A reply to Jonathan Kay’s “How About We Just Play Baseball?”

Your premise about the Giants players just wearing the regular cap and not writing on the rainbow cap is right.  Complaining about the need for uniformity for the sake of togetherness and team is not.  Players get to wear different colored cleats and use various colored and patterned gloves, all as sanctioned by the rulebook/contract you cited and linked in the article.  The players are not all uniform, and it is allowed.  Pant length, undershirts, wristbands, etc. are individual - and often based on personal sponsor contracts - as long as they fit the set of rules.  One Blue Jay could wear blue cleats with a white corporate logo while his teammate wears white with no blue.  Hat, jersey, pants and stirrups are the same color and makeup, but not the shoes, glove and other possible accouterments.  I actually prefer the genuine 'everyone in the same uniform, top to bottom', but it doesn't happen in today's sporting culture.  Funny how you kind of mirror your complaint - it is a good one - about the extension of the rainbow mafia with your own argument about uniform uniformity.  But, a generally good article.  Stick with the first, main and important argument though.

—Dave

A reply to Maarten Boudry’s “How Europe Became the World Champion of Heat Deaths”

I read Quillette because it offered something increasingly rare: a willingness to challenge prevailing orthodoxies without simply replacing them with new ones.

Maarten Boudry’s essay on heat mortality in Europe raises a number of worthwhile points. Air conditioning has undoubtedly saved lives. Adaptation deserves more attention in climate discussions. Some regulations may unintentionally discourage sensible responses to extreme heat.

What concerns me is not the argument’s starting point but its destination.

The essay begins with a specific policy question: why does Europe experience unusually high heat mortality? It then arrives at a much broader conclusion—that Europe suffers from a deep ideological hostility to energy, abundance, technology, and progress itself.

This pattern has become increasingly familiar in heterodox media. A real problem is identified. A genuine ideological contributor is noted. The contributor is then elevated into the principal explanation for a much larger social phenomenon. By the end, what began as a discussion of heat deaths has become a story about “green gospel,” “secular penance,” “technophobia,” and hostility to progress.

The difficulty is not that these concepts are necessarily wrong. It is that they are so expansive that they risk explaining too much. Europe’s low rate of air-conditioning adoption may reflect environmental attitudes, but it may also reflect historically mild climates, older building stock, higher electricity prices, urban design, housing patterns, and a host of other factors. The existence of multiple causes does not preclude ideological influence. It does suggest caution before attributing a complex outcome to a single worldview.

What originally distinguished Quillette was a commitment to examining evidence even when it challenged fashionable assumptions. Increasingly, some essays seem less interested in following evidence wherever it leads than in locating the progressive villain behind the story.

That is a subtle shift, but an important one. The opposite of orthodoxy is not counter-orthodoxy. It is curiosity.

—A. Davey Coogan