Best links of the past week (3.9.2015)

A few weeks ago, I started sharing various stories that I read in the past week that stayed with me, for one reason or another, sometimes with a little commentary.  I like to continue this, but I think the exercise may prove better, both for the blog and for me personally, if I be more discerning and limit the number of articles.  The hope is that the process will result in more critical examination my part on why I find certain articles more significant or share-worthy among the numerous articles I read each week.  Anyway, without further digression, the three most interesting or impactful stories I read in the past week...

1. The Libertarian Delusion - Great read from Bill Moyers' site, about the impracticalities of libertarianism.  I agree with so much of this article, and felt that I could have written significant parts of it.  I detest the idea that the market will solve issues, chiefly because I believe we have a host of data from history that shows us that it is not the case.  And ultimately, this is the problem I have with much of political and economic theory - we allow certain theories to control our policies when we have empirical data that disproves the theory.  I'm a big believer of utilizing evidence based practices and policies, and the data, as this article demonstrates, just doesn't support libertarianism.

2. Paternal Fraternity - article from the college basketball world, looking at several players who are also fathers, and how that impacts them in a variety of ways.  This is the kind of "human interest" story I really enjoy - one that should make many of us face preconceptions we have about people, particularly about athletes.  In addition, its always a good reminder to all sports fans to remember that are rooting interests, as strong as they may be, are just for manufactured contests and entertaining games, and our actions as fans should reflect the understanding that the players (particularly unpaid college athletes) should always be treated with respect and dignity, and without expectation, because we never know what is going on in their world.

3. Goals are for losers - short read about how setting goals, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, is counter-productive to actually meeting those goals.  That the better practice is to work on establishing habits - repeatable actions.  Good reminder for me as I work towards several things I wanted to improve upon in 2015.