which this book is concerned: namely, that which substitutes emotional and personal vocabularies for political ones in formulating solutions to political problems. When the ideal or practice of tolerance is substituted for justice or equality, when sensitivity to or even respect for the other is substituted for justice for the other, when historically induced suffering is reduced to "difference" or to a medium of "offense," when suffering as such is reduced to a problem of personal feeling, then the field of political battle and political transformation is replaced with an agenda of behavioral, attitudinal, and emotional practices. While such practices often have their value, substituting a tolerant attitude or ethos for political redress of inequality or violent exclusions not only reifies politically produced differences but reduces political action and justice projects to sensitivity training, or what Richard Rorty has called an "improvement in manners."15 A justice project is replaced with a therapeutic or behavioral one.
One sure sign of a depoliticizing trope or discourse is the easy and politically crosscutting embrace of a political project bearing its name. As we have seen, tolerance, like diversity, democracy, and family, is endorsed across political lines in liberal societies, a phenomenon that has intensified in recent years as tolerance has come to belong collectively rather than selectively to Westerners and as intolerance has become a code word not merely for bigotry or investments in whiteness but for a fundamentalism identified with the non-West, with barbarism, and with anti-Western violence. Even Westerners who oppose certain kinds of tolerance—conservative Christians who argue against tolerating sexual libertinism, "humanism," or atheism; self-anointed patriots who would limit political dissent; or progressives who argue against tolerating cultural or religious practices they judge abusive to women or children—even these positions are not arrayed against tolerance as such but only against extending tolerance to the obscene or the barbaric. If tolerance today is considered synonymous with the West, with liberal democracy, with Enlightenment, and with modernity, then tolerance is what distinguishes "us" from "them." Chandran Kukathas has taken this so far as to instantiate tolerance as the first virtue of liberal political life; prior to equality, freedom, or any other principle of justice is the liberty of conscience and association that toleration protects.16
By no means is tolerance the only or even the most significant discourse of depoliticization in contemporary liberal democracies. In fact, the widespread embrace of tolerance today, especially in the United States, is facilitated by its convergence with other sources of discursive depoliticalization. These sources include long-standing tendencies in liberalism itself and in the peculiarly American ethos of individualism. They include the diffusion of market rationality across the political and social spheres precipitated by the ascendency of neoliberalism. And they include the more recent phenomenon that Mahmood Mamdani has named the "culturalization of politics."17 Each of these will be considered below.
Liberalism. The legal and political formalism of liberalism, in which most of what transpires in the spaces designated as cultural, social, economic, and private is considered natural or personal (in any event, independent of power and political life), is a profound achievement of depoliticization. Liberalism's excessive freighting of the individual subject with self-making, agency, and a relentless responsibility for itself also contributes to the personalization of politically contoured conflicts and inequalities. These tendencies eliminate from view various norms and social relations—especially those pertaining to capital, race, gender, and sexuality—that construct and position subjects in liberal democracies. In addition, the reduction of freedom to rights, and of equality to equal standing before the law, eliminates from view many sources of subordination, marginalization, and inequality that organize liberal democratic societies and fashion their subjects. Liberal ideology at its most generic, then, always already eschews power and history in its articulation and comprehension of the social and the subject.
Individualism. The American cultural emphasis on the importance of individual belief and behavior, and of individual heroism and failure, is also relentlessly depoliticizing. An identification of belief, attitude, moral fiber, and individual will with the capacity to make world history is the calling card of the biographical backstories and anecdotes that so often substitute for political analyses and considerations of power in American popular culture.18 From Horatio Algers to demonized welfare mothers, from Private Jessica Lynch to Private Lynndie England, from mythohistories to mythobiographies, we are awash in the conceits that right attitudes produce justice, that willpower and tenacity produce success, and that everything else is, at most, background, context, luck, or accidents of history.19 It is a child's view of history and politics: idealist, personal, and replete with heroes and villains, good values and bad.
Market rationality. A third layer of depoliticization is added to the contemporary American context by the saturation of every feature of social and political life with entrepreneurial and consumer discourse, a saturation inaugurated by capitalism in its earlier modality but taken to new levels by neoliberal political rationality. When every aspect of human relations, human endeavor, and human need is framed in terms of the rational entrepreneur or consumer, then the powers constitutive of these relations, endeavors, and needs vanish from view. As the political rationality of neoliberalism becomes increasingly dominant, its depoliticizing effects combine with those of classical political liberalism and American cultural narratives of the individual to make nearly everything seem a matter of individual agency or will, on the one hand, or fortune or contingency on the other.20
Tolerance as a depoliticizing discourse gains acceptance and legitimacy by being nestled among these other discourses of depoliticization, and it draws on their techniques of analytically disappearing the political and historical constitution of conflicts and subjects. Moreover, as is the case with liberalism, the American culture of individualism, and neoliberal market rationality, tolerance masks its own operation as a discourse of power and a technology of governmentality. Popularly defined as respect for human difference or for "opinions and practices [that] differ from one's own,"21 there is no acknowledgment of the norms, the subject construction, the subject positioning, or the civilizational identity at stake in tolerance discourse; likewise, there is no avowal of the means by which certain peoples, nations, practices, or utterances get marked as beyond the pale of tolerance, or of the politics of line drawing between the tolerable and the intolerable, the tolerant and the intolerant.
Culturalization of politics. We have already noted ambiguity in the meaning and purview of tolerance: Is it respect? acceptance? repressed violence? Is it a posture? a policy? a moral principle? an ethos? a politics? Does it promote moral autonomy? equality? the protection of difference? freedom? But more than being merely ambiguous, tolerance today is often invoked in a manner that equates or conflates non-commensurable subjects and practices, including religion, culture, ethnicity, race, and sexual norms. In tolerance talk, ethnicity, race, religion, and culture are especially interchangeable. For example: In her discussion of how and why "culture" oppresses women and ought therefore to be constrained and regulated by liberal juridicism rather than always tolerated, Susan Okin slides indiscriminately between (patriarchal) culture and (patriarchal) religion, effectively conflating them.22 And in a film on terror at the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance, the narrative moves directly from a discussion of the threat posed by "Islamic extremists" to a question about the appropriateness of "racial and ethnic profiling" to manage this threat, thereby conflating religion, ethnicity, and race. Similarly, the interchangeability of "Arab American" and "Muslim" in American political discourse is as routine as is elision of the fact that many Palestinians are Christians and some Israelis are Arabs. And fundamentalism as one name for the post–cold war enemy of the "free world" is assigned a shifting site of emanation that floats across culture, religion, state, region, and regime.
These conflations and slides are not simply the effect of historical and political ignorance or of a sloppy multiculturalist discourse in which all marked identities are rendered analytically equivalent. They are, rather, symptoms of the culturalization of politics, the assumption "that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it and then explains politics as a consequence of that essence."23 This reduction of political motivations and causes to essentialized culture (where culture refers to an amorphous polyglot of ethnically marked religious and nonreligious beliefs and practices) is mobilized to explain everything from Palestinian suicide bombers to Osama bin Laden's world designs, mass death in Rwanda and Sudan, and the failure of democracy to take hold in the immediate aftermath of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It is what George W. Bush draws on when he insists that a gruesome event in the Middle East "reminds us of the nature of our enemy."24 The culturalization of politics analytically vanquishes political economy, states, history, and international and transnational relations. It eliminates colonialism, capital, caste or class stratification, and external political domination from accounts of political conflict or instability. In their stead, "culture" is summoned to explain the motives and aspirations leading to certain conflicts (living by the sword, religious fundamentalism, cultures of violence) as well as the techniques and weapons deployed (suicide bombing, decapitation). Samuel Huntington offers the premier inscription for the culturalization of politics: since the end of the cold war, he argues, "the iron curtain of ideology" has been replaced by a "velvet curtain of culture."25 Critically reworded, the West's cold war reduction of political conflict to ideology has been replaced by its post–cold war reduction of political conflict to culture.
Importantly, however, this reduction bears a profound asymmetry. The culturalization of politics is not evenly distributed across the globe. Rather, culture is understood to drive Them politically and to lead them to attack our culture, which We are not driven by but which we do cherish and defend. As Mamdani puts it, "The moderns make culture and are its masters; the premoderns are said to be but conduits."26 This division into those who are said to be ruled by culture and those who are said to rule themselves but enjoy culture renders culture not simply a dividing line between various peoples or regimes or civilizations, and not simply the explanation for political conflict, but itself the problem for which liberalism is the solution. How does this work?
The notion that culture—whatever one means by it—is political is old news. But the notion that liberalism, as a politics, is cultural, is catachrestic. The reasons for this nonreciprocity are several. There is, first, liberalism's conceit about the universality of its basic principles: secularism, the rule of law, equal rights, moral autonomy, individual liberty. If these principles are universal, then they are not matters of culture, which is identified today with the particular, local, and provincial.27 There is, second, liberalism's unit of analysis, the individual, and its primary project, maximizing individual freedom, which together stand antithetically to culture's provision of the coherence and continuity of groups—an antithesis that positions liberal principles and culture as mutual antagonists. This leads to the third basis on which liberalism represents itself as cultureless: namely, that liberalism presumes to master culture by privatizing and individualizing it, just as it privatizes and individualizes religion. It is a basic premise of liberal secularism and liberal universalism that neither culture nor religion are permitted to govern publicly; both are tolerated on the condition that they are privately and individually enjoyed.
Contemporary liberal political and legal doctrine thus positions culture as its Other and also as necessarily antagonistic to its principles unless it is subordinated—that is, unless culture is literally "liberalized" through privatization and individualization. Moreover, liberalization is taken to attenuate the claims of culture by making what are otherwise authoritative and automatically transmitted meanings, practices, behaviors, and beliefs into matters of individual attachment. Liberalism presumes to convert culture's collectively binding powers, its shared and public qualities, into individual and privately lived choices. Liberalism, in other words, presumes culture and politics to be fused unless culture is conquered—politically neutered—by the universal, hence noncultural, principles of liberalism. Without liberalism, culture is conceived by liberals as oppressive and dangerous not only because of its disregard for individual rights and liberties and for the rule of law, but also because the inextricability of cultural principles from power, combined with the nonuniversal nature of these principles, renders it devoid of judicial and political accountability. Hence culture must be contained by liberalism, forced into a position in which it makes no political claim and is established as optional for individuals. Rather than a universe of organizing ideas, values, and modes of being together, culture must be shrunk to the status of a house that individuals may enter and exit. Liberalism represents itself as the sole mode of governance that can do this.
In short, in our time, the conceit of the relative autonomy of the political, the economic, and the cultural within liberal democracies—a conceit shared by liberals ranging from Habermas to Huntington— has replaced the nineteenth-century conceit of the autonomy of the state from civil society. Liberal democratic governance is imagined by liberals to operate relatively independently of both capital and cultural values. This putative autonomy of liberal political principles and institutions is incarnated in the liberal insistence on the universality and hence supervenience of human rights, an insistence that runs from Jimmy Carter to Michael Ignatieff to George W. Bush. Not only does this formulation free human rights from the stigma of cultural imperialism, it also allows them to be coherently invoked as a means of protecting culture.28
But liberalism is cultural. This is not simply to say that liberalism promotes a certain culture—say, of individualism or of entrepreneurship—though certainly these are truisms. Nor is it simply to say that liberalism is always imbricated with what we call national cultures, although it is and too little contemporary liberal theory has considered what this imbrication implies, even as our histories of political thought have routinely compared the liberalisms emerging from different parts of Europe and the Americas. Nor is it simply to say that there is no pure liberalism but only varieties of it—republican, libertarian, communitarian, social democratic. Nor is it only to say that all liberal orders harbor, affirm, and instantiate in law nonliberal values and practices, although this is also so. Rather, the theoretical claim here is that both the constructive and repressive powers we call those of culture— the powers that produce and reproduce subjects' relations and practices, beliefs and rationalities, and that do so without their express choice or consent—are neither conquered by liberalism nor absent from liberalism. Liberalism is not only itself a cultural form, it also is striated with nonliberal culture wherever it is institutionalized and practiced. Even in the texts of its most abstract analytic theorists, it is impure, hybridized, and fused to values, assumptions, and practices unaccounted by it and unaccountable within it. Liberalism involves a contingent, malleable, and protean set of beliefs and practices about being human and being together; about relating to self, others, and world; about doing and not doing; about valuing and not valuing select things. And liberalism is also always institutionalized, constitutionalized, and governmentalized in articulation with other cultural norms—those of kinship, race, gender, sexuality, work, politics, leisure, and more. This is one reason why liberalism, a protean cultural form, is not analytically synonymous with democracy, a protean political practice of sharing power and governance. The double ruse on which liberalism relies to distinguish itself from culture—on the one hand, casting liberal principles as universal; on the other, juridically privatizing culture—ideologically figures liberalism as untouched by culture and thus as incapable of cultural imperialism. In its self-representation as the sole political doctrine that can harbor culture and religion without being conquered by them, liberalism casts itself as uniquely tolerant of culture from its position above culture. But liberalism is no more above or outside culture than is any other political form, and culture is not always elsewhere from liberalism. Both the autonomy and the universality of liberal principles are myths, crucial to liberalism's reduction of questions about its imperial ambitions or practices to questions about whether forcing others to be free is consonant with liberal principles.
In sum, the contemporary "culturalization of politics" reduces non-liberal political life (including radical identity claims within liberal regimes) to something called culture at the same time that it divests liberal democratic institutions of any association with culture. Within this logic, tolerance is invoked as a liberal democratic principle but for what is named the cultural domain, a domain that comprises all essentialized identities, from sexuality to ethnicity, that produce the problem of difference within contemporary liberalism. Thus, tolerance is invoked as a tool for managing what are construed as (nonliberal because "different" and nonpolitical because "essential") culturalized identity claims or identity clashes. As such, tolerance reiterates the depoliticization of those claims and clashes, at the same time depicting itself as a norm-free tool of liberal governance, a mere means for securing freedom of conscience or (perhaps more apt today) freedom of identity.
This book seeks to lay bare this political landscape. It contests the culturalization of politics that tolerance discourse draws from and promulgates, and contests as well theputatively a-cultural nature of liberalism. The normative premise animating this contestation is that a more democratic global future involves affirming rather than denying and disavowing liberalism's cultural facets and its imprint by particular cultures. Such an affirmation would undermine liberalism's claims to universalism and liberalism's status as culturally neutral in brokering the tolerable. This erosion, in turn, would challenge the standing of liberal regimes as uniquely, let alone absolutely, tolerant, revealing them instead to be as self-affirming and Other-rejecting as many other regimes. It would also reveal liberalism's proximity to and bouts of forthright engagement with fundamentalism.
The recognition of liberalism as cultural is more than a project of debunking its airs of superiority or humiliating its hubristic reach. Rather, insofar as it makes explicit the inherent hybridity or impurity of every instantiation of liberalism, it underscores the impossibility of any liberalism ever being "only liberalism" and the extent to which both form and content are potted, historical, local, lived. It reveals liberalism as always already being the issue of miscegenation with its fundamentalist Other, as containing this Other within, and thus as having a certain potential for recognizing and connecting with this Other without. In this possibility may be contained liberalism's prospects for renewal, even for redemption, or at the very least for more modest and peaceful practices.
File created: 8/7/2007
Questions and comments to: firstname.lastname@example.com
|New Book E-mails
|New In Print
|PUP Blog
|Princeton APPS
|Sample Chapters
|Princeton Legacy Library
|Exam/Desk Copy
|Recent Awards
|Princeton Shorts
|Freshman Reading
|PUP Europe
|About Us
|Contact Us
|PUP Home