
Colin Kaepernick to Join Medium Board of Directors - apress
https://blog.medium.com/colin-kaepernick-to-join-medium-board-of-directors-7e5e8a28d7ee
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tonystubblebine
I was excited in the WashPo coverage that they said Colin would be pushing
more coverage of prison reform.

It took me awhile, including attending a few events run by public defenders,
to come around to the far end of the spectrum of reform which is abolition[1].
Abolitionists would say that reformers are wasting their time and that prisons
work as designed.

Prison abolition, like defunding the police, is a topic that's reasonable if
you dig into it but sounds radical and dangerous on the surface. So it's
something the main stream media won't cover well or will cover with a lot of
both-sidesism. I never read what the WashPo or NYT say on this topic because I
know it'll be frustratingly bad.

So I see this as a great moment for Medium, to be a place where this topic can
be covered fully and in depth. It's a win for their subscription model, which
is generating the revenue that allows for high quality coverage. It's just
great. I'm so excited.

[1] If abolition sounds dangerous or radical, the key point that got me over
the hump was that it is a long term goal, say a hundred years, that is meant
to be executed category by category. Once you see the goal that way, it's easy
to first of all find categories that can simply be eliminated by
decriminalization. And then as you keep going you find ways to either do
restorative justice where the focus is on making amends or ways to solve the
root issue prompting crime. It's not until the end where you would face the
possibly impossible issues of what to do with a Jeffrey Dahmer for instance.

~~~
mc32
So what do you do with people who do things out of malice, say, mobsters,
human traffickers? Some people do things because there’s an opening.

How do you do restorative justice with them?

~~~
tonystubblebine
What do I do? Nothing. Did you see that part of my post? I really tried to
emphasize that you go piece by piece and that harder pieces get addressed
later. I'll be dead before anyone tries to figure out what to do with
mobsters. But if you could find a way, almost definitely that way would be
preferable to incarceration. That is why it's called abolition. The goal is to
find ways to abolish every single category of incarceration.

~~~
tuesdayrain
>you go piece by piece and that harder pieces get addressed later

Sounds like diving head-first into something with significant short and long
term consequences while refusing to plan for the actual end-game. Frankly the
reason people haven't addressed the "harder pieces" of abolition yet is
because there is no good alternative to prison. Some people are fundamentally
dangerous to society and no amount of "please be nice" therapy or education
will change them.

~~~
tonystubblebine
What is the risk here? Break it down for yourself. I think either you are
imagining a different process than I'm imagining or you'll find there are no
short or long term consequences other than maybe some research money that gets
spent verifying a dead end.

If 90 years from now a set of experiments to find alternatives to
incarceration for mobsters failed, that's not going to make people regret the
first step of abolition which is probably decriminalizing drug possession. Or
the second step, which is also well supported, which is eliminating cash bail.

~~~
nickff
It seems like you're setting a target that you have no actual plan to achieve.
Perhaps de-scoping the project would have the twin benefits of appearing more
reasonable to your audience, and allowing for the possibility of success.

~~~
tonystubblebine
The abolition movement does answer this which is that the reform movement has
already been tested and failed.

For illustration, can we say the easiest and most straight forward solutions
eliminate 50% of incarceration? We've had incarceration rates in the US that
were lower than that.

When reformers say reform, they have to fight tooth and nail for 1% reduction.
Even in New York State some simple bail reform got rolled back almost
immediately after heavy PR by the police departments here.

How do you go from 1% to saying, no, no, we actually meant 50x more reform
than that? It just doesn't work.

So, if abolition says 100% and it laters turns out that the theoretical
healthy limit for a society is only 80%, well, nobody on the abolition side is
going to be all that worked up about it.

~~~
nickff
If you were negotiating pricing with a single party, anchoring would work, but
I think that's not what's going on here.

~~~
watwut
But he has a point that attempts at small reforms failed for years.

And it also seems to me that lately radicals can get their way somewhat, but
"reasonable center" is not achieving anything or ends up being enabler for
more powerful sociopath.

It would be better if things were the opposite way, but they are not. It is
imo the core reason for radicalisation of all involved sides lately.

------
jl2718
Just imagine if you are a person that has a PhD in criminal justice, spent an
entire career in the CJ system as e.g. a parole judge or internal affairs
prosecutor, wrote textbooks about CJ reform, maybe even experienced
incarceration and rehabilitation first-hand. Imagine how you would feel about
this appointment. Would this look like a genuine commitment to advancing the
kind of intelligent discourse that solves a problem? Or would it look like a
desperate celebrity appointment for marketing and fundraising? Surely he’s
brave and has learned a lot. His contribution was symbolically transformative.
It’s hard to imagine that he is the expert on the topic. It seems to me that
what is going on here is picking sides. BLM is like a social startup on a
massive growth trajectory. Invest now for massive gains in social proof.
There’s also a fear element, like, get your business on the internet or it’s
the internet will kill your business. Replace ‘internet’ with ‘social justice
movement’. This is the point in the timeline where every company on earth is
desperate to make a website.

~~~
tonystubblebine
Pretty sure that the majority response from these PhDs is that they will be
the authors in these publications. This isn't Colin Kaepernick's daily blog
we're talking about. Colin has money/power and this is what he's using it to
support. So, if I were a PhD or other expert, I'd be focused on the good news
that there is a new source of support for getting my expertise out there.

~~~
jl2718
Oh, you're saying that this is more like Colin Kaepernick's decision to
partner with Medium moreso than Medium's conveniently-timed decision to
support a movement through celebrity endorsement. Yes, that makes sense, and
it seems that Kaepernick likely has the upper hand in this transaction. His
brand is much stronger than Medium, better growth potential, impossible to
replicate. I hope he got at least 20% of the company in this deal.

