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Domestic brands have the most American-made content in the U.S. according to a new index released by American University's Kogod School of Business. Professor Frank DuBois, a global supply chain management expert, led the analysis, which considered not only where each vehicle's parts were produced, but also the location of the manufacturer's headquarters and other details, all in an effort to help consumers buy American. Here are 10 vehicles that made the top-five most American-made 2013 models from DuBois' index. Several vehicles ended up with tied scores, resulting in multiple winners for each position. View the complete list. At left, the GMC Acadia, tied with two other vehicles for the No. 1 spot.
1. Buick Enclave (3-way tie)
"If you break down a single 'American-made' transmission, you'll find many smaller parts, each stamped with its own country of origin. You may well find 80% of the parts inside that transmission didn't come from the U.S.," said Dubois.
1. Chevy Traverse (3-way tie)
To narrow down the options, DuBois' team collected data from several sources, including recent American Automobile Labeling Act reports. The AALA was enacted in 1992 to inform consumers about the percentage of American content which comprises each car. AALA data specifies the percentage of U.S./Canadian parts content for each vehicle, including where the engine and transmissions were built.
2. Dodge Avenger (2-way tie)
DuBois' index used these details as well as each vehicle's overall AALA score, but also factored in: where the manufacturer's headquarters is located; where most research and development occurs and where assembly occurs.
2. Ford F-series pickup (2-way tie)
Some highly similar vehicle models that varied on the basis of trim lines or engine and transmission options were aggregated together for ease of comparison, resulting in 253 total vehicles indexed. As there were multiple tie scores, there are a total of 72 ranked positions.
3. Chrysler 200
Even the most homegrown manufacturers are now global corporations. In an article on Kogodnow.com, DuBois noted that of Ford's 56 research centers, 45 are in the U.S.—which means 11 are elsewhere. On the other hand, four out of every 10 Ford Motor Co. F, -1.43% workers are based in the US, while Toyota TM, -1.01% has just one out of 10.
4. Jeep Compass, Patriot and Wrangler
To read more about these cars, check out Car Reviews By Make at Autoweek.com.
5. Chevrolet Corvette (3-way tie)
5. Chevrolet Equinox (3-way tie)
5. Ford Mustang (3-way tie)
5. GMC Terrain (3-way tie)
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Orange Curtains
There are no products matching the selection
What style of curtain should I choose?
There are a wide variation of differing styles and types of curtains dependent upon the look and feel you want to create in your home. So whether you want contemporary décor or a more traditional look we have a wide range of design styles to fit both eyelet curtains or pencil pleat curtains. Eyelet curtains traditionally have a metal eyelets evenly spaced about 4 cms from the top of the curtain, a curtain pole can then be threaded through, this gives a concertina look to the top of the curtains but allow them to hang with soft loose folds.
Pencil Pleat have a tape at the top that usually have three differing rows of micro pockets that allow the height of the curtains to be adjusted slightly. The cords allow the pleats to be tightened to create the effect of the pleats, the tighter you pull the chords the more pleats you have. Pencil pleat curtains often hang really well and are synonymous with sophistication as they are a bit more flexible and can be hung around bay windows.
For bedrooms we sell a range of blackout curtains to ensure that daylight does'nt interrupt a good night's sleep.
Curtain Accessories
Ask any interior designer and they will tell you that the key to successful designing is in adding those finishing touches that ultimately make all the difference to a home. We have an extensive range of accessories for curtains such as tie backs & swags, the perfect finishing touch to any curtain. Voiles can also be used to decorate windows in any room in the house.
We also supply blackout linings which are very popular in bedrooms to keep out the daylight and allowing uninterrupted sleep.

subset: commoncrawl


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50 Comments | Add Yours
I always had something going wrong on Christmas. Like when my mom bought me a nice dress when I was 5 to where to my aunt's party and when I went upstairs to my cousins room she was whering the same dress. It was very funny!
by new-b cool-e on 12/20/2009 1:45:53 PM
Every X-mas Eve, at my Aunt's christmas party at her house, something always goes wrong!
Last year my older brother made me sad and I cried in their bathroom! I was o.k. though because my cousin is so cool that she tried comforting me by teaching me some dance moves. Did I mention it was in the bathroom!?
The year before that I was chasing my younger cousin around the house and he ran into his room. On both sides of the door we were pullig on the doornob, so it just broke off!
The year before that, my cousin (the one who taught me dance moves in the bathroom)was going to the bathroomand when she flushed the toilet, It started overflowing! It was like a never ending waterfall!
As you can see, my family is very acsident prone, but that's o.k. because it adds more excitemant to the party!!!!!!!
by new-b cool-e on 12/20/2009 1:43:02 PM
One christmas, My moms friend came over, and I was wearing a really loose shirt. I bent down to get my snowpants off the floor, and I flashed them.
check out my profile, and leave a comment, thx!
by rosebubbles101 on 12/20/2009 1:40:14 PM
Every Cristmas Eve my family goes over my Aunts house for a huge party. When I was around 4-6, my cousins, brother and I decided to put on a show for the family. It was hilarious! My older brother and the older cousins acted like they were on a news channel and we put on talents. My role model/ cousin has a great voice and sang kareoke to Brittany Spears. Then I decided to sing a song but I was never good when I'm in front of crowds so I sang really badley about a girl who got sick in the rain and got better again. The whole family clapped but now that I'm older I realized that it was really embaressing.
by new-b cool-e on 12/20/2009 1:33:23 PM
My cats, when they were kittens, climbed all the way to the top to our 11-or more-foot synthetic tree! it was so cute cause the tree was meowing! (: they were so small it didn't effect the tree, so cute!
check out my pro
by horseloverhgv on 12/20/2009 12:26:47 PM
My family goes to church christmas eve night and they give you these candles. We have contest to see who can bend them the best w/o breaking it. Well last year we had circles and question marks. The pastor just stared at r family! It was funny
by promnite13 on 12/20/2009 12:01:41 PM
one christmas when i was like 3, my older cousin told me to call the cops. i did, just because she told me to. i hung up, but then a cop actually came to my grandparents house. i dont think ive ever been that scared before.
by hello x beautiful 94 on 12/20/2009 11:37:28 AM
i used to have cats. they knocked over our
tree a lot b/c they would climb it
by twilightgirl/taylorfan on 12/20/2009 10:48:42 AM
sweet 1st comment srry 4 all of y'all but y'all can look back and laugh at it
by girlzrock123 on 12/20/2009 10:16:33 AM
Those are all funny. One time we went over a relatives house and my brother and I were looking at ornaments on the their tree and he went to grab one to look at he accidentally pushed the whole tree over. We were all shocked, broken bulbs were everywhere and we were embarrassed. But we laugh about it now.
by luckykel on 12/20/2009 9:45:11 AM
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|Logano wins at Daytona with help from Kyle Busch
|Written by Admin
|Friday, 01 July 2011 16:02
Danica Patrick was in position to race for the win with late help from JR Motorsports teammate Aric Almirola. Her two-car tandem swapped the lead over the closing laps with Elliott Sadler, who was being pushed by Kevin Harvick Inc. teammate Tony Stewart.
But Patrick and Almirola fell back into traffic, and the Sadler-Stewart tandem was caught by the Logano-Busch pairing. As Logano closed in on the finish line, a slew of cars began to wreck coming off the final turn.
Patrick was caught in it when Mike Wallace knocked her into the wall and she bounced off into traffic. Sadler and Stewart also were involved in the accident.
Jason Leffler finished second, Reed Sorenson finished third and Busch was fourth. Justin Allgaier was fifth.
Patrick wound up 10th.


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Seattle Mariners blog
Seattle Mariners MLB news, including Seattle Mariners trades, roster, rumors, game and schedule information
Posts filtered on Tag
Mariners out-hitting opponents, but can't turn hits into runs
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Mike Carp gets called back up to the Mariners
The team hasn't announced it yet, but the man himself has: Mike Carp has been reactivated from the disabled list and is joining the Mariners today in Tampa. Updated 1:20 p.m.: The Mariners have now announced it. Miguel Olivo has been placed on the 15-day disabled list with a strained right groin. Carp tweeted the […] [Read More]
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Michael Pineda to have season-ending surgery after trade to Yankees
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When it comes to trades, Mariners fans are understandably skeptical. This is a team that once had Shin-Soo Choo, Rafael Soriano and Jason Varitek on its roster, all traded away for players who never amounted to much with the Mariners. So this offseason, when GM Jack Zduriencik traded star pitcher Michael Pineda away to the […] [Read More]
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iPhone Diaries: Kelly hits New York City 0
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Behind the Scenes: The Rip Curl Search Puerto Rico 0
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Channel Islands Surfboards Team Rider Kelly Slater Wins Landmark 10th World Title on His Own Board Design Kelly Dedicates his Win to the Memory of Andy Irons Riding for Channel Islands Surfboards since his early teens, surf legend Kelly Slater has now won his 10th ASP World Title on his own personally designed Channel Islands […]


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SCUBA // SCUBA Gear // SCUBA Bcds // Jacket Style // Aqua Lung Axiom BCD (Item #31340X)
Aqua Lung Axiom BCD
Style ID: 31340X
Avg Review Read Reviews | Write a Review
Aqua Lung Axiom Scuba BCD
The Aqua Lung Axiom BCD is the newest in a long line of great BCDs from the Aqua Lung family. The earlier model was a perrenial first team All-American at FSU, but this phenom''s going pro after demolishing records as a Gator true freshman. This Axiom''s got all the tools, including the ones below.
- The Axiom's innovative design makes it one of the most streamlined jacket style BCD's on the market
- Flat valves reduce drag while swimming through the water
- The Wrapture™ harness system, using the shoulder swivel buckles (patented), valve retention strap and a customized back plate, provide comfort and stability while preventing "ride-up" at the surface
- The GripLock™ tank band system makes attachment to a cylinder easier than ever before. Gone are the days of complicated web weaving and you don't have to worry about pinching your fingers with the innovative finger saver feature (pat. pend.)
- SureLock™ II weight pouches (patented) provide a simple, single-pull release. Loading is as simple as insert and "click"
- Fixed trim weight pockets on the tank band to help provide proper trim in the water
- A bladder retraction system is used to pull in the sides of the bladder during deflation
- The chest strap can be adjusted for personal comfort
- Includes an octo-pocket and an instrumentation pocket
- Large, easy-to-access, zippered utility pockets found on both sides
- Knife attachment points are found on the left lobe
- 5 stainless steel D-rings and 1 plastic D-ring
- Right shoulder pull dump is easy to locate and use
- Deep See Squeeze Lock Knife (sold separately)


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Thank you
@ Heidi W. I said I wouldn't get involved in this discussion again, but you are WRONG about the boos…
Without cats there is nothing!
Sounds really stupid and an exaggeration. I just use a fine grater. Indoors. No gloves, no goggles, …


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Rather ironic, wouldn't you say
gandle(4 NE)April 16, 2013
Yesterday morning the North Platte fire department was called to a tractor-trailed fire 3 miles east on I-80. The cab or semi was totalled and according to the fire department spokesman, the contents of the trailer received severe smoke damage. The contents of the trailer, it was completey full of Camel cigarettes. Smoke damage on cigarettes, how terrible.


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Number systems
Number systems and the rules for combining numbers can be daunting. This unit will help...
Number systems and the rules for combining numbers can be daunting. This unit will help you to understand the detail of rational and real numbers, complex numbers and integers. You will also be introduced to modular arithmetic and the concept of a relation between elements of a set.
After studying this unit you should be able to:
- understand the arithmetical properties of the rational and real numbers;
- understand the definition of a complex number;
- perform arithmetical operations with complex numbers;
- represent complex numbers as points in the complex plane;
- determine the polar form of a complex number;
- use de Moivre's Theorem to find the nth roots of a complex number and to find some trigonometric identities;
- understand the definition of ez, where z is a complex variable;
- explain the terms modular addition and modular multiplication;
- use Euclid's Algorithm to find multiplicative inverses in modular arithmetic, where these exist;
- explain the meanings of a relation defined on a set, an equivalence relation and a partition of a set;
- determine whether a given relation defined on a given set is an equivalence relation by checking the reflexive, symmetric and transitive properties;
- understand that an equivalence relation partitions a set into equivalence classes;
- determine the equivalence classes for a given equivalence relation.
- Duration 20 hours
- Updated Thursday 7th April 2011
- Intermediate level
- Posted under Mathematics
- Current section: Introduction
- Learning outcomes
- 1 Real numbers
- 2 Complex numbers
- 3 Modular arithmetic
- 4 Equivalence relations
- Acknowledgements
Number systems
In this unit we look at some different systems of numbers, and the rules for combining numbers in these systems. For each system we consider the question of which elements have additive and/or multiplicative inverses in the system. We look at solving certain equations in the system, such as linear, quadratic and other polynomial equations.
In Section 1 we start by revising the notation used for the rational numbers and the real numbers, and we list their arithmetical properties. You will meet other properties of these numbers in the analysis units, as the study of real functions depends on properties of the real numbers. We note that some quadratic equations with rational coefficients, such as x2 = 2, have solutions which are real but not rational.
In Section 2 we introduce the set of complex numbers. This system of numbers enables us to solve all polynomial equations, including those with no real solutions, such as x2 + 1 = 0. Just as real numbers correspond to points on the real line, so complex numbers correspond to points in a plane, known as the complex plane.
In Section 3 we look further at some properties of the integers, and introduce modular arithmetic. This will be useful in the group theory units, as some sets of numbers with the operation of modular addition or modular multiplication form groups.
In Section 4 we introduce the concept of a relation between elements of a set. This is a more general idea than that of a function, and leads us to a mathematical structure known as an equivalence relation. An equivalence relation on a set classifies elements of the set, separating them into disjoint subsets called equivalence classes.
This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course Pure mathematics (M208) [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]
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AEG Live is bringing the power of its Denver-based management team to bear in the Pacific Northwest, hoping to dominate live-music promotion in Seattle and Portland, Ore., as it has in Colorado.
The city of Denver has finalized a five-year contract to make the AEG Live-owned AXS the exclusive ticket seller for all city venues, Denver Arts & Venues spokesman Brian Kitts said Thursday.
Chuck Morris talks Fiddler's Green renovations, Colorado Music Hall of Fame and more.
Mike Barsch's Soda Jerk Presents acts as the DIY, independent alternative to corporate music promoters like Live Nation and AEG Live in Denver.
The National, the Lumineers, Big Gigantic and the Lyons music community have already organized benefits that have raised more than $40,000 for Colorado flood victims.
AEG Live Rocky Mountains will replace Live Nation as the booking partner at the 24-year-old, 18,000-seat Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre in Greenwood Village.
Earlier this week Zac Brown Band announced a return to Red Rocks Amphitheatre this summer, where it played two sold out shows in 2011. It looks like the band is hoping to do the same this year, as it has announced a second date at the mountain venue on May 9.
A buyer for Phil Anschutz's AEG may be hard to find
Billionaire Phil Anschutz may sell AEG, leaving future of Coachella, AEG Live unknown
Mark Cuban and Ryan Seacrest have started a new music-centric TV network that will be based in Denver


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'Glee' First Look: 'American Idol's' Jessica Sanchez Finally Arrives
The season 11 runner-up will make her first appearance Thursday, playing a diva from a rival school.
Nearly a year after news broke that American Idol's season 11 runner-up Jessica Sanchez would join Fox's Glee for a major arc, the singer's time has finally arrived.
Sanchez will guest star on Thursday's "Lights Out" episode of the Fox musical dramedy in the first of a multiple-episode arc as a student from a rival school described (naturally) as a legendary diva powerhouse singer. (Worth noting: That story line was one of five THR suggested for the young performer back in November.)
PHOTOS: 'Glee' Season 4 in Pictures
"I love to be creative -- that's what the entertainment business is about. You have to be out there sometimes, and Glee is so colorful and unexpected with everything. I'm really excited to see what they have planned for those episodes," Sanchez told The Hollywood Reporter in March. The singer and aspiring actress also told THR in November that she was taking acting lessons to prepare for her upcoming role.
"I've been studying up," she quipped. Sanchez is also slated to appear in the May 2 and May 9 season finale of Glee as New Directions preps for Regionals.
Check out a first-look photo of Sanchez's Glee appearance, above, and our gallery of episodic images from season four here.
Glee airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. on Fox. Hit the comments with your thoughts on Sanchez's appearance.
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The New Inquisition
At a literary festival in New York City some years ago, I was introduced to a French writer who, almost immediately after we shook hands, asked me where I was from. When the answer was "Morocco," he put down his drink and stared at me with anthropological curiosity. We spoke about literature, of course, and discovered a common love for the work of the South African writer J.M. Coetzee, but before long the conversation had turned to Moroccan writers, then to Moroccan writers in France, and then, as I expected it eventually would, to Moroccan immigrants in France--at which point the French writer declared, "If they were all like you, there wouldn't be a problem."
His tone suggested he was paying me some sort of compliment, though I found it odd that he would want the 1 million Moroccans in his country to be carbon copies of someone he had barely met and whose views on immigration--had he asked about them--he might not have found quite to his liking. It was only later, when I had returned to my hotel room, that it dawned on me that the profile of the unproblematic Moroccan immigrant he might have had in mind was based solely on conspicuous things. Some of these, like skin color, were purely accidental; others, like sartorial choices or dietary practices, were in my opinion inessential, but from his vantage point perhaps they suggested a smaller degree of "Muslimness."
Was this man really suggesting that I was a more desirable immigrant because I did not look Muslim? We had started our conversation as two equals, two potential friends, two writers discussing literature, but we had ended it as judge and supplicant--the former telling the latter whether or not she would make a suitable immigrant. And why on earth did I not say something on the spot? Why did I not ask him what he meant? Instead, I had stared back at him with what I imagine was dumbfounded perplexity, and then changed the subject. Perhaps if I had confronted him I would have been able to remove the sting of the insult that had lain hidden inside the compliment.
In any case, the man's assertion was a purely theoretical speculation. In practice, there is little evidence that even inconspicuous Muslims are fully accepted in France, or elsewhere in Europe. This was made abundantly clear in September, when Le Monde released video footage from an encounter between Brice Hortefeux, the interior minister of France, and Amine Benalia-Brouch, a young Algerian-French activist. Hortefeux and Benalia-Brouch, who were both attending the summer congress of the center-right party Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, were asked to pose for a photograph. A female onlooker touched Benalia-Brouch on the cheek and, in a voice ringing with approbation, said, "[Benalia-Brouch] is Catholic. He eats pork and drinks beer." "That is true," replied Benalia-Brouch, smiling. "He is our little Arab," the woman continued. Hortefeux added, "Very well. We always need one. When there's one, that's all right. It's when there are a lot of them that there are problems."
However offensive Hortefeux's statements may be, they are not particularly remarkable. In French politics, anti-immigrant posturing is something of a rite, often performed at the height of election season. When he was still mayor of Paris, and preparing to run for the presidency under the banner of the center-right party Rassemblement pour la République, Jacques Chirac bemoaned the plight of the "French worker," who was driven "mad" by "the noise and the smell" of the immigrant family next door, "with a father, three or four wives, twenty kids, taking in 50,000 Francs in welfare payments without working." After serving a term as president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing took to the pages of Le Figaro Magazine to argue passionately that citizenship laws needed to replace the "right of land" (jus soli, automatic citizenship for those born on French soil) with the "right of blood" (jus sanguinis, citizenship determined through French ancestry). If such a distinction were not made, he warned, France would face "an invasion." The "right of blood" definition of citizenship, depending on how it is interpreted, could have ruled out the writer Alexandre Dumas, the footballer Michel Platini, the actress Isabelle Adjani, the physicist Marie Curie, the composer Maurice Ravel, the singer Charles Aznavour, as well as Nicolas Sarkozy, the current president of France, but perhaps Giscard d'Estaing felt his country could have done without any of them. (France eliminated the jus soli definition of citizenship in 1993 and then reinstated it in a limited form in 1997.)
In 2002 Manuel Valls, the mayor of Evry and a member of the Parti Socialiste, shot to national prominence when he tried to close down a halal supermarket because it did not carry pork or wine. He claimed the store had to "help us maintain some diversity." Two years before his election to the presidency in 2007, Sarkozy promised he would "hose down" the "scum" of the Paris suburbs, where many of the city's Muslims reside. Declarations such as these cut across party lines and constitute what the French press euphemistically calls dérapages, or blunders.
The reactions to the dérapages are also something of a tradition. Members of the offending politician's party rally behind him, while members of the opposition call him a racist. Meanwhile, leaders of the far right gloat that--at long last!--the mainstream is recognizing something they have been saying for years. After Chirac's infamous "noise and smell" comments, for instance, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the avowedly racist and anti-Semitic leader of the Front National, gleefully insisted that the French would always prefer "the original to a copy."
So it would seem that the perfect Muslim immigrant in France is one who cleans the house, picks up the trash, attends to the infant or, increasingly, fixes the computer, heals the sick and runs the bank, and then disappears in a wisp of smoke, before his presence, his beliefs, his customs, his way of dress, his "noise and smell" offend the particular sensibilities of the general population. France is not alone in wishing that its Muslims were invisible. As anyone who has visited Western Europe in the past few years will tell you, the "Muslim question" is a matter of grave concern.
European Muslims have unintentionally revived a whole genre of nonfiction--the alarmist tract, billed as a "searing" yet "necessary" exposé on Europe's impending demise now that it has allowed so many millions of Muslims to settle on its shores. The titles are each more ominous than the last: The Rage and the Pride, by Oriana Fallaci (2002); Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by Bat Ye'Or (2005); Londonistan, by Melanie Phillips (2006); Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's Too, by Claire Berlinski (2006); and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within, by Bruce Bawer (2006). The authors rely mostly on tabloid or newspaper accounts; the arguments are simple, or, more accurately, simplistic, and the preferred method of inference is extrapolation.
The latest offering in this genre is Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, by Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a regular contributor to the Financial Times, The New York Times Magazine and many other publications. However, just as Chirac and Sarkozy prefer to say more carefully what Le Pen says bluntly, Caldwell articulates in polite and embellished language what Bawer and others have been saying aggressively for years: Europe is being overrun by Muslim immigrants; these immigrants show no sign of assimilating to European culture and social mores; and as a result, Europe is in danger of becoming an outpost of the Islamic empire.
According to Caldwell, European "political and commercial elites" invited immigrants to work on the continent in order to help rebuild the infrastructure that had been destroyed during World War II. These immigrants were expected to take up jobs in construction and, in later waves, jobs that were deemed too menial or too low-paying for "European natives." Immigrants revitalized industries like car manufacturing in the 1950s, but by the 1960s they were already propping up those, like textile mills, that were failing. Deindustrialization, combined with the 1973 oil crisis, resulted in the closing of factories and the loss of thousands of jobs. By then, the immigrants had already settled in Europe indefinitely, had married or brought spouses and had children. "Decade in, decade out," Caldwell writes, "the sentiment of Western European publics, as measured by opinion polls, has been resolutely opposed to mass immigration. But that is the beginning, not the end of our story."
That story, in Caldwell's telling, focuses on the Muslim communities of Europe. The plot involves the physical isolation of rapidly growing numbers of Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Turks, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians in suburban neighborhoods; high rates of crime and imprisonment; misogynistic practices and anti-Semitic confrontations; and general cultural tensions with mainstream society. The story's climax is the Muslim minority's "demands" for concessions to its religion, laws and customs. The other characters in this high drama are the "self-loathing" European elites, who are in love with the idea of a multicultural society and who close their eyes to any negativity because they feel they have to atone for centuries of colonialism.
However, Caldwell argues, "immigration is not enhancing or validating European culture; it is supplanting it." European Muslims, he warns, are having children at a rate unmatched by the secularized natives. As of 2005, there were approximately 5 million Muslims in France; 3 million in Germany; 1.6 million in Britain; 1 million in Spain; and fewer than 1 million in the Netherlands and in Italy. All told, Muslims account for about 5 percent of the total population of Western Europe; but that may be 5 percent too many, because in Caldwell's estimation, "if one abandons the idea that Western Europeans are rapacious and exploitative by nature, and that Africans, Asians, and other would-be immigrants are inevitably their victims, then the fundamental difference between colonization and labor migration ceases to be obvious."
The comparison between labor migrations of the past fifty years and colonization--the most memorable example of which, in recent history, is European colonialism in Africa and Asia--leaves out such details as invasions by armed troops; the systematic expropriation of land; the exploitation of natural resources to the sole benefit of the settlers; genocide, as happened to an estimated 10 million Congolese; wars of independence that cost millions of lives; and the installation of brutal dictatorships. Unbelievably, Caldwell insists that the immigration of individuals, each one acting independently and for economic or political reasons, not in obeisance to a collective supranational policy or religious mission, is nothing short of colonization.
To continue with Caldwell's story, the Muslims of Europe--and, naturally, the elites who enable them--have led each major European country to a national tragedy: the London underground bombing; the Madrid commuter train attacks; the Paris riots; the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands; and the cartoon crisis in Denmark. He concludes by sounding a pessimistic note on Europe's chances of winning this existential fight for its cultural survival. "Europe finds itself in a contest with Islam for the allegiance of its newcomers," he writes. "For now, Islam is the stronger party in that contest, in an obvious demographic way and in a less obvious philosophical way. In such circumstances, words like 'majority' and 'minority' mean little. When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctriness, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter."
The assumption here is that Europe's culture was a rigid construct that remained unchanged until the immigrants arrived. But cultures are not static; they change all the time. Of course Europe's culture will change as a result of its demographic shifts, but that change need not (indeed, it should not) be turned into a culture war between Islam and the West. Caldwell's conclusion is also contradictory, coming as it does after 300 pages in which he has argued just the opposite: that Muslims are backward, unemployed, criminal and, until recently, disengaged from the political process. By the time he ends the book, they are suddenly and inexplicably strong enough to "conquer" Europe.
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is the kind of book that will reaffirm the opinions of those who already agree with its author. If you happen to think that the establishment of what is now called "Eurabia" is a matter of time, you will find plenty of support in the many statistics and anecdotes Caldwell culls from newspaper and magazine reports. If, on the other hand, you prefer a more reasoned and complex view of the issues, the simplifications, contradictions and errors in this book will fail to persuade you. Caldwell repeats the thoroughly debunked canard that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were roundly celebrated in the Muslim world: "It was a day of joy in much of the Muslim world, including parts of Muslim Europe." On the contrary, there were demonstrations of solidarity with the families of the victims in nearly every major Muslim capital, from Rabat to Cairo to Tehran. More to the point, when the United States invaded Iraq, under the spurious claim that it possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had helped plot the 9/11 attacks, were the bombings not greeted with shouts of "U-S-A" in this country? That does not mean that the vast majority of Americans approved of the wholesale killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Simplifying the facts is expedient for Caldwell, however, as it helps bolster the argument he is trying to make, which is that Islam is locked in an inevitable and perpetual civilizational conflict with the West.
Although a large proportion of Europe's immigrants are not Muslim, and although the continent has faced serious economic, political and social challenges at various times over the past fifty years, European Muslims are held to blame for the rise in crime, violence against women, the resurgence of anti-Semitism and homegrown terrorism. For instance, Caldwell examines rates of incarceration in Europe, finds them proportionately higher for Muslims and attributes this finding to their religion and their culture, neither of which, in his view, equip them with the necessary tools for succeeding in the West. Missing from this grim assessment is the stubborn fact that Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to be prosecuted for minor offenses. In France, where judges and prosecutors have large discretionary powers, noncitizens are significantly more likely to be forced into pretrial detention while their case is being investigated. The sociologist Devah Pager, who teaches at Princeton, also found a strong correlation between crime-control strategies in French local jurisdictions and the ethnic heterogeneity of these jurisdictions. To put it more plainly, crime is not policed in the same way for everyone. Researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found a similar pattern; they recently published the result of a study showing that Moroccans sit in jail for lighter crimes than ethnic Dutch.
At no time was the question of crime in Muslim neighborhoods debated more hotly than in the fall of 2005, when the Parisian banlieues erupted in riots that lasted three weeks, leading then-President Chirac to declare a state of emergency. The riots were triggered by the deaths of two teenage boys, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who, while fleeing the police, hid in a power station and were electrocuted. Initially, Sarkozy, at the time Chirac's interior minister, claimed that the boys were suspected of robbery, but there was no solid evidence that they committed a crime--they had been playing soccer in a field when they saw police officers and fled to avoid a lengthy process of interrogation. In interviews after the riots, the people of the banlieues often described the teenagers' deaths as a spark but cited as fuel discrimination, isolation and joblessness. The banlieues are ghettos, and as James Baldwin once wrote, "To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need." Though Pascal Mailhos, the head of the French national intelligence services, flatly stated that religious beliefs played no part in the riots, several French politicians blamed, persistently and exclusively, Islam. So does Caldwell: "Even if they did not believe in Islam, they believed in Team Islam." The point here, I suppose, is that Muslims are acting collectively even when they tell you they're not.
Caldwell also suggests that Muslims are far more likely to commit violence against women. Under the heading "Virginity and violence," he writes that "there were forty-five [honor killings] in Germany alone in the first half of the decade." Since the argument here is that Muslims are more inclined to commit homicides against women in the context of "some trespass against sexual propriety," it would have been helpful if Caldwell had included, for the sake of contrast, the number of ethnic German women killed in incidents of domestic violence, as well as numbers for an entirely distinct and recent immigrant group, such as Eastern Europeans. Without such empirical comparisons, it is difficult to see how he can reach the conclusion he does, which is that "such acts make law. They assert sovereignty over a certain part of European territory for a different sexual regime." The label "honor killing" makes violence against women and girls sound like an exotic import rather than the pernicious and all-too-frequent reality that it is. Caldwell doesn't mention that domestic violence has been treated as a criminal problem in Europe thanks to the work of European feminists in the 1960s and '70s, and that now European Muslim feminists are working to create a similar zero-tolerance level about honor killings. Encouragingly, a recent Gallup study found that Muslims in Paris, Berlin and London disapproved of honor killings and crimes of passion about as much as the general French, German and British populations.
One of Caldwell's frequent arguments is that Europeans should be worried about the Islamization of their continent because Muslim women are having children in greater numbers than non-Muslims. As proof for this claim, he cites a working paper from the Vienna Institute of Demography. But recent studies show that birthrates among European Muslim women are declining sharply; for instance, the fertility rate in the Netherlands for Moroccan-born women fell from 4.9 to 2.9 between 1990 and 2005. Turkish-born women had 3.2 children in 1990 and 1.9 in 2005. Similar patterns have been observed in France and Germany. Martin Walker, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, points out that, "broadly speaking, birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm within two generations." Moreover, the Financial Times, the newspaper for which Caldwell is a columnist, recently published an article that belied all the alarmist claims about Muslim birthrates, concluding, "in short, Islamicisation--let alone sharia law--is not a demographic prospect for Europe."
The fundamental problem with Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is that Caldwell focuses exclusively on the problems with Muslim immigrants without stepping back to assess the general status of the European Muslim community. While he frequently denounces idleness, urban separation and crime by Muslims, he does not see fit to devote any space to the discrimination they face in employment, housing or the justice system, or the successes they have had in fields like science, sports, arts and entertainment. The French even have a term for this wave of young successful Muslims; they call it beurgeoisie. (The word beur is French slang for "North African.")
This flaw in Caldwell's approach is, unfortunately, entirely intentional. Reflections, he writes in his introduction, is a book about Europe, immigration and the place of Islam and Muslims in it, not "a book about the difficulties faced by immigrants and ethnic minorities." He stresses that he will use the term "native" to refer to those of European blood and "immigrant" to refer to those who are from outside Europe, even when they have been citizens of European countries for two or three generations. But by simplifying his terminology and focusing exclusively on the problems immigrants cause, not on those they face, Caldwell has tilted the scales: he does not present a complete view of the relationship between immigrant and native. On the rare occasions (I counted two) when he does mention discrimination, it is to minimize it: "There was certainly measurable discrimination in the European job and housing markets, although it was mild alongside what one might have found in the United States four decades ago." How easy it is to dismiss discrimination when one is not on the receiving end of it. But the statistics on job discrimination defy minimization: while 27 percent of beur university graduates are unemployed in France, the overall unemployment rate for university graduates is just 5 percent.
In effect, this lack of context mirrors the way Muslim immigrants (even those in second and third generations, or those who are probably Muslim in name only) are talked about in newspapers and magazines, on the radio and television: their religion is at the center of any discussion, as if the only thing that defines their political convictions, their votes, their relationship with their neighbors, with people of other religions or with members of the opposite sex is their ability to tell their nisab from their khums.
The thesis that only Islam is to blame for Muslims' supposed inability to assimilate in Europe is far too simplistic to stand the test of reality. In fact, it's just as simplistic as the argument peddled by the Muslim right wing, which is that Islam is the only cure for whatever ails Muslims. When one looks at Muslims on another continent (America, say) the pattern that Caldwell insists has been replicated throughout Europe (ghettoization, crime, violence against women, a resurgence of anti-Semitism, homegrown terrorism and demands for accommodation) does not obtain. In fact, income and education levels of Muslims in America mirror those of the general public. But save for two paragraphs, which appear ten pages before the end of the book, Caldwell avoids this comparison, presumably because it does not fit with his theory.
Caldwell does contrast Muslim immigration to Europe with Latin immigration to America. "The cultural peculiarities of Latin American immigrants," he argues, "are generally antiquated versions of American ones. Latinos have less money, higher labor-force participation, more authoritarian family structures, lower divorce rates, more frequent church attendance...lousier diets, and higher rates of military enlistment than native-born Americans." This, he says, makes Latino culture "perfectly intelligible to any patient American who has ever had a conversation about the past with his parents." But intelligibility did not prevent Glenn Beck from claiming that immigrants were "trying to conquer our culture" or Lou Dobbs from suggesting that the "invasion of illegal aliens" was responsible for a huge (and undocumented) rise in leprosy cases in the United States. The scholar Anouar Majid has cataloged many similarities between the treatment of Latino immigrants in the United States and Muslim immigrants in Europe in his book We Are All Moors. Ironically, Caldwell behaves much like a new convert to a religion: having found an ideology he agrees with, he looks only for the evidence that confirms his beliefs and disregards everything else.
Not surprisingly, Caldwell's assessment of Europe, like his assessment of European Muslims, leaves little room for nuance or complexity. He portrays the continent as a racially, culturally and politically homogenous place and its natives as extremely tolerant, respectful of human rights and largely secular. In his view, Europeans naïvely believed that Muslim workers who came after World War II would not stay. They welcomed the immigrants and muted their own concerns because they were afraid to be called racist. Caldwell makes the entire process of immigration seem like a giant hoax devious Muslims perpetrated on innocent Europeans. "European natives," he writes, "have become steadily less forthright, or more frightened, about expressing their opposition to immigration in public."
But the truth is that Europeans, particularly of the right-wing persuasion, have not been shy at all about opposing immigration. Anti-immigrant sentiment is as old as immigration itself, and Europe is no exception. Over the past few decades, immigration policy has repeatedly been a major theme of general elections in several European countries, including France, Italy and Spain. Still, the typical European one encounters in Reflections is ashamed of his country and unable to stand up to immigrants. Caldwell writes, rather preposterously, "The singing of national anthems and the waving of national flags became, in some countries, the province only of skinheads and soccer hooligans." Elsewhere, he argues that European natives have become so enamored with the idea of multiculturalism that they "know more about Arabic calligraphy and kente cloth" than they know about "Montaigne and Goethe." Of course, this is hyperbole. But strikingly, Caldwell does not wonder how much European Muslims, a great many of whom are graduates of European schools on the continent or outside it, know about these subjects.
While Caldwell blames Muslim immigrants for a range of problems, he reserves part of his scorn for "the spiritual tawdriness" of Europe--which, in his estimation, may be the "biggest liability in preserving its culture." The increasing secularization of Europe caused it to lose its bearings and gradually become vulnerable to "colonization" by "primitive" cultures. "Along the road of European modernization," he writes, "lie the shopping mall, the pierced navel, online gambling, a 50 percent divorce rate, and a high rate of anomie and self-loathing. What makes us so certain that that Europeanization is a road that immigrants will want to travel?" But in fact polls show that attitudes of European Muslims vary from country to country and often display the same regional differences seen among various European publics. For instance, Gallup polls show that Parisian Muslims are more likely than Muslims in Berlin or London to consider adultery "morally acceptable," a pattern that mirrors the larger proportions of native French who find adultery acceptable when compared with Britons or Germans.
For Caldwell, there is a quality of "Europeanness" that, on the one hand, is in danger of being lost because of the mass immigration of Muslims, and, on the other hand, is so idiosyncratic that it is not easily passed to new generations of European Muslims. He appears to suggest that this quality is innate: "[EU expansion] raised hopes that Western European labor needs could be filled by people who more or less thought like Europeans (say, maids from Hungary and machinists from Bulgaria) rather than people who did not (say, maids and machinists from Pakistan and Algeria)." The emphasis is his.
Caldwell argues that intra-European immigration had a higher degree of success because the immigrants who moved within Europe shared religious and cultural beliefs with the natives. Such an optimistic view leaves out inconvenient facts of history. In the early decades of the twentieth century, France brought thousands of Polish workers to its factories and its mines; many lived in suburban ghettos and, despite being Christian, were deemed by the natives to be too attached to their culture and too religious (they were referred to as calotins, or "Holy Joes"). Some French intellectuals and politicians began speaking of "invasion." (Similar accusations were made about Spaniards, Italians and Belgians who later migrated to France.) When the recession of the 1930s put a crunch on the French economy, the government forcibly put Polish immigrants on trains and sent them back home. So the process by which immigrants integrate in European societies has historically been a slow one, even when immigrants "think" like Europeans.
This undiscerning approach leads Caldwell to severe errors of judgment. It is exceedingly disturbing to find so many right-wing leaders receive one form or another of rehabilitation in Reflections. The British conservative politician Enoch Powell--who famously warned that if Britain didn't stop letting in nonwhite immigrants, it would soon be "foaming with much blood"--is described as "morally" wrong but "factually" right. Elsewhere, Caldwell decries the Dutch media's portrayal of the far-right leader Geert Wilders as a "paranoid and sinister bumpkin," while those who speak more conciliatorily about Islam are "spared ridicule." Wilders once compared the Koran with Mein Kampf and proposed that it be banned. This past September, he argued that a tax of 1,000 euros should be levied against Muslim women who wear a headscarf because they "pollute" the landscape.
Pim Fortuyn, the notorious Dutch far-right leader, "was not a racist," Caldwell informs us, "and his colorful repartee about the Moroccan men he had slept with was adequate to place him above the suspicion of being one." By the same logic, should one forget that Strom Thurmond supported racist laws just because he had a black child? Caldwell writes wistfully that "Fortuyn could well have become prime minister had he not been shot dead days before national elections in May 2002, by an animal rights activist who claimed to be acting to protect Dutch Muslims." Even though Muslims had nothing to do with Fortuyn's murder, this formulation suggests that, somehow, they did.
Not coincidentally, several of the loudest forecasters of European doom were previously best known for their anti-Semitic views. Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, once called the Holocaust an "extremely profitable lie." Nowadays, he asks that Muslims be prevented from flying into or out of Britain and runs ads with the slogan Enoch Powell Was Right. Vlaams Belang, the Flemish far-right party, has also had Holocaust deniers in its leadership, though now they seem most preoccupied with preventing Muslim women who wear the headscarf from working for local councils. And Le Pen, the founder of the French National Front, once described gas chambers as "a mere detail of history" and called a political opponent named Michel Durafour "Durafour crématoire" (the pun can be loosely translated as "Michel-hard-to-cook-in-a-gas-chamber"). Now he warns that it is only a matter of time before the mayor of Marseille will no longer be Mr. Gaudin but Mr. "Ben Gaudin." Recently it emerged that the Vlaams Belang and other far-right groups have formed a coalition called "Cities Against Islamisation." Europe has gone down this road before, and it did not emerge the better for it.
The societies of Europe are undergoing demographic changes, which have economic, social and educational consequences. So far, the debate on these changes has focused exclusively on Islam in Europe. Yet no one in the chattering classes seems to have noticed that the voices of European Muslims are seldom heard. This is a debate about them--not with them. And indeed Reflections on the Revolution in Europe has been reviewed in the American press mostly by people who are not European, much less Muslim. Not surprisingly, the argument that Muslims are collectively trying to "conquer" Europe "street by street" in order to turn it into an outpost of Islam has been taken at face value. But this argument is not serious criticism because it is not based on thorough empirical evidence; it is racism.
When European Muslims are heard from, it is often on the topic of religion, and usually immediately after some disaster caused by one of their co-religionists. Political leaders, eager to show that they are in dialogue with the "immigrants" (large proportions of whom are second- or third-generation citizens), quote from the Koran or invite some imam to tea at the presidential palace. The conversation turns into a battle over religion, over who has the right interpretation of what verse, instead of being expanded to the issues most relevant to the integration of European Muslims--issues like jobs, housing, education and civil rights.
The current debate places far too much emphasis on Islam as a set of codes and on the Koran as a literal text, rather than on Islam as it is lived and the Koran as an experienced text. A Moroccan man may be very devout and yet work as a sommelier in a restaurant in Paris. A Turkish teenager may not be particularly faithful and yet keep Ramadan because it is the only time of year she gets to connect with her community. An Algerian elder may be the imam of his mosque and yet carry credit card debt. Islam is not just its texts; it is millions of people, each one of whom has found an idiosyncratic way of adapting faith to modern life. Our religious beliefs are not the sum total of our lives. To discuss them as if they were puts our very lives up for debate.
The challenge of immigration is not Europe's alone. In our increasingly globalized world, immigrants are moving in all directions, across large distances and at faster rates than ever before. What Europeans--what all of us--need to face is the unavoidability of living together. Caldwell has culled two tercets from W.H. Auden's "The Quest" as the epigraph for his book:
Could he forget a child's ambition to be old
And institutions where it learned to wash and lie,
He'd tell the truth for which he thinks himself too young,
That everywhere on his horizon, all the sky,
Is now, as always, only waiting to be told
To be his father's house and speak his mother tongue.
Yet when I read Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, I was reminded of another poem, one Auden had written a year earlier, at the onset of World War II; and though the poet came to look with disfavor on the line, its truth is the one I would rather cling to: "We must love one another or die."


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Depart the US: Thursday, March 24 Arrive Berlin: Friday, March 25 Depart Berlin: Friday June 3 Deadline to apply Friday, December 18, 2015 (for students wishing to purchase the group flight) Friday, January 15, 2016 (for students wishing to make their own flight arrangements) Your program includes: Housing in centrally located multi-bedding apartments […] Read More »
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Welcome Summer on the Shores of Lake Joseph
Sherwood Inn on Lake Joseph • Port Carling, Canada
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Locally sourced fare is never far, as the inn's on-site dining room, Vintages, dishes up a cornucopia of Muskoka-inspired dishes thought up by renowned Chef de Cuisine Everett Bell. Sherwood smoked salmon is complemented by Muskoka-grown pickled shallots, while pan-seared trout glazed with Hawberry lemon butter is served alongside confit fingerling potatoes and in-season vegetables.
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A Sociological Exploration of the Ideology of Speciesism.
We are Made of Meat: interview with Matthew Calarco
Published with permission from author Leonardo Caffo (University of Torino, Italy).
We are Made of Meat: interview with Matthew Calarco
1) Why do you think is important to employ continental philosophy for the animal question?
I think there are several ways into the animal question, via law, literature, art, film, science, and so on. Philosophy represents another important approach for helping us to think through animals; and, to date, philosophical approaches to animals have been dominated by so-called Anglo-American analytic philosophy (especially the branch of ethical theory that has developed out of that tradition). I don't dispute the importance of the work done by thinkers in this tradition (and here I have in mind everyone from Peter Singer and Tom Regan to Paola Cavalieri and Mark Rowlands), but I think it's important to note that their general approach is but one avenue and path of thought among many.
In addition, it is important to underscore that there are certain intractable lacunas and dilemmas that follow from this body of work in analytic animal ethics, some of which I have examined in my published work. Let me briefly touch on just one of these dilemmas. One of the main problems that arises in the context of analytic approaches to thinking about animals is that these approaches tend to install a certain conception of the human subject at the center of ethical reflection and then extend outward from that center to include nonhuman animals. In other words, within most of these frameworks, animals are included within the scope of ethical consideration inasmuch as they are like "us" in ethically relevant ways; and animals and other beings who do not resemble us in relevant ways are typically left outside the scope of attention and consideration. Now, such arguments by analogy (e.g., this given group of animals is analogous to paradigm case humans in ethically relevant ways and should be given the same ethical consideration) are undoubtedly important at certain levels and in certain situations, but they come at a serious cost to all beings who do not resemble "us" in ethically relevant ways.
One of the major trends within Continental philosophy that I find useful for pushing back against this questionable tendency of analytic approaches is the critical analysis of "the human" that we find in such thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Irigaray, Braidotti, and others. This approach to philosophy takes as its point of departure the notion that traditional notions of human nature (based on unified subjectivity, full self-presence, sovereign agency, and so forth) are no longer tenable (and they arrive at this position through a long chain of argumentation that I can't reconstruct here). If we follow the line of thought opened up by these philosophers, then we have to rethink in a fundamental way what it means to be human.
And as we undertake this kind of analysis, we can see straight away that all of the traditional marks of human propriety that are now in question have been used repeatedly throughout the history of thought, culture, law, economics, and so on, to differentiate human beings from animals. So, if we can no longer trust in those markers of human propriety to tell us who we are, we can also no longer be sure of who or what animals are and what our relation to them might be (both ontologically and ethically). In short, we also have to rethink in a fundamental way what it means to be animal.
Continental philosophy—if pursued in the direction I'm outlining here—would have our thinking about animals begin from a site of aporia, of confusion and tumult, about who humans are and who animals are. This starting point asks us to construct alternative concepts and alternative ways of thinking that no longer trust uncritically the categories and distinctions that have structured the dominant culture's ways of thinking and living up to this point. This is a much more modest approach to thinking about animals, and it is one that proceeds with a keen awareness of the pitfalls of creating clean and distinct ontological and ethical lines between human beings and animals.
2) In one of your recent papers, you maintain that the best approach to thinking about animals is "indistinction". I can understand this position philosophically, but might it not be dangerous from a political point of view?
Yes, there are certain dangers in this approach, and so it has to be spelled out very carefully. Let me try to do that as best as I am able to here.
Following the line of thought I just outlined in the previous question, "indistinction" names the space of aporia in which we find ourselves when thinking about animals and human beings. If the sharp distinctions that have typically been drawn between humans and animals fall by the wayside, humans and animals fall into a shared space in which they become deeply indistinct from one another. Indistinct does not mean superficial identity—which is to say, it does not mean that they (animals) are now seen to be like us (humans), or vice versa; rather, it means that both what we call human and what we call animals fall into an altogether different zone of profound and deep identity that requires us to use alternative, nontraditional concepts and ideas if we wish to speak about it. In other words, indistinction means that we have ethical and ontological work to do. It throws a question in our faces: how might (what we call) humans and animals relate, ethically and ontologically, otherwise? We know the old answer to the question of how humans and animals should relate (ontologically, humans are separated from animals by an abyss; and ethically, humans have more value than animals do). But if "The Human" is dead, along with "The Animal," then we don't know who we and they might become, what kinds of affects and relations we and they might encounter, what kinds of worlds we and they might constitute and inhabit. In other words, viewing humans and animals as indistinct entails seeing all of us as caught up in a shared space of ontological and ethical experimentation.
Now, where this line of thought might get politically dangerous is with the suspicion that it seems to undercut many progressive movements for human social justice. Traditionally, many marginalized groups have been denied full standing as human beings on the grounds that they were not fully human, that they were "like animals." Many of these marginalized groups have had to fight for their humanity, that is, for recognition of their full standing as human beings—and here I am, seemingly trying to undercut the concept of the human altogether! But I hope it is clear that I am entirely on the side of these progressive movements for social justice. I am fully and painfully aware of how rhetorics of animality have been used to marginalize human beings the world over, and I am deeply aware of how important being recognized as fully human can often be for such peoples.
But it has to be noted that there have also been radical movements for change throughout the years that have sought change on other grounds and through other avenues. Many different queer struggles, feminist groups, indigenous peoples, anti-racism and decolonization struggles, alter-globalization activists, radical environmentalists, and so on, have argued that radical movements for social justice should not be about who is human and who isn't human, about who should be granted access to the status quo economy/law/culture associated with "man" and who shouldn't. Their goal has been to push back against and ultimately leave behind that all-too-human world and construct a world in which many worlds are possible and for beings of all sorts. Rather than playing the old game of determining human propriety and then stretching it to include or exclude this being or that being, these groups are asking us to push back against that game and eventually exit it altogether. I place my work within, alongside, and in support of those struggles. So, my work is not aimed at undercutting the humanist progressive struggles for social justice that I mentioned above; instead, it is aimed at deepening and radicalizing them in the name of those who continue to be marginalized by the established anthropocentric order.
3) Besides being a philosopher, you call yourself an activist? Have you become vegan? Do you think it's important to become vegan, despite all the problems with it?
I have been involved with animal activism of various sorts and at various levels for many years. And, yes, veganism is to my mind one important aspect of pushing back against the established anthropocentric order. Veganism is not for me an attempt at being pure and making sure that I consume no animals or animal products or that I cause animals no harm. Given the world we live in (which is deeply caught up in violence toward animals at every conceivable level), and given the more general logic of consumption (which is inherently violent), pure veganism is impossible to attain—and I know that, despite my best efforts (I am a strict vegan by most people's standards), I indirectly consume animals and cause them harm in innumerable ways. But that doesn't mean one simply gives up and eats just anything one feels like. Instead the question becomes: How can I, or better, how can we consume (and be consumed, because consumption runs both ways!) as respectfully as possible? Veganism is the name I give to that practice of respectful eating when it is undertaken in view of animals.
For me, veganism is one of the ways of putting the notion of indistinction into practice. Animals and human beings are deeply and profoundly indistinct in the fact that we are, all of us, potentially meat. This is one of the most important lessons of artists like Francis Bacon (a point that is made well by Deleuze in his reading of Bacon), feminist theorists like Val Plumwood (see her essay "Being Prey"), as well as several indigenous peoples and traditions that have influenced my work. Counter to some animal ethicists who view animals and humans as being fundamentally inedible and who build their veganism on a kind of absolute prohibition of consumption, this alternative way of seeing humans and animals as sharing a zone of indistinct, meaty, consumable embodiment gives rise to another kind of veganism. Vegans of this sort, among which I would count myself, avoid eating meat as much as possible not because animals should not be seen as meat. Animals are potentially meat; they (and we!) can be eaten, are eaten, and will be eaten. But what we know—we fellow meaty, embodied beings who practice this sort of veganism—what we know is that animal bodies can be much more than "mere" meat.
Modern factory farms and animal industries try to reduce animals to "mere" meat (the scare quotation marks are there because nothing is "mere" to my mind, not even processed meat), to make us think that their bodies are capable of nothing more than ending up as beef, pork, or various byproducts on our plates or on our bodies. So, yes, animals are potentially meat to be eaten—but they are potentially more than that as well. Veganism is an attempt to release animals into these additional potentials, into these other possibilities. It is an effort to release them from a world and an established order that has blocked them from constituting their own worlds, their own relations, their own becomings, joys, and passions. As such, veganism of this sort is not a hatred or disgust of meat or of embodiment, but a profound identification with and passion for meaty bodies and their wide range of potentials. Moreover, veganism of this sort is also an effort to release ourselves into other possibilities, potentials, and passions. Who knows what we might become when we try eating more thoughtfully, more respectfully? Who knows what we might become when rethink who we are and who animals are?
I should also stress that this is why veganism cannot be limited to an individual ethical stance if it is to be seriously pursued. The established order that seeks to reduce animals to "mere" meat is extraordinarily powerful and is constituted by a series of economic, legal, ontological, and other innumerable systems and institutions that cannot be taken down (or even seriously reformed) through individual or collective acts of vegan eating.
Veganism of the sort I am talking about here needs to go well beyond a change in eating habits and must extend to a reflection on and radical transformation of everything from transportation (think of the massive death, suffering, and habitat fragmentation associated with roadkill, railkill, and airkill), to energy usage (every step of the process of extraction, processing, and end use of fossil fuels and even "renewables" is fraught with harm to animal lives and habitats, not to mention the innumerable harms caused to animals through climate change), to architecture (our cities, towns, and general infrastructures for living are built with very little to no consideration of animal well being) to waste, to our collective use of and impact on water, soil, air, and other aspects of the material world that compose animals' environments. It is enormously challenging to think through animal issues on this kind of complicated terrain, but there are numerous and promising possibilities here as well for forming important linkages with other movements for radical change (including, of course, all of the groups I mentioned above who seek to build a world in which many worlds are possible for all sorts of beings). The wager of my work is that serious transformation of the established order will come, if it comes at all, through these kinds of alliances and solidarities.
Original Text (Italian).
Posted by Roger Yates. at 5:20 PM
Labels: Continental philosophy, made of meat
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What is Eraser?
Eraser is an advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. The patterns used for overwriting are based on Peter Gutmann's paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" and they are selected to effectively remove magnetic remnants from the hard drive.
Other methods include the one defined in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual of the US Department of Defence and overwriting with pseudorandom data. You can also define your own overwriting methods.
File size :: 9.47 MB (9,931,912 bytes)
Main :: esnips
Eraser v5.7 addon for those who prefer smaller but older version
Edited by johndoe74, 13 September 2008 - 01:38 AM.


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