Month: June 2013

Michael Kazin explains why Woodrow Wilson, who took office 100 years ago, isn’t celebrated like FDR or even LBJ:

Despite his academic background and cerebral image, Wilson, like Obama now, was a masterful orator. Unlike nearly all his predecessors, he thought the public deserved to hear their elected leader explain, in a variety of venues, what he was doing and why. … He bet that a massive army and compelling ideals would cleanse the world of autocracy, empire, and, with the new League of Nations, perhaps even war itself. Yet Wilson famously lost that bet—as the other victorious Allies retained their colonies, the Senate voted against the U.S. joining the League, and the lethal movements of fascism and Communism emerged from the ashes.

That great failure was the last public act of Wilson’s life. It tarnished his reputation for years to come and is still the primary reason why he gets no love from liberals today. More than his dour demeanor, his excessive moralism, or his paternalistic racism, it demonstrates the peril of thinking that a war made by Americans can magically turn the world from the darkness of oppression toward the light of tolerance and democracy. Having gained the presidency as a critic of the disaster in Iraq, Barack Obama, another former academic, seems to grasp that truth.

(Photo: A monument of Woodrow Wilson in Poznań, Poland, via Wikimedia Commons)

Josh Jones digs up an old cartoon version of “The Happy Prince”:

He uses the story to contextualize Wilde’s moral sensibilities:

Wilde was ridiculed for the many of the same reasons he was feted—his flamboyant public persona and devotion to aestheticism, which satirists caricatured as a kind of decadent navel-gazing. But careful readers of Wilde’s diverse canon of poetry, prose, and drama will know of his critical looks at solipsism and superficiality. Some of his best works as a moralist are his children’s stories, such as the 1888 book of fairy stories The Happy Prince and Other Tales. In the title story, a prince is transformed into a glittering statue on a pedestal high above a city, where residents look up to him as an example of human perfection. But the prince, we learn, spends his time weeping in compassion for the poverty and suffering he sees below him. Made in 1974 by Canadian company Potterton Productions, and featuring the voices of British actors Christopher Plummer and Glynis Johns, the animated short film above is a faithful rendering of Wilde’s story.

The text of the story is here.

Jimmy Stamp reviews some of the stranger deviations from standard notation, like the sheet music to Krystof Penderecki’s “Polymorphia,” based on measurements of brain activity:

As the name suggests, the piece does indeed take various forms and changes dramatically from section to section. With “Polymorphia,” Penderecki was searching for new sonic possibilities and, if those possibilities include “terrifying haunted house music,” he absolutely nailed it. The composition is intended for 48 string instruments and emphasizes timbre rather than pitch, and the collision of sound generating bodies made of metal, wood, or leather – what music scholar Danuta Mirka refers to as the composer’s “primary materials”. The notation was inspired, in part, by electroencephalograms –visual measurements of brain activity. It eschews traditional measures in favor of a score divided into sections of variable length and, in some sections, further vertical divisions to mark each second, with a “total pitch space” describing the relative pitch of each instrument.

Earlier Dish on musical notation here.

Seth Masket constructs the above maps, which show the median ideological score for state legislators (darker states are more extreme), taken from what he calls “one of the most important datasets on state politics, legislatures, and parties to be released in a long, long time”:

[T]hese graphs don’t really tell us why a state might have extreme or moderate legislators. The Republican parties of the deep South are probably very conservative because they represent some of the most conservative voters in the country, while the extremism of parties in more moderate states may be more an indicator of the strength of party organizations in screening out moderates in primary elections.

Still, this sort of data is extremely useful if we want to understand the political context of a state party and the politicians who emerge from it. Barack Obama was an Illinois state senator (yep, he’s in the dataset — ideal point of -.695), although they’re far from the most liberal group of Democrats in the country. George W. Bush got along famously well with Texas Democrats when he was governor, but those are among the most conservative Democrats in the land. How has Chris Christie survived in blue New Jersey? Well it probably helps that his state’s Republicans are moderate by national standards, keeping pressure off him to veer rightward.

A reader writes:

I wonder whether your perception of “faggot” would change if you considered the continuing debate on reddit over the use of the “OP is a faggot” meme. This meme appears (and is usually upvoted to the top of the thread) almost without exception in cases where the original poster (OP) of the thread is suspected of wrongdoing – usually lying about the nature of the post, reposting old content without acknowledging the source, or making things up to get karma. These things happen a lot on reddit and so you don’t have to spend much time there to see “OP is a faggot.”

Many redditors will tell you that they are only using the term as you describe it – a “general term of abuse for straight women and straight men” that is “jokey” and “has been drained of any explicit homosexual meaning.” All you need to do to see the dishonesty of this claim is to look at one of the most popular ways to call OP a faggot – using an image meme. Search Google images for “OP is a faggot” for some representative examples. These images almost universally involve homosexual sex, gay stereotypes, or other direct allusions to a man being gay. Generally they consist of a man who has been caught in a situation that reveals that he is homosexual, with an arrow labeling the man as “OP.” And yet on the very same thread where they post and upvote these images, redditors will tell you with a straight face that “OP is a faggot” has “nothing to do with being gay!” and, often, what a faggot you are for ruining their fun by pointing out that it does.

Earlier perspective from readers on “No Homo” here.