Thoughts On Phil

Phil Mickelson and Jim Furyk played in the same group today. Phil had 3 holes where he broke par. Furyk had 7. Furyk only beat Phil by 2 strokes. That's because Phil had zero bogeys and one eagle, while Furyk had one bogey and no eagles. This is not the way things are supposed to be: yes, it makes sense for Phil to have more eagles than Furyk, but you'd never pick Phil to be the one of those two to have the bogey-free round. Except that recently, it's been the other way around (not particularly about Furyk, but about Phil). His final round at Augusta was bogey-free. It wasn't his first spotless round this year: he'll get four or five strokes from par on the holes where he breaks par, but give nothing away. And that results in the same thing as a nine birdie, four bogey round. It's also a lot easier to do when you just don't have the spark, and I think that's what Phil's gotten a lot better at: making sure that in the rounds where he only has a handful of strokes under par in him, he doesn't give anything away, and so he can still put up a really good score, 68 in this case, when he's not making very many putts. I wouldn't be shocked to see him take over the #1 spot before too long.

Also: apparently 27% of surveyed professional golfers think Tiger took performance-enhancing drugs. Really, guys? Really? I seem to remember some golfer saying that he'd love to see someone come out on tour juiced because he'd just get crushed: no one's made a good PED for golf yet. Pure strength isn't an advantage, when it comes with reduced flexibility and a worse temper. He's just that good: get over it. You might not like his sex life, but that doesn't change the fact that he's been kicking your ass for a decade-plus.

Logic. Get some.

It's one thing to be wrong on the facts. But it's just annoying when I get into an argument where I could concede literally every factual claim my opponent makes and still refute their conclusion.

Conflicts of Interests

John Rawls proposes a system of political liberalism as opposed to comprehensive liberalism, supposedly motivated by the "fact of reasonable pluralism" and the ensuing fact that no comprehensive doctrine can ever have the support of all the people and thus be the legitimate basis of governance. Gerry Cohen, on the other hand, alleges that a political liberalism that only concerns itself with the so-called "basic structure" and allows citizens to make inegalitarian choices in their private lives is insufficient (he's not the only one!). Corey Brettschneider responds that, well, okay, but Cohen is trying to advance a comprehensive doctrine, and as we've shown, that doesn't work. How to resolve the dispute?

The Point of Life

This is going to be an actually-brief response to a comment I saw on an article with which I strongly disagreed claiming that Tiger has "learned nothing," specifically about humility. The comment basically disparaged his skill at "attacking a little white ball" as being unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Here's my response to that: I get your point, but at the same time, in my view all those things that are unimportant in the grand scheme of things in this sense but are used for entertainment are the point of life. Everything else, all the economizing and working and struggling and politicking, exists to make the things that enrich people's lives possible. For those of us who appreciate it, watching Tiger Woods attack a little white ball and make it do things no one else can do or could ever do is a tremendously enjoyable experience: that makes it worthwhile for him to do it.

Proxies

I just sat down to try and do a statistical analysis of how certain, um, stats contribute to overall scoring average on the PGA Tour. I did a fair bit of analysis, and then had to go eat (because I was hungry). While I was walking, eating, and walking again, I had the following musings:

Opinions

This is a response, hopefully fairly brief, to a lecture I read recently by G.A. Cohen called "Paradoxes of Conviction." His main thesis is basically this: many people believe certain things only because they were raised to believe them, and furthermore some of those people know that this is so, and yet they continue to believe; this, he argues, is irrational, or might be. The idea is that if you know that you don't have better epistemological grounds for believing p than someone else does for believing q, and that the only reason you believe p and they believe q and not vice-versa is your respective upbringings, then you don't actually believe that there is better reason to believe p than q, and so you are almost contradicting yourself. So what gives?

Why I Hate The Yankees But Love Tiger Woods

And no, this isn't about his affairs. It's about the following paradox: I am a passionate Tiger fan, but I hate the Yankees. What's more, I hate the Yankees in large part because they are so dominant, so dynastic. But isn't Tiger Woods in a certain sense the Yankees of golf? Shouldn't I, therefore, either dislike both or neither? Well, no, I think I have an answer as to why this is not the case.

Inequality

I've been reading, for my Modern Political Thought class, a book titled Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women?. It features a twenty-page essay by Susan Okin, essentially arguing that one particular kind of multiculturalism (the kind that wants to allow certain Groups rights to do things that others don't get to do) runs contrary to feminism. One person's reply and critique involved a considerable amount of the following kind of logic: "veils aren't specifically designed to restrict women's sexuality, they're part of a broader system for regulating and restricting the community's sexuality." That's ridiculous, and it reveals, I think, one of the dangers of a focus on inequality: there are, strictly speaking, two ways to remove it.