Over at Boing Boing, a long time favorite of mine, a link to a fantastic idea: the Presidential Speech Tag Cloud! 360 Presidential speeches from 1776 to the present broken down into tag clouds, with words becoming larger the more frequently they are used. And Shrub’s speeches after 9-11 scream one word loudly: TERRORIST. There is no other word that comes close to being a central word in Bush’s vocabulary.
It’s fascinating to scroll through and compare and contrast. For instance, the word “commitment” plays a prominent role in presidential speeches since JFK, who was the first to hammer the word repeatedly. Or how about “insurgent”? Well, scroll back to McKinley and you find he drilled that one home for the Cuban War. And so did Lincoln in the early days of the Civil War. Reagan, a big hero in Bushworld, has his own keywords. But it wasn’t “Communist”. The word that leaps out the most in his speeches? “Deficit”. Communism, empire, Soviets all get drowned out by inflation, unemployment, crime, welfare… in short, whatever else you can say about Reagan, he at least didn’t spend all his time screaming about the bogeyman in his State of the Union addresses. Sad to say, that’s what we’ve got today.
Here’s a question: if you fed all the major speeches of China’s leaders since Mao into tag clouds, what words would show up? Bonus points for the actual Chinese.
1
By Ames Tiedeman
Keep bashing Bush. This entire site in pro China and anti-USA.
You people are communists. What has China ever done for human rights, freedom, self government, individual rights, or equality.
America is the land of the free despite what some of you may think.
All of our Presidents have been better than anyting from China. China is a copycat nation. It is not an innovator of freedom or human rights. The leadership of China was only smart enough to see that a free nation produces real wealth. This is the only reason they have moved in any direction toward a more open society, if you want to even call it that. America chose freedom long ago, not to make a buck but to live in happiness.
November 4, 2006 @ 8:43 am | Comment
2
By Jeremiah
Ames, Ames, Ames, my man.
You gotta READ the site, my friend, before you post– otherwise you end up looking like a moron. I mean, more of a moron.
It’d take a pretty BROAD brush to paint TPD as a pro-Communist, Rah Rah China site. In fact just reading your post in light of a few of Ivan’s cleverly worded rants…words fail…Must. Start. Drinking.
November 4, 2006 @ 9:48 am | Comment
3
By wu ming
i’ll put my money on ·¢Õ¹ ËØÖÊ and ÎÄÃ÷.
that site is fantastic BTW.
November 4, 2006 @ 3:34 pm | Comment
4
By wu ming
damn, that was supposed to be fazhan, wenming and suzhi, but the characters got messed up.
November 4, 2006 @ 3:36 pm | Comment
5
By davesgonechina
@Wu Ming: it’s all about the character encoding. On Firefox go to View->Character Encoding->More Encodings->Chinese GB 2312, then type characters. In Explorer something similar. Damn thing gets me every time because my browser defaults to other encodings.
November 4, 2006 @ 4:09 pm | Comment
6
By the Admiral
@Ames Tiedeman – You sir, are nothing more than a spineless little Mccarthite. Communists? First of all, communism works. …As long as there no more than 3 individuals involved. My preferences run along myself and two triple-jointed bisexual women… Having said that, I must say in all seriousnedd your argument about us quacking canards being communist bastards merely proves your own ignorance…
Regards!
November 4, 2006 @ 4:27 pm | Comment
7
By Ivan
Dave, I’m guessing that the biggest “tag cloud” for the Communist Pigs post-Mao, would be the word,
“development.” They’ve used it so often, and so meaninglessly, that it, well, no longer means a damned thing whenever any Chinese person uses it.
November 4, 2006 @ 4:53 pm | Comment
8
By richard
Ames has been dropping comments like this all over my site the past couple of days. He thinks I’m a shill for the CCP. He’s obviously a ong-time reader in possession of finely tuned analystical skills
November 4, 2006 @ 5:05 pm | Comment
9
By Ames Tiedeman
You people bash Bush and America but alwayse seem to stop short of disecting China enough to call your views balanced.
America is the savior. China is a copycat nation that will soon be nothing more than an also-ran.
November 5, 2006 @ 3:14 am | Comment
10
By Ames Tiedeman
@the Admiral:
I now know what the term walking Neanderthal really means. It describes you. Your pro-China and anti-American. Show your true colors. Have the guts to say you hate America and want to see China rule the world…
You find more fault with America than China.
Your thinking is a disgrace to humanity.
November 5, 2006 @ 3:18 am | Comment
11
By Ames Tiedeman
@the Admiral:
I now know what the term walking Neanderthal really means. It describes you. Your pro-China and anti-American. Show your true colors. Have the guts to say you hate America and want to see China rule the world…
You find more fault with America than China.
Your thinking is a disgrace to humanity.
November 5, 2006 @ 3:19 am | Comment
12
By Brobostigon
Methinks Ames is MAJ inverted; reverse-psychology psychops or the result a Trekkian teleporter accident?
November 5, 2006 @ 3:28 am | Comment
13
By davesgonechina
@Brobostigon: if it was whom you speak of, I think Richard would’ve spotted telltale signs by now.
@Ames: Sorry, no points for you. The only word you’ve used that might even remotely show up in PRC tag cloud is “communist”. That doesn’t even count, it’s too easy!
November 5, 2006 @ 4:28 am | Comment
14
By Ames Tiedeman
Good bye everyone..It has been a fun few days..
See you in 6 months when I will post again…
November 5, 2006 @ 6:16 am | Comment
15
By Fat Cat
I just checked. It’s a single syllable word 党 pronounced “dang”, meaning “Political Party”, an acronym for “the Chinese Communist Party”.
November 5, 2006 @ 8:29 am | Comment
16
By davesgonechina
@Fat Cat: you win 57 points; however, Ames inadvertently quoted remarks by Zhao Ziyang, first to students, then an aside to Wen Jiabao in 1989. Zhao thought he’d get off with a slap on the wrist. Ames therefore gains 26,000 points and will be held under house arrest until he is dead.
That’s all for this show, join us next time when our contestants will form warring tribes that will slaughter one another to determine Mao Zedong’s favorite color.
November 5, 2006 @ 9:11 am | Comment
17
By richard
Ames, please take your time. We know you’re a very busy man…
November 5, 2006 @ 12:06 pm | Comment