Tom Brady finds new ways to be the worst

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A combination of professional success, vapid personality, and a caddish past makes Tom Brady pretty damn unlikable to anyone who isn’t a fan of the New England Patriots. But this week, he found a new way to annoy people by filing a trademark application on his alleged nickname, “Tom Terrific”.

Now everybody who cares about sports—as opposed to just Boston sports—knows that the nickname “Tom Terrific” belongs to three-time Cy Young Award winner and Hall of Famer Tom Seaver of the New York Mets. Seaver won 311 games in his twenty-year career, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot with 98.8% of the vote, a record at the time. He was the first player to have his number retired by the Mets and is one of two players in the Hall of Fame as a Met.

It takes a lot for me, a diehard Phillies fan, to side with the Mets. But this nickname-squatting is unacceptable. Brady could not beat New York in the Super Bowl, and he shouldn’t be allowed to steal the moniker of one of the city’s greatest professional athletes.

China’s Bloody Anniversary

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Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square. The anti-communist revolutions we celebrate in the West have their evil twin in the East, where mass demonstrations did not lead to a freer China, but only to decades more of repression.

China made peace with capitalism since then, but their war on liberty continues unabated. We saw that in the arrests of Christian ministers late last year. In a greater enormity this year, we have seen the morally backward socialist government recreate the worst crimes of the twentieth century as they locked up more than a million Uighurs in concentration camps.

There should be a greater outcry against concentration camps! But maybe because the people there are Muslims from an ethnic group that is relatively unknown in the West, or maybe because our governments care more about the business we do with Red China than the human rights of their citizens, we hear little.

  • Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a fairly blistering statement against the Chinese government. It’s a good start.
  • Helen Raleigh writes for National Review about how China has tried to censor everything about the 1989 uprising.
  • She also writes for The Federalist about why the still-anonymous Tank Man was a hero.
  • Meanwhile, Silicon Valley shows where its loyalties lie: as Anthony Ha writes for TechCrunch, Twitter engaged in mass suppression of Chinese accounts in the days leading up to the anniversary.

More blogging

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When I started this site, I intended to do more blogging, but also link to published work. Since then, the published stuff has taken up more and more of my time. This summer, I’d like to try to add some shorter stuff here, like an old-fashioned blog, and to invite more community engagement in the comments. So watch this space for more of the kind of ideas I can’t get anybody to pay me for!