Tag Archives: Washington Post

Is China’s Xinjiang Genocide?

Trying out a new format today! Folks may have noticed that traffic has been declining a bit on the channel. I’d been wondering about this for a while, but over the holiday season I did a deeper dive, and decided to figure out why. The simple fact seem to be that YouTube’s requirements have changed. It’s true that they are less likely to point to controversial topics from small channels, but my videos are no longer algorithm friendly in a more important way as well: They’re just too short.

People may prefer short videos, I certainly do. But YouTube wants people to watch for longer. Long established YouTuber Veritasium maintains that you need to have an average watchtime of around 8 minutes for YouTube to get excited about putting your video in front of more people. Can’t get to an 8 minute watch time if most of your videos are under 8 minutes long, as mine are. So, with today’s video, I’m switching things up a bit. I’m trying to mix the produced videos with more improv-ed riffs. Let me know how you think it’s going!

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Abolish Police? Defund? Dismantle? Minneapolis, Camden and the Future

Having finished today’s video I’m almost wondering if it’s too conservative. My sense of what police abolition means is what happened in Camden, New Jersey. Everybody on the old force was fired, the union was broken ( it later reformed), and the new, better police force has a fraction as many abuse claims AND crime has fallen precipitously. But I see on the twitter that people are envisioning all kinds of more radical futures. New corps of non-police officials could be charged with looking after the mentally ill. The money spent on policing could be devoted to any number of different aims, from the plausible to the ridiculous…

People are thinking in much bigger terms than just better, less present policing. It’s weird to find myself in the cautious mainstream on criminal justice… and I love it! It’s a sign of just how far the conversation has moved since my first videos on the drug war back in 2011. Back then many of my friends thought I was nuts. Now I’m being outpaced by people who could plausibly have political power in a few cities across this country. It’s a sign of how quickly things have changed for the better. These are, perhaps surprisingly, very optimistic times here in the United States of America.

If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click where to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.

Video Transcript after the jump…

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