Stop calling the Islamic State "ISIS"
Chapter # 3 The geography of Isis Isis is -literally- all over the map. A good number of Isis place names are known to cartographers. Examples include: Isis Avenue Cincinnati, Ohio Isis Street San Francisco Houses in the $1 million range Isis Avenue Los Angeles Isis Avenue Inglewood, California Isis Avenue Hawthorne, California ------------------- Isis Street Earlsfield, England Houses priced at 1 million pounds sterling. Served by London bus route to Isis Street Newspaper stories which insult the name "Isis" and which incongruously overlook the fact that the name was not objectionable for many years until the rise of the Islamic State: Daily Mail January 6, 2015 "unfortunate name" Guardian October 1, 2015 "embarrassing road name" Isis Walk Residential area accessible via sidewalk Bletchly, England Isis Avenue Bicester, Oxfordshire, England Isis Lane Kingsford, New South Wales, Australia Possibly this is connected to "Isis Lane" also in New South Wales, located in "Tea Gardens" Isis Lane Epping, suburb of Melbourne, Australia Isis Lane Epping, New South Wales Possible name change 2017 because of numerous complaints and threats; suggested new name "Aditi Lane" Isis Ranch Strasburg, Colorado Isis Farms Avery, Texas Isis Park Brean, England Warren Farm Holiday Centre Isis Village Tlokweng, Botswana Isis Park (neighborhood) Beylikdüzü, Turkiye Shire of Isis Queensland, Australia This was the name of a geographic area near the city of Bundaberg; "Isis" is still made use of by the Isis District Rugby League Football Club, which is proud of its heritage extending back decades, by Isis Ski Gardens, and by schools, roads, rivers, and social groups. As an article by Ross Kay and Kallee Buchanan of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for September 23, 2014, points out, the precursor of Isis Shire dates to 1887 and the name remained in use until 2008 when the district was combined with three additional shires to form the Bundaberg Regional Council. Two local areas still use the name, Isis Central and North Isis. An article in the November 25, 2015 edition of the Daily Mail adds that one community in particular has been under pressure to drop the "Isis" nomenclature but its people have refused to consider the request, a sugar cane organization called the "Isis Club," located in the town of Childers. Isis Falls Kittitas County, Washington state Yakima River watershed Isis River As Wikipedia informs us, :Isis River may refer to: Isis River (New South Wales) a tributary of Pages River, Australia; [or] Isis River (Queensland), a tributary of Gregory River, Australia. Isis Creek Located near Greenstone, Ontario, Canada in the Thunder Bay District. Isis Lake near Nipissing, Ontario, Canada Isis Lake Cotswold, England Promotional literature describes the lake in these terms: Isis Lake is a great family friendly location and offers a wide range of activities...Isis lake offers both carp and trout fishing, and [nearby Lake] Windrush allows boating; all within walking distance of these family holiday cottages. [Everything is] located within the Cotswold Water Park and is next door to the South Cerney Outdoor Education Centre. The Lakeside Bar and Brasserie is also a short walk away, located on Spring Lake, offering fine cuisine overlooking the water ski lake. [Isis Lake is] close to the lovely old market town of Cirencester and north of Swindon and only 90 miles from London it is very easily accessible by road and train. The charm of the area "presents a fine British holiday with a dash of American style." The story of Oxford and Isis Of all places in the world, at least outside of Egypt, Oxford is most closely identified with the Goddess Isis. Wikipedia explains matters succinctly: "The Isis is the name given to the part of the River Thames above Iffley Lock which flows through the university city of Oxford, England, past Christ Church Meadow and the focal point of rowing for Oxford University." There is also Isis Lock which connects _Oxford Canal_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Canal) and _Castle Mill Stream_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Mill_Stream) . Apparently the name dates to the Roman occupation of Britain although there is some dispute since the possibility cannot be dismissed that there somehow was Celtic origin. That is, the stretch of the river near Oxford preserves the original name, which was the Latin "Tamesis" or maybe Thame-isis. The Isis proper was actually the upper river starting at Dorchester (what is now Dorchester-on-Thames) to the confluence with the old river Thame, hence Thame-Isis / Thames. Dorchester-on-Thames is famous for its annual World Poohsticks Championship which has been held at there since 1984. As Wikipedia adds, "current Ordnance Survey maps still label the Thames as "River Thames or Isis" until _Dorchester_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorchester,_Oxfordshire) ." There are sculptures of Isis and Tamesis created by Anne Seymour Damer downstream from Oxford found at Henley Bridge, to the South of Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Two organizations make use of the name of the Goddess: Oxford Brookes Racing team manufactures Formula Student race cars that feature an ISIS chassis. Isis Innovation Limited deals with technology transfer issues and offers related academic consulting. There is also a prestigious journal called The ISIS, which has been published since 1892. It specializes in "feature journalism," stories with a lot of substance. Among past writers who appeared in the magazine have been Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Sylvia Plath, and someone named Gyles Brandreth (the last name is German), a celebrity in his own right who once was the European _Monopoly_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)) champion and has been the President of the _Association of British Scrabble Players_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_British_Scrabble_Players) . He also is a well known _after-dinner speaker_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After-dinner_speaker) who set the world record for the "longest continuous after-dinner speech" which lasted 12-1/2 hours, a stunt for charity purposes. Together with his wife he also founded the _Teddy Bear museum_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_bear_museum) at Wimbledon. Among his books are: The Book of Mistaikes (1982) John Gielgud: An Actor's Life (2001) The Great Book of Optical Illusions (1985) The Joy of Lex: An Amazing and Amusing Z to A and A to Z of Words (2002) Gyles Brandreth is also somewhat of an expert on the writings of Oscar Wilde, someone whom I despise, but for the record..... The Isis has a history of financial problems but it has always managed to muddle through. It has also been helped out by several well known benefactors, among them Robert Maxwell, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Even Oxford has not been immune to troubles associated with the acronym ISIS, Re: Islamic State. A school for children was called Isis Academy until not long ago. However, as an article in the Daily Mail tells us, 'Isis Academy' [was] forced to change its name after headmistress was asked if she was training children to be TERRORISTS." ------------------------------------------------------- You would think that in all of this, at least concerning the United States, there are grounds for a massive class action lawsuit against the news media for abuse of its First Amendment rights, for reckless disregard of proprietary rights of many businesses and organizations, for unethical disregard of the rights of people named Isis, and for generally being irresponsible and stupid. Complaints began to materialize in 2014 and have increased ever since with almost no response from television news organizations. Which is to say that ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN. MSNBC, and maybe Fox News as well, could be the targets of lawsuits seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. And the sooner the better. Nothing excuses the massive failure of TV news to correct a major problem that has been pointed out to its leadership repeatedly during the past three years. If news people plead ignorance they would simultaneously be admitting to gross irresponsibility. Everything said here is public domain and easy enough to access. Why didn't executives at the major television outlets take the problem seriously? Hubris may explain it best but that is hardly a justification for the damages that have been caused by the media in the years since 2013. News people still seem oblivious to what they have done. Maybe if they owned and used desk top computers instead of pocket-sized toy computers they just might take the imperative to research what they are doing seriously. There may be all kinds of neat-o things you can do with cell phones, such as taking selfies and the like, but for research purposes an adult computer is a necessity: The kind of computer that allows ease of access to large scale page layouts, multiple entry information displays, and sufficient space to read multi-page research articles and book chapters. And, of course, it is necessary to actually find the activity of reading objectively valuable -not just looking at snippets of data, not just brief summaries of black and white events, but actually trying to solve intellectual problems. But for that you need intellectual curiosity. It isn't just Donald Trump who has no intellectual curiosity it is almost the entire news establishment. ---------------------------------------------- An article by Edmondo Burr published at YourNewsWire.com on November 21, 2015 makes a number of entirely valid points about how the news media has handled the "Isis story." The title says it all: We should Stop Associating the Islamic state with the Goddess ISIS. What has been happening by calling the Islamic State "Isis" is that we are "gifting" Muslim terrorists with "powers that are associated with the word itself, the Goddess ISIS, the patroness of nature and magic who is able to bring life to the dead." The metaphor may be excessive but it sure gets the point across. The goddess Isis "is associated with power, health and wisdom." And now, thanks to the news media, we "empower...devils with the qualities of the ancient goddess." "I love history, and I love mythology," said Edmondo Burr. "That is why, on August 30, 2001, my wife and I named our first-born Isis." Now here we are, a decade or so later, and the news media has allowed a "loose assortment of low-life scumbags to co-opt that name of compassion, magic and power." Part of the problem is that the name "Isis" rolled off the tongue easily because "people already know the word," all along is it has been "in their subconscious...so it’s easier to connect meanings to it." But what the news media has done is to facilitate evil meanings to the name. And how is that in any way justified? Suppose there was a group that the media decided to apply an acronym like CHRIST to it? This is the exact effect that "Isis" has to all those people and organizations that regard the name as sacrosanct or, anyway, as entirely positive in character. The "brand," as it were, becomes hopelessly corrupted. This being the case, the agency who does the most to perpetuate this state of affairs deserves the most opprobrium. This effects all concerned but especially women. This means that "women named Isis, no matter what their personal attributes, now have to put up with associations with this group – despite having had the name much longer, and doing many good things in that name." This needs to stop. Another article that makes important points was published in The Spectator on June 28, 2014. This is Dot Wordsworth's "The bloody battle for the name Isis." The story begins, however, with a malapropism. Dot and her husband enjoyed a good laugh because of a story in the London Telegraph one day. The newspaper had published a letter "from the Pagan Federation complaining that the acronym Isis ‘is likely to form an inadvertent association in the minds of hearers between Sunni jihadists and followers of the goddess Isis’ " After all, Neo-Pagans are not to be taken seriously, and, besides, their religious beliefs are some kind of joke. Except that, even if some contemporary Pagan religious views do come across as make-believe or the stuff of naive fantasy, there is an entire history behind some of those beliefs which is as 'mainstream' in importance and anything gets. And qui bono, who benefits from belittling Pagan religion? Not only that, but laughter at the expense of modern-day Pagans often follows from abysmal ignorance of history. Something may be terribly funny but only if you don't know the relevant history. If you learn that history the joke may be on you. This is not a defense of all things Neo-Pagan. While it would be possible to quarrel with parts of Charlotte Allen's essay, "The Scholars and the Goddess," from The Atlantic magazine for January 2001, basically she is right. The foundation stories about Wicca, for instance, are historical fictions. Most Wiccans cannot be taken seriously. And scholars know it; Wicca's intellectual foundations are akin to Tolkein's Hobbit fables. But this does not account for serious classical era religions reborn in the modern era, of which Isisism is especially prominent -precisely because it takes scholarship seriously and seeks to be true to actual Isis religion as it was once practiced by real people of history. Dot Wordsworth finally got the idea by the time she had written just a few paragraphs of her article. And then she discussed how the regrettable use of the name Isis poisons our shared culture. "Isis works well in English as it is a pre-existing word," Dot Wordsworth said, and this helps explain why the acronym has become as popular as it has. But keep in mind a well known effect of this kind of phenomenon: "When acronyms collide the most prominent often drives others to extinction. The popular slimmers’ biscuits called Aids rapidly disappeared after the rise of the acronym for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome." The term ISIS to identify Muslim crazies who kill innocent people, who are hell bent on reviving original Islam as preached and practiced by a fanatic bigot with authoritarian personality disorder, does no-one the least good. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
