Unfinished Thoughts

I’ve been fascinated with the on-going demolition and remaking of college sports – and college football, in particular – for the better part of 2 decades now. Basically, dating back to a few years after the inception of the BCS. And this post (and comments) on Defector prompted me to finally jot down my (always scattered) thoughts which follow… A lot of the absurdity of the situation is pretty well encapsulated in Cardale Jones’ tweet from 2012: "Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain't come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS." And what wasn’t captured in the tweet itself was probably picked up in the giant pile of hot takes it spawned. But, however inelegantly stated, at its core is a basic truth: These guys are NOT going to Ohio State or Miami or Auburn or Florida State or any number of other FBS schools ranging the academic spectrum from UCLA to Mississippi State. I might poss...

  "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."   - Honore de Balzac What if someone wrote an entire non-fiction book based on that quote? But what if instead of a blistering takedown of a particular business empire and its origins, a mostly humorless & judgmental schoolmarm give you a drab and somewhat unfocused moralizing guilt-trip of a lecture that seemed burdened with more irrelevant examples than those germane to its central thesis? Tragically, the latter description is much more descriptive of "Limitarianism" by Ingrid Robeyns. I'll start with my bias: I was really excited to read this book so perhaps my disappointment is amplified by my high hopes. I'd read a couple of reviews in the usual places a middle-brow person like myself finds them. I should have noticed that the reviews mostly presented the *idea* of limitarianism rather than this actual book. And I will be clear: I thought this book was not g...