1-5 , Biblical Figures

Number Two in a series on Countries named after Peeps

1. Jacob son of Isaac son of Abraham

Yes, he almost certainly never really existed. And there are quite a few legendary founder figures whose names have become associated with countries in a false etymology. For instance, the derivation of  'Britain' from Brutus of Troy, 'Misr' (Egypt) from Mizraim son of Ham, and the doubly-incorrect derivation of the name of the country known in English as 'Georgia': in English, from St George (which is wrong) and in Kartvelian from 'Kartvel', an apocryphal son of Japheth (also wrong).

But I think it is quite likely that the first incarnation of the land of Israel, c.1000 BCE, was named as claimed after a legendary ancestor figure, instead of the other way around, given that the biblical accounts of its foundation have it being conquered a relatively short time before it is known by that name. I can't be sure; but I'm going to call it as a valid country named after a peep.

2. King Solomon son of David

Third king of the united kingdom of Israel, immortalised in Judeao-Christo-Islamic culture for his wisdom and fabulous wealth, whose name was given by a Spanish explorer to the Solomon Islands, sort of like Erik the Red naming Greenland 'Greenland', in hope that they would be chock full of treasure.

3. Mary mother of Jesus
You will search the roll of the United Nations in vain for a 'Santa Maria'.  No, the Blessed Virgin Mary makes this list in a rather obcure fashion. One of her many titles is 'Our Lady of the Snows', in reference to a 4th century miracle, which led a Spanish explorer to give the name 'Nuestra Señora de las Nieves' to a Caribbean island. This was gradually corrupted to 'Nevis', which is one half of the name of the nation of St. Kitts and Nevis.


 4. Jesus Christ
While going forth to conquer new lands on the southern edge of New Spain with their armies of Nahuatl auxilaries, the Spanish (again) gave a region on the Pacific coast of Central America the pious but rather unwieldy name of 'The Province of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Saviour of the World'. This has been shortened to 'The Saviour', El Salvador.

5. Thomas the Apostle
Of the many saints that have had countries named after them, the only biblical one is the Apostle Thomas, aka Doubting Thomas. A volcanic island off the coast of Africa, discovered on St. Thomas' day (December 21st) by Portuguese explorers, was given his name, and now forms one half of the nation of  Sao Tome and Principe.

Countries Named After Peeps

Number 1 in a Series

Last Saturday a bird struck the window of our living room with an almighty bang and broke its neck. It was one those pigeons with the spiky tufts on their heads that we never had in Townsville and I can first remember seeing in Alice Springs on my honeymoon. I noticed this morning that it has left a mark – it is like an eye, an arc over a circle, and the circle with enough feathery fine structure to satisfy any iridologist. Poor bird. We will have to hang somethings on strings to stop it from happening again. It will never happen again for that particular bird, though: it was killed instantly. It had beautiful iridescent feathers on its side. It was a simply amazing thing from a chemical point of view. From any reasonable point of view. Fearfully and wonderfully made, it was. Life casts so much beauty and complexity so carelessly about the world. Life is so very profligate of beauty – and of suffering. Life is so wonderful and so fearful.

I also finished my virtual ride across the Sahara last Saturday: from Oran to Lagos, roughly tracing the journey in ‘Beau Geste’ on Google Maps. It took me a little less than three years. Most all of it is paved road. It would be great to see it all in real life some day, when Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghrib and Boko Haram have calmed down. 

And a few days before last Saturday, I deactivated my Twitter account. We will see if I am stubborn enough to wait out the thirty days beyond which – it is written – return is impossible. I don’t think there is anything I ought to be saying that can be said in 140 characters or less. There didn’t seem to be any flow through from Youtube to Twitter followers, or vice versa, and it was making me depressed almost every day. On days when it wasn’t making me depressed, it was encouraging my troll-nature to a dangerous degree, and I kept having to bite back inflammatory things I thought of tweeting. For example I was going to take advantage of the existence of the International Date Line to cheerily tweet #IndependenceDay greetings on our 5^th of July to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Which brings me to my point, which is countries named after peeps. I thought, hmm, is there anyone else besides Simon Bolivar whose name features in the official names of more than one country? I thought perhaps Saint Dominic, but it turns out that the island of Dominica is named after the day it was discovered. I think Bolivar is the only one. But of course this got me thinking of countries named after peeps more generally, and I have put a map together, like so.

The countries in blue have names with a noun part that derives from the name of a particular individual person; the countries in cyan have names with an adjectival part that derives from the name of a particular individual person. I count 22 people who have been immortalised this way. I was going to go through them all (in chronological order) in one big post of geography pedantry jollity, but I think I will do them instead in a whole bunch of individual posts. Because having a country named after you is a pretty big deal.

Some Ruminations on 'Green Left Weekly'

The other day I was waiting for my coffee, and having already read with interest the local free paper that was lying about in numerous copies (our MP in the NSW Parliament was picked up driving at three times the legal blood alcohol limit; he has apologised profusely), I flicked instead through a copy of Green Left Weekly that someone had left lying about.

I found, on perusing this paper, that it irritated me very much less than the average copy of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald, a mildly left-of-centre paper that was mild enough to endorse Tony Abbott at the last federal election. I was thinking about why this might be the case, and have come up with several reasons.

Firstly, I have a weakness for people who are passionate about things, even if they are passionate about crushing all that I hold dear. There is something stirring in seeing anyone who really believes in what they are saying get up and voice an opinion in the face of opposition.  

Secondly, the things that Green Left Weekly concerns itself about are mostly concrete things, and this gives it more of a sense of proportion than one finds in the mainstream media.  Overwhelmingly, the articles concerned actual people with less money in their pay packets or not, or actual trees being cut down or not. There was hardly anything about those vacuous point-scoring sort of progressive issues on which the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald spends so much of its efforts.

Thirdly, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald is, like the ABC, part of the establishment, and it speaks with the condescension of the establishment towards minority views, which is infuriating; Green Left Weekly knows it is the voice of a minority, and does not speak in this same voice. 

Fourthly, another consequence of being part of the establishment left-of-centre is that the writers of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald live inside a bubble, where everyone they meet thinks the same way as they do, and they are never required to defend their tiresomely conventional views with rational argument. So their pieces are either devoid of rational argument, or employ it very badly. The writers for Green Left Weekly, being a minority, are accustomed to engaging in arguments for defending what they believe, and employing reason in doing so, and this shows in what they write. There was an article on the situation on Iraq which eschewed vitriol and hyperbole; which set out a proper argument; which employed rational thought; and which, though I disagreed with its conclusions, I thought made a better case than articles reaching the same conclusions I have read by authors on the libertarian right-of-centre.

The other day I was waiting for my coffee, and having already read with interest the local free paper that was lying about in numerous copies (our MP in the NSW Parliament was picked up driving at three times the legal blood alcohol limit; he has apologised profusely), I flicked instead through a copy of Green Left Weekly that someone had left lying about.

I found, on perusing this paper, that it irritated me very much less than the average copy of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald, a mildly left-of-centre paper that was mild enough to endorse Tony Abbott at the last federal election. I was thinking about why this might be the case, and have come up with several reasons.

Firstly, I have a weakness for people who are passionate about things, even if they are passionate about crushing all that I hold dear. There is something stirring in seeing anyone who really believes in what they are saying get up and voice an opinion in the face of opposition.  I don’t doubt that that the writers at the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald believe what they are writing: and to an extent, perhaps, if exactly the same op-eds had appeared in a paper explicitly aimed at a leftist fringe, they would not bother me as much.

Secondly, the things that Green Left Weekly concerns itself about are mostly concrete things, and this gives it more of a sense of proportion than one finds in the mainstream media.  Overwhelmingly, the articles concerned actual people with less money in their pay packets or not, or actual trees being cut down or not. There was hardly anything about those vacuous point-scoring sort of progressive issues on which the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald spends so much of its efforts.

Thirdly, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald is, like the ABC, part of the establishment, and it speaks with the condescension of the establishment towards minority views; Green Left Weekly knows it is the voice of a minority, and does not speak in this same infuriating voice.

Fourthly, another consequence of being part of the establishment left-of-centre is that the writers of Devil Bunny City Morning Herald live inside a bubble, where everyone they meet thinks the same way as they do, and they are never required to defend their tiresomely conventional views with rational argument. So their pieces are either devoid of rational argument, or employ it very badly. The writers for Green Left Weekly, being a minority, are accustomed to engaging in arguments for defending what they believe, and employing reason in doing so, and this shows in what they write. There was an article on the situation on Iraq which eschewed vitriol and hyperbole; which set out a proper argument; which employed rational thought; and which, though I disagreed with its conclusions, I thought made a better case than articles reaching the same conclusions I have read by authors on the libertarian right-of-centre.

 

The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me

I am reading Macaulay’s ‘History of England’, and my virtual bicycle trip through Google Earth Africa has brought me to Lagos. These two inputs have combined to make me inordinately cheerful.

The 17^th century was in a lot of ways not a great time in England. There was a civil war. The Great Fire of London. Plague. A vicious back and forth between religious factions that seems as pointless and horrible from this point in time as what is currently happening in Iraq. The politics of the time, which a history has necessarily to concentrate on, is a dreadful tale of people breaking promises, switching sides, inflicting abominable punishments on their enemies, failing to achieve their goals, and seeing everything they strove for broken and mocked. And yet, Macaulay is at pains to point out: at the end of the century England was vastly better off than at the beginning. Furthermore, the same was true for any twenty-year period you picked out of the chaos. People were better fed and clothed and educated at the beginning of the Civil War than at the accession of Charles I. At the Restoration than at the start of the Civil War. At the time of the Glorious Revolution than at the Restoration. People unrecorded by the historians were striving all that time to make a better life for their children, and what Macaulay calls the ‘Baconian Revolution’ had given them better tools to do it. Self-interest driving hard work. Science making hard work more effective.

I thought of this when Google Earth began to show me the outskirts of Lagos. Nobody thinks of Nigeria as a good example of a country that has been governed particularly well for the past fifty or so years. It has had a civil war. It is riven by religious conflicts. Its politicians are notoriously corrupt. And yet, the people have been getting on with things. I knew that a city of nigh twenty-million people had grown up in that time. I guess I had a vague impression of an endless formless mass of miserable slums. But from Google Earth, the thing that struck me was how much it looked like Australia. There are motorways. Vast numbers of trucks on the motorways. Endless industrial estates.  Shopping centres that when you click on the pictures show you images that don’t look that different  from shopping centres in Townsville.  Suburban streets that when you click on the pictures don’t look all that different from suburban streets in Darwin. So many icons showing the locations of educational institutions. A vast construction project where a satellite city for a quarter of a million people is being reclaimed from the ocean. Yes, I know I wouldn’t want to live there. But there are twenty million people there with opportunities unimaginably greater than those available to their grandparents.  And while all we ever heard in the rest of the world was bad news, people were getting on with things and building it. 

 There are at least a billion people in the world right now walking around with access to all of humanity’s knowledge in their pockets whose grandparents lived their whole lives as subsistence farmers a few miles from where they were born. I just went off to check my email and top of the pile was a question about chemistry from a student in the Philippines who saw my chemistry videos on Youtube. How awesome is it that I can sit here in my bathrobe and answer a question asked by someone in the Philippines?

I am bullish on humanity. I am living in the time of the greatest expansion in human happiness, human comfort, and human knowledge that has ever been. Yes, the glass is half empty. But it towers over your grandparents’ glass like a big thing towering over a much smaller thing. Like the glass and steel tower in the middle of this picture towers over the shack at the extreme bottom left. Empty your grandparent’s glass into our glass, and you won’t even be able to tell how much fuller it is.

Now in the mind of [          ] reason has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them. It has never occurred to him that there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that  a rumour does not prove a fact, that a single fact, when proved, is hardly foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more convincing than ‘scoundrel’ and ‘blockhead’.

This is from a review by Macaulay of a book by a Mr. Southey, written in 1830, but what it describes is one of the characteristic vices of our age.  At the present time we have Mr. Southeys among us in myriads of myriads, drowning out all other voices on almost any topic of importance. So this extract could well serve for an introduction to a discussion about just about anything I have blogged about. However, it seems particularly apropos to the topic that is currently clogging my Twitter feed with bile, the detention of asylum seekers.

There is near universal agreement among the people who are retweeted by people I know that the governments who have introduced and maintained this policy, from Keating’s onward, are guilty of gross inhumanity for no good reason; that the bipartisan adoption of this policy is an abomination rightly abhorred by all people with the faintest shred of conscience; and that Scott Morrison is a fiend in human form who takes delight in the pain of innocents. If these things were true, they would of course be abominable. It would also be an unheard-of case of collusion in utter bastardry for no reason between the two main factions in Australian politics. (Collusion in utter bastardry out of self-interest is another matter; I humbly tips me lid to the great John Madigan for opting out of the pay rise they recently voted themselves).  So our current bipartisan policy must be there for some good reason. It is no good just calling Morrison, Abbot, Rudd, Ruddock, etc. ‘scoundrel’ and ‘blockhead’ and pointing to the bad effects of the policy of detaining asylum seekers, without considering what the good effects of this policy are, and what we might possibly do differently to preserve these good effects without the bad effects; or alternatively, whether we might be prepared to forego these good effects in order to get rid of the bad effects. We need to propose some positive alternative course of action and give a proper argument for it.

The two good effects of the present bipartisan policy, as I see it, are these:

1.       Fewer people drowning trying to get here. 

2.       The minimisation of personal income as a factor in the likelihood of getting one of the (shamefully small) number of refugee visas available.

People drowning is the main problem, in my opinion, and I am convinced it was also the thing that haunted the dreams of Phillip Ruddock and justified the policy in his mind.  There is a way to achieve these two effects in another way, and a sufficiently audacious first-term Prime Minister might pull it off: I will tell you what it is, and you can tell me – honestly – whether you would suffer the disadvantages of it, rather than the disadvantages of the current policy.

Let me get there by taking the genuine, well-intentioned, humane course of opinion voiced by many and follow it to its logical conclusion.

Simplicio: Most of these people from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Sri Lanka are found to be genuine refugees in the end, anyway. Surely there is no harm in keeping them in the community until their proposals are assessed, and then letting them stay to build productive lives here.

Salviati: That is true, but very many people want to come here. When such a policy is followed- or when a weakening of the policy in such a direction is made- the number of people seeking asylum increases. Unfortunately, many of them drown trying to get here.

Simplicio: Then we should fly them here.

Salviati: By making the crossing easier, we will increase the number of people seeking asylum. How do you propose we should limit their number?

Simplicio: I don’t know.  I am incapable of quantitative thought, like so many of my kind.

Salviati: Let me ask you another question: are you an admirer of the American systems of health care and education, where decent services are only available to those who can pay?

Simplicio: I would have to say ‘no’.

Salviati: But what you are proposing amounts to the same thing; any refugee who can travel from their home country to Java we will fly to Australia and give a new life; but these are not just the ones with more enterprise and vigour, the ones we might wish to select as new citizens given a free choice, but the ones that have more money. For it takes a great deal of money to travel from a refugee camp outside of Peshawar, for instance, to Java.

Simplicio: I didn’t say Java. We can fly them from wherever. 

Salviati: Then the problem is multiplied a hundredfold. We have made the barrier yet lower. How do you suppose we limit their number?

Simplicio: We could make some kind of a lottery, I guess.

Salviati: Exactly! And how good of a chance would you expect in a lottery, to sit back and await the results instead of trying your luck on a small boat to Australia? What percentage of applicants would have to be successful in a year for you to wait hopefully in a squalid refugee camp?

Simplicio: I don’t know.  I am...

Salviati: Incapable of quantitative thought, yes. How about 1:100?

Simplicio: That doesn’t sound very good.

Salviati: 1:10?

Simplicio: That sounds better. I guess I could live in squalor for ten years, on average.

Salviati: There are more than 10 million refugees whose status recognised by the United Nations around the world, and many more that are unrecognised who would apply to such a lottery. While I will require funding from the Australian Research Council to do a proper study, I have pulled some numbers out of my arse and would suggest that such a lottery would not have any success in reducing unauthorised arrivals unless we were to lift our refugee intake to 250,000 a year.

Simplicio: I wish I could do that thing with the numbers.

We do not believe that Mr. Southey would recommend such a course, through his language would, according to all the rules of logic, justify us in supposing this to be his meaning. He never sees, at one glance, more of a question than will furnish matter for one flowing and well-turned sentence; so that it would be the height of unfairness to charge him personally with holding a doctrine merely because that doctrine is deducible, though by the closest and most accurate reasoning, from the premises which he had laid down.

I have, in 2001, written to Kim Beazley asking him to lift our refugee intake to 250,000 a year if he won the election. At about the same time I am on record as saying that I would like to see another 2 million Iraqis in Western Sydney. We could certainly do this: much poorer countries have taken much larger proportional numbers of people. I am willing to lump the unavoidable reduced standard of living and the unavoidable increased pressure on the environment that this would entail. I would like to see minor parties motivated by Islam, in the same way that Family First, the Christian Democrats, and the DLP are motivated by Christianity, with the balance of power in the Senate.  

I am guessing, though, that a decade after the Dr Clam policy is introduced, that the minor party that is most associated with vociferous Mr. Southey-style objections to the bipartisan policy will be the most vociferous opponent of the new policy. They will hate the new power stations, dams, and highways that it will require; their affluent voter base will resent the erosion in their standard of living; and a new block of socially-conservative Muslim voters will put the brakes on their progressive agenda.  Maybe not. I hope I live to see them disappoint me, when Anthony A or Anthony A enacts my agenda in a fit of madness.