Quickthink

I admit it. Fred was fun to watch on TV. Even as host of a terrible TV game show called Family Fued, Fred was still fun to watch. One reason, Fred liked to go over and kiss the lady contestants — black or white it didn’t matter. And even after studio execs complained, he refused to stop. He insisted that it was a key part of the success of the show. He said this

“It’s very important to me that on ‘Family Feud’ I could kiss all people,” he said in a 2010 interview for the Archive of American Television.

Everyone? Yes, everyone. He goes on

“It sounds crazy, but when I first came here Petula Clark was on a show with Nat King Cole, and he kissed her on the cheek, and 81 stations in the South canceled him. I kissed black women daily and nightly on “Family Feud” for 11 years, and the world didn’t come to an end, did it?”

I think he was right. Well, Fred passed away and NYT has his obit. God bless you Fred! You were fun.

Saint Paul? Right. I refer to Paul Krugman. And I refer to him as saint, because over the years, Paul Krugman has been one of the few pundits who has had the courage to write clearly about what he knows to be right. And he is now having fun in Europe. Salon tracks his latest tour.

The American legal system is supposed to be apolitical. That is the paradigm. But by now, we accept that this paradigm aint really what drives the system. It would be more accurate to say that the law is sensitive to political debate. So both conservative jurists and liberal jurists listen to political debate as a source of inspiration for where the law should go.

BTW, this was the motivation for the decision by Justice Blackman in Roe v. Wade. He said that he was responding to debate about abortion to formulate a legal understanding of abortion rights. Well, right wing politics has had a field day with this. They have argued that Roe is not law but glorified social science. Hmmm … so do they have a different approach for where legal norms arise?

Sure they do. They take their cue from acceptance by the Republican Party. That’s right. Party politics trumps legal reasoning. That is the view of Jack Balkin writing for Atlantic Magazine. And you know, I think that Jack has a point.

So, here is my question. Whether you are a conservative or a liberal, should legal theory be subject to the whims of party politics?

I have been following chit chat about education reform for a while now. And it appears that I am not alone. Presentation Zen offers a post with a list of clips by very smart people talking about it. It is a treasure chest! Avast me hardies! Do we dare use it?

Mathew Ingram has a nice overview for Giga of the thoughts of Prof. Tim McGuire about the future of media companies. Much of this is old news, but it is nicely framed. The key question is how do content providers add value for users in an information soaked ecology? You don’t do it by demanding a fee for information (paywalls).

One might ask why do newspapers not wake up and start experimenting more? Instead, they appear tied to their traditional modes of content distribution, and stay print based. It is simple. As Mary Meeker points out, that is where they get the most advertising revenue. It won’t last forever, but for the time being, advertisers still pay more to appear in print media. For how much longer? Until one finds a way to make digital advertising more effective.

This quote from Fred Wilson caught my eye today

… platforms are ascendent as drivers of audience, particularly platforms like Twitter that are optimized for mobile.

Fred concludes with this

But no matter how you slice it, we are in the era of mobile platforms. That is pretty clear to me this morning.

So, if you are building a platform, is it geared for mobile use? It better be.

As Cringely reports, this is why Microsoft is dumbing down Windows 8 - to make it a better mobile OS.

Law Prof. Larry Lessig addresses the graduating class of John Marshall Law School. He notes

There is no one in the criminal justice system who believes that system works well. There is no one in housing law who believes it is what law was meant to be. In contracts, you read about disputes involving tens of dollars, maybe a hundred — the disputes of ordinary people. These disputes are not for the courts anymore. Or if they are, they are for courts that are an embarrassment to the ideals of justice. The law of real people doesn’t work, even if the law of corporations does.

Ouch.

I am all for Larry’s message. Indeed, I bought into this years ago after reading Sol Linowitz’s brilliant critique of the legal profession. But let’s face it. Larry is talking to a bunch of people who just spent a rather large amount of money to be successful in a legal career. That means they need to make a lot of money. End of story for trying to persuade them to fix the legal system. No one makes a lot of money doing that. They should, but they don’t.

Justin E.H. Smith offers a few controversial ideas about the study of non-western philosophy in western universities.  This is not just for professional philosophers. One of his main points is that

It is no secret that the center (of economic activity and hence intellectual production) is shifting once again, this time toward the Pacific. A bit of historical perspective makes it easy to see that this shift will have consequences for our understanding of what philosophy is, and of who gets to define the set of questions with which it is concerned.

And perhaps not just philosophy.

Rebecca Adlington is getting ready to compete in the London Olympics. She wants to focus her energy — all of it — on one goal. So according to Wired Mag, she is turning off her twitter account.

You might say, “so what does that have to do with me?” Hmmm … do you need to focus?

FOLLOW -  Seth Godin goes a bit further. He argues that

In his famous experiment, Stanley Milgram gave his subjects a switch and then encouraged them to give (fake) electric shocks to his confederates if they were slow to follow instructions.

The internet has become a giant version of this, except the shocks are real.

In other words, unless you are careful, the internet pulls you into something other than your own world.

An epiphany occurs when you see something ordinary in a new light. As part of a larger story. Suddenly, the thing and everything it is connected to gains meaning. James Joyce, the apostate Catholic Irish rebel was obsessed with epiphanies and made them the central focus of his stories.

But what about in the real world? What epiphanies can we celebrate in our lives? One may have to do with economics and politics. I grew up with the idea that there was a fundamental conflict of principle between the two great US political parties. Both were telling the truth, but from different perspectives. And so I listened intensely to both trying to discern which truth had greater traction for me. Then came Nixon. It was as if someone pulled the curtain back to reveal what was really going. It was an epiphany for me that the leader of one of the great parties was a conniving weirdo. It didn’t make me feel any better to learn of charges that Johnson may not have been much better when it came to tactics.

Let’s flash forward to the present. We live in a post Ronald Reagan political world. This is a world where one of the great parties (the republicans) embraces a theory of economics that demands reduction of government involvement in the economy.  That is their great “truth”. Well, if it were true, then we should be living in paradise. Why? Because in the US, government has been shrinking for decades. As Paul Krugman points out, in fact it is a hoax. It is a hoax of monumental proportions.

And perhaps a great epiphany awaits us all.

FOLLOW -  And what of young Mr. Cameron, the conservative British PM?`Time reports that some now question his judgment with respect to the friends he keeps. It is interesting that they do not question his judgment with respect to his rigid adherence to the austerity policies that are blocking UK economic recovery.