I know I’m supposed to like Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. He’s a free spirit. He’s producing feel-good movies, like Akeelah and the Bee and Good Night, and Good Luck. He has an interesting blog that is sometimes deadon:
99pct of blogs are about what someone has to say. 99 pct of traditional media is about making money. Which is exactly what leads to the resentment between bloggers and traditional media and why blogging on traditional media websites will find it tough to be successful.
For another thing, Cuban is rich, and when I chanced to go to synagogue last week they read from Leviticus in a way that hit me between the eyes: ‘Do not … show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.” (For I tend to favor the poor.)
But Cuban is losing me. Last week he complained about NBA officiating on his blog, then went out on the court to yell at the referees. When Fort Worth columnist Randy Galloway wrote that he is a whiner, Cuban made Galloway out to be an alcoholic and lit on whining as a way of promoting himself for several paragraphs:
When I got to Indiana University, I whined that the classes they wanted me to take were’nt enough of a challenge, so I snuck into the MBA program and took graduate level statistics when I was a freshman. Then I took other MBA level classes as a freshman and sophmore, which gave me the confidence to compete at any level.
Yes, the meritocracy is better than the aristocracy. But at least the aristocrats understood they were privileged. They knew that life wasn’t fair economically; they didn’t believe they had beaten everyone else to the spot, fair and square. So they had social prohibitions against acting like jerks.
