29 Sunset Missives

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Teachers unions, pro athletes unions, and vaccine mandates

August 16, 2021


This week, millions of children are headed back to school in person, and so are the adults who teach and otherwise care for them. While large majorities of teachers appear to be pro-vaccination and actually getting vaccinated, too, teachers unions have, predictably, received waves of vitriol from the usual suspects for deigning to flex their collective muscle to urge the utmost caution in returning to school. A weird thing about this conflict is that a very similar dynamic plays out in professional sports leagues.

Prediction: The worst people are about to start invoking 'mental health'

July 30, 2021


Most of the conversation around Simone Biles’s decision to pull out of Olympic gymnastics competitions has been equal parts supportive and deferential to her stated reasons, at least in my circles. It’s not difficult to recognize that competing in these particular events without full confidence is far more dangerous than, say, trying to play basketball at the highest levels with an extreme aversion to shooting the ball.

However, I’ve come across a few people with different takes, which largely boil down to “she could have done something rather than pull out of the team competition completely, right?” or, in the case of the culture warriors making bad-faith arguments about how Biles’s choices reflect poorly on America more broadly, “she’s weak.”

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