Chris​Hubbs​.com

There’s a wonderful long-form profile on the Washington Post right now about Chris Mark, a man who eschewed an opportunity for a upper-class education to (literally) go work in the coal mines, and ended up revolutionizing coal mine safety. (That’s a gift link, so you can read it whether you’re a WaPo subscriber or not.) It’s a compelling story of a man, driven by some complex family dynamics, who found his niche and ended up in a government job where he could follow that interest in a direction that has resulted in countless miners’ lives saved over his career.

The value of experts in government driving regulation gets stated explicitly late in the piece:

Every now and then, however, Chris’s work slipped into public view. His coal mine roof rating was used all over the world and, in his own narrow circles, he was well known. In 2016 — the first year in recorded history that zero underground coal miners were killed by falling roofs — Chris landed in a public spat. He’d seen an article by an economic historian about the history of roof bolts in the Journal of Technology and Culture. The historian wanted to argue that roof bolts had taken 20 years to reduce fatality rates because it had taken 20 years for the coal mining industry to learn to use them. All by itself, the market had solved this worker safety problem! The government’s role, in his telling, was as a kind of gentle helpmate of industry. “It was kind of amazing,” said Chris. “What actually happened was the regulators were finally empowered to regulate. Regulators needed to be able to enforce. He elevated the role of technology. He minimized the role of regulators.”

Government functionaries can be an easy target for criticism, but this profile highlights the key and dedicated role that so many play in today’s society. In my own work I have encountered many Federal Aviation Administration employees who fit a similar profile. They found some particular niche interest related to flying, and they made it their life’s work to make it better and safer. It’s often a thankless job, and on a government pay scale that pales next to what they could likely make in industry.

(As a side note, this is part of what makes Trump’s Project 2025 intentions to politicize the civil service so terrifying: it would eliminate protections on just these dedicated experts to replace them with people who don’t know the topic but who donated to the right political cause. You wanna see the country (literally) crumble? Ditch all the regulatory experts like Chris Mark and replace them with Heritage Foundation interns.)

I really appreciated A.R. Moxon’s weekend post framing up the “Weird” discourse from the past week. (This long-ish excerpt is still really just an excerpt. Worth reading the whole thing.)

Not so very long ago, it wasn’t normal to be trans or gay or even nonconforming to very strict gender roles in any way. It wasn’t normal to be a woman with a powerful job. It wasn’t even normal to be a woman with a paid job of any kind. It wasn’t normal or even legal to be a woman with a bank account. It wasn’t normal to be a woman who could just chart their own way in life, and make their own decisions about their bodies and their lives for themselves. And it wasn’t normal to be Jewish, it wasn’t normal to be Muslim, it wasn’t normal to be Hindu, it wasn’t normal to be an atheist; nor was it normal to be Black, or Asian, or any identity in a category called “nonwhite” that people used without really thinking about it. It wasn’t normal to be chronically sick or disabled, and it certainly wasn’t normal to expect to be treated as a full member of society if your way of being was not normal. And there were many many other ways of being that weren’t normal either. They were different, other—weird.

Some of these ways of being abnormal were permitted to a degree, others were not. They were permitted by The Normal Ones, who had the license to decide what identity was, and to establish the strictures which that identity must remain, outside of which that identity could not stray. And not so very long ago, one of the main requirements for anyone with a “weird” identity who was receiving from license for that identity was that they would agree that The Normal Ones had the right to bestow such a license, because they and only they were truly normal.

It was normal to be white. It was normal to be a Christian. It was normal to be a man with a job, and it was normal to be a woman who was a man’s property. It was normal for children to be viewed as property of the parents, which (see previous point) meant the property of the man. It was normal to be straight and cis. It was normal to be able-bodied and employed. More importantly, though, these were the only normal things to be. To not be those things was to be abnormal, and to be abnormal was to be at the mercy of The Normal Ones.

Abuse—by those who were normal, of those who were not normal—used to be normal, and not ever acknowledging how all the most normal forms of abuse actually were abuse was most normal of all. It was perfectly normal to be racist, misogynist, a religious bigot, as a way of defending and maintaining normalcy, which was a way of defending who did and who did not have the right to make decisions about what identities would be permitted, and to what extent the permission would be allowed. So rape was normal, and bigotry was normal, and exclusion and threats and punishment and murder of those who committed the offense of trespassing the established boundaries of what ways of being human would be permitted by normal people was normal.

I fooled you. All of that is still normal. But increasingly, more and more of us are moving on from all that. We’re done with it.

Imperfectly, to be sure, haltingly, no doubt. Sometimes it feels as if we’ve been scaling a mountain face and only recently passed through some clouds, allowing us a view, previously obscured, of what lay above—and so the distance we’ve come often only affords us a better view of how much further we have to climb. I know some would like to use the daunting climb looming above us to claim that we haven’t climbed at all. But, if we are attentive and look downward long enough, we can see, peeking through the clouds, the vast prospect of rigid and supremacist normalcy we’ve left behind. We can see all the ways of being a human that used to depend upon normalized bigotry for permission to exist but which now give themselves their own permission to exist, without seeking any other. We can see more and more identities that are now considered normal, and more and more of the abuse that once was granted as normal is now recognized, from loftier vantage, for the abnormal perversion it is.

Preach, brother Moxon, preach.

So Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. This morning I have a distant cousin on Facebook last night complaining about how broken the justice system is. And this morning he’s calling for another Civil War. I’m just not sure how to bridge this reality gap.

First off, as Matt Tebbe so brilliantly put it:

It’s not a miscarriage of justice when
a Black man is choked out in the street
Or a Black woman is killed in her bed
Or a Black man is gunned down running while Black
But it is when a white millionaire is convicted of many felonies.
This is how whiteness works.

That cousin surely didn’t make a lot of noise about the broken justice system after George Floyd was killed, or Breanna Taylor was killed, or Trayvon Martin was killed… I wonder why now?

And secondly, is that cousin really ready to take up his guns and kill people like me because we disagree politically? And because I think maybe the justice system did its job here?

Now I know it’s far easier to grumble on Facebook than it is to do actual work, and I’m willing to bet at this point I’ve been to more political protests in the last 5 years than he has. But I do wonder how we ever bridge the gap here. Are things so irreparably broken that chaos is inevitable? I fear so, but I hope not.

Sam Thielman goes hard in his most recent piece at Forever Wars titled “What Could Be More Radicalizing Than An NYPD-Columbia Education?”

Eric Adams, the ex-NYPD mayor of New York City —who, in keeping with the grand traditions of his old job, probably doesn’t even live in New York—cares deeply about our children. We know this because he told us so. “These are our children,” he told Katty Kay on MSNBC, “and we can’t allow them to be radicalized like children are being radicalized across the globe.”

It is important to Eric Adams that children learn the right lesson at the right time. And so, on the campus of Columbia University, where the Pulitzer Prizes will be awarded today, he deployed platoons of his former colleagues to administer the kind of education New York City’s ruling class prefers.

Worth reading the whole thing. (As is true any time Sam is writing.)

It is amazing to me the level of over-reaction from School Administration and the NYPD, who clearly wanted an excuse to display their power. Fascim, folks. It’s real. It’s not coming; it’s here already.

A. R. Moxon has a brilliant and brutal essay out today entitled “War or Nothing”, in which he describes a theme beginning in 2001 with the US’s response to the 9/11 attacks and continues all the way through 2020’s George Floyd protests and this year’s pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. From it he describes “seven laws of living in a war-oriented society”:

• Killing is not only an appropriate answer to killing, it is the only appropriate answer.
• The worst betrayal possible is any opposition to killing.
• The only appropriate answer to killing is not only killing—it must be disproportionate killing.
• Any hypothetical future threat of potential attack justifies the same disproportionate violent response as an actual attack.
• Any killing we do, not matter how indefensible it is, can only ever be self-defense.
• Wanting to wage war makes you correct in a way that overcomes evidence or results or even coherence.
• Killing is the only thing that will keep us safe from killing. Therefore, anyone who opposes killing represents a threat justifying further killing.

He’s not wrong. A taste:

And millions of us, who have been watching since 2001 or even before, can see how framing the apparatus of killing as indistinguishable from safety helps the apparatus of killing, but not how it helps make us safe. We can see how framing a country as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the country. We can see how framing all a county’s citizens as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the people. And we can see clearly how framing killing as the only way to bring safety, and any act other than killing as nothing favors those who want to see a world of death, but not how it helps honor the dead or keeps any of the living safe.

Millions of us think the bigger problem might be the killing. It seems to us war as the only option represents the greatest possible failure of human imagination there can be, and our wealth and resources and ingenuity seem to present many other options. Perhaps if we put our heads together, we might think of something else to do, that isn’t nothing but isn’t war, either. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant about what that something might be, we think that seeking that something is better than not seeking it. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant, many of us are not, and even those of us who are ignorant fools can see the way the suggestions and solutions presented by those who are not ignorant fools are ignored while those of us who are the most ignorant and the most foolish receive the most attention from our institutions of influence and power, to frame this whole act of imagination as ignorant and foolish.

And even those of us who are ignorant fools can see how this helps promote the ideal of war or nothing, but we don’t see how it helps us find something that is not killing but isn’t nothing, either.

God grant us leaders brave enough to consider responses to killing that aren’t more killing, but aren’t nothing, either.