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Afternoon Links: Ivanka to the Olympics, Facebook in the Courtroom, and the Rot of the Campus Right

By Jim Swift

Day Zero approaches in Cape Town. This Guardian feature about the water crisis in South Africa is fascinating.

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A major topic of conversation for Capetonians is how many litres they use and how long they can go without washing their hair or flushing. “I’ve never talked about toilets so much,” says Fiona Kinsey, a young office worker. “Last year, we were discussing whether it was OK to wee in a public toilet and not flush. Now we are way beyond that.”

Perhaps, if we’re not careful, this could happen in Arizona or California.

Vice President Pence, Ivanka to lead U.S. Olympic Delegations. Bloomberg is reporting that VP Pence will lead the U.S. delegation for the opening ceremonies, and Ivanka Trump will lead it for the closing ceremonies.

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Facebook in the courtroom. I’ve never been a big fan of cameras in the courtroom. Not to benefit the wonderful courtroom artists or anything, but I just don’t like the idea of playing to the camera, like with Judge Judy, or a guy trying to beat up a man who abused his daughter. Also, could televised trials put the rights of defendants in jeopardy? What about intimidating jurors and witnesses? It just doesn’t belong on television. Transcripts and audio recordings do just fine.

Florida, of course, is leading the way in the opposite direction, as the Examiner‘s Melissa Quinn reports:

“In the 1970s, Florida became the first state to allow broadcasts of its court cases at a time when every other court in the nation refused it,” Jorge Labarga, the chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, said last month. “This court’s experiment with transparency showed everyone a better way to balance First Amendment rights against the rights of people involved in a trial of appeal. Social media will be our next step in moving this highly successful model of openness into the 21st Century.” The Florida Supreme Court has allowed TV cameras in the courtroom since 1975, and it began broadcasting its own proceedings in 1997. Several federal appeals courts have started livestreaming audio or video of oral arguments.

Ugh. If it’s about transparency (it’s not!), why limit it to oral arguments? Why not videotape the deliberation, too? Transparency is a slippery slope.

A conversation with Quincy Jones: Do dedicate some time to this Q&A with Quincy Jones at Vulture. This bit about We Are The World is a bit spicy:

There’s a small anecdote in your memoir about how the rock musicians who’d been asked to sing on “We Are the World” were griping about the song. Is there more to that story? It wasn’t the rockers. It was Cyndi Lauper. She had a manager come over to me and say, “The rockers don’t like the song.” I know how that s**t works. We went to see Springsteen, Hall & Oates, Billy Joel, and all those cats and they said, “We love the song.” So I said [to Lauper], “Okay, you can just get your s**t over with and leave.” And she was f***ng up every take because her necklace or bracelet was rattling in the microphone. It was just her that had a problem.

Time to take intellectual rot on the on-campus right seriously. At The Federalist, Dave Marcus has a worthwhile read on the rise of the campus racists and malcontents and what we can do about it:

We need fewer campus appearances from Milo Yiannopoulos and more from David French. We need to hear fewer grievances about the destruction of Western culture and more description of how that culture, with its dedication to liberty, offers the best path forward to a more equal society.

And by fewer, let’s agree on zero as an appropriate number. Marcus hits on the biggest problem with campus conservatism, which is to say intellectual rot via promoting outrage rather than discourse:

Jumping on every example of ridiculous policies about who can say, wear, or eat what is great for clicks, but is it making a dent in the way colleges actually treat race? It’s not clear that it is. This is an issue where reasonable people of all political stripes should be able to sit together and find solutions.

Unless the adults in the conservative movement who fund these campus operations pay attention, the TV trope of “quit hitting yourself” is all young people will know of campus conservatives. Not only is that a shame, it’s not a great way to build for the party’s future, unless your party’s future is putting uninformed kids on Fox News.

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