He launched the podcast, which he co-hosts with former NYPD Lt. Eric Dym, after he says he was forced to resign from the department in 2021 for refusing to take the COVID vaccine, citing a religious exemption that the NYPD denied.

Dym, who retired in the face of a number of complaints of improper use of force by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, joined the show as co-host toward the end of that year.

He has faulted the NYPD leadership for not standing up for his policing, which he said conformed to the training he received and used the minimum force necessary against often violent suspects.

You have to be a special kind of piece of shit to be too much of a piece of shit for the NYPD. I don’t generally subscribe to the ACAB framework, I think policing in this country has improved substantially and hating on cops indiscriminately is counterproductive. But the NYPD is an outlier. If you’re too bad for the NYPD, you are very bad.

Graham crackers with whipped cream on top. This one was very much the bottom of the barrel. 🥲

Ghirardelli brownie mix from Costco, filled up to about 1/3 of a mug mixed with milk and microwaved for 45 seconds to make a little brownie. Serve with ice cream on top, or with a glass of milk. I actually still do this one, it is delicious and costs basically $0 per serving.

Rice + milk + sugar and then mixed up in a bowl into a kind of puree. This goes great as a dessert after rice + frozen vegetables sauteed up from those massive Costco bags lol. If you’re feeling bougie you can shred some cheese on top.

You clearly aren’t intending this to be about this (OP’s) post, and yet…

I realized, in the course of talking with you, that while me and OP have come to the same conclusion about what’s going on in Lemmy, the specific sets of behavior we are calling out are very different. But we’re describing the same underlying problem, we just have different perspectives on what we observed that led us to that conclusion.

I basically agree with OP’s characterization of a type of argument these accounts like to make that to me doesn’t make sense, but I just sort of suspect that there’s a big contingent of genuine users that also like to muster that exact same argument pattern also, or at least a lot of the elements of it. But again it’s probably pretty fruitless to start wildly speculating about which specific users are or are not “genuine,” unless they do some kind of really obvious tell that they are not what they are claiming to be. It is absolutely impossible to know.

I actually like your idea, and I think that it could work if there was some kind of set structure to the posts, maybe using a template to make it easy for an LLM to parse, and to prevent comments from asking more follow-up questions than allowed. My partner is involved with competitive debate, and I think a highly-structured variant could work in an asynchronous format like forums posts, especially if there’s a bot to auto-remove posts that aren’t formatted correctly (that part could just be a script with regex or something).

Hm… this is an interesting idea. I was going to have it intuit the “main pillars” so to speak of each side’s argument, and then make sense of how well the other side was coping with each of the pillars. Not in the sense of assessing right versus wrong or reading sources or anything, that’s clearly hopeless. But just the basics: Are you addressing the argument directly, or are you just kind of stepping past it when you respond or pretending that it didn’t exist, or are you mischaracterizing it as something totally different and then beating up the strawman? That might seem like kind of a simplistic bar to clear but I think there is so much on Lemmy that would fail that type of test that it would be really productive to have an objective referee. For everyone. It’s surprisingly easy to fall into “my stuff is right, fuck all this other stuff, that is nonsense” type of thinking, it doesn’t even have to be anything wrong with you if the bot is dinging you for not addressing something.

Formalizing the thing and the format you need to provide could work too, it’s just an extra bar for people to clear and I feel like the LLM could probably do a half-decent job without it. I might try to knock up a quick version of it based on my idea but I’d be happy for any critique or other ways it could work.

Okay. You basically ignored most of my message, including some specific questions which I asked for specific reasons to try to get to the bottom of this. You just repeated your side again. So never mind.

You say you’re not, but then what is the remedy you’re putting forth?

This on the other hand is a pretty good question. So, one remedy I’d like to try is creating a moderated community specifically for political discussion, with a bot that can “oversee” the community and can identify fallacies or bad-faith engagement. LLMs aren’t really capable of following the thread of a conversation or picking the “winner”, but a lot of the stuff that pisses me off on Lemmy is pretty simple stuff to detect that I think they could do: Claiming that someone said something when they actually said something else, blatantly ignoring a direct question and instead going off and just talking about some different thing, repeating yourself forever without substantively responding to anything the other person says. That kind of thing. I think if there were a bot that could moderate discussions according to that kind of guideline and call people out in an unbiased way when they were engaging poorly, it would be hugely helpful. Because everyone does it, to some extent. It’s easy to get emotional or get heated up about the point you wanted to make, it’s easy to misinterpret something accidentally, and obviously everyone comes from a standpoint that their stuff is right (obviously right) or else they wouldn’t be saying it. I think a more neutral arbiter could help to point those things out without it being a big acrimonious mess whenever people disagree. Accusing another person in the conversation of bad faith rarely goes anywhere good. I think in general (if it somewhat worked) it could be a really cool thing.

And, getting back to your question, I actually think something like that would do a lot to address the type of engagement that I tend to talk about when I talk about fake accounts. It sidesteps the (basically impossible and highly polarizing / inflammatory) task of categorizing accounts into “fake” or not. If you have a political viewpoint that I or OP happen to think may be coming from a “fake” POV, but you’re just sitting there talking about it and engaging with people who disagree, it’s fine. That’s healthy. The problem comes in (to me) when people come in big gangs to all yell the same stuff, don’t really engage with people who disagree but just mischaracterize the opposition and repeat their points of view forever, basically just engage in bad faith. Whether those people are “fake” or not is still relevant, to me, but I don’t think just excising them out from your Lemmy experience is necessarily the way, and I definitely don’t think trying to publicly call them out once they’re “identified” by whatever specific criteria is the way. Because it is impossible to tell specifically for any given person.

Probably there are going to be 0 people who think that is a good idea. That is fine. I feel like the general street cred that AI in general has right now will lead people to hate the idea. That is fine. If I get motivation, I think I will just set the idea up and turn it loose, and if anyone’s open to play with it then see how it works out. That is my remedy.

My take on a lot of this is that these sound like the strawmen positions that I’ve had levied against me before.

You’ve had people accuse you of having no idea what normal American salaries are or how Americans write their numbers, while claiming to be a genuine American who was super-concerned about the election, and saying that was suspicious? What strawman position similar to that have you had levied against you?

We need to be discussing any and every viable path to fixing the party, not calling people who say the current incarnation of the party can’t win “doomers” or trolls, when many of our point is that we can win, if we fix the party.

Most of the people OP was talking about are not trying to fix the Democrats, and they’re often pretty explicit about saying that Democrats are as bad or worse than the Republicans and that they want to not vote or vote for third party candidates as a result. Obviously, advocating for a third party in itself isn’t suspicious or anything, it’s fine, but the particular type of guaranteed-to-be-counterproductive way that they’re doing it is what OP is calling out, I think.

I sort of get what you’re saying, that maybe someone has accused you of being a fake account because you criticize Democrats, and that’s how you read OP’s message. I don’t think that is what OP’s talking about, it’s certainly not what I am talking about.

Well, since you’re asking me to surmise ‘why’ you might do that, my dime-store-psychology take would be that you’ve probably been influenced by the large amount of propaganda takes both pre- and post-election, that keep insisting that the pro-Palestine movement online was being driven artificially in order to divide the Democratic Party (as opposed to actually being a signal that Israel was in fact no longer considered ‘good’ among Dem voters).

I… what?

This has nothing to do with my question. I was pointing out that some of these fake accounts put on pro-Palestinian affects, and that I still think they are suspicious even though I am also pro-Palestinian. It doesn’t even need to be anything to do with the Democrats in this scenario. I feel like you read what I talked about but now you’re talking about some totally different scenario.

I am aware that there’s a whole establishment-Democrat theory that the pro-Palestinian movement itself was “fake” or not really valid. That’s 100% different from what I am talking about, and I don’t think that theory ever really got traction with anyone outside of DC or the establishment media. Actually I would specifically contrast something like the “uncommitted” movement as an excellent example of something that is clearly real, because it clearly shows concern for the Palestinian people and a desire to fight for a better solution, whereas the exact thing me and OP have been talking about and what makes it suspicious is people who seem like they’re totally unconcerned with making things any better, and just want to explicitly tell people never to vote for Democrats, and that’s the end of it and as far as it goes. Which, voting’s not enough sure, but refusing to do it at all seems totally counterproductive to anything good happening with immigration or Palestine. Totally different from what you’re talking about as your own behavior and advocacy.

Did that all not come through from what either of us said so far? You thought we were just saying that anyone who criticizes Democrats must be fake?

I edited my comment to explain a little more. I’m honestly lost even trying to talk to you. Last message.

Okay, I’ll work on my solution for better conversation on the internet. I think I’ve spent enough time aiming to help you with reading comprehension for today.

I said, “The Democrats can be ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform” and you spent like a short story’s worth of words screaming at me that the Democrats are ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform, and then when I tried for like the 10th time to express to you that you can calm down about expressing that like a street preacher shouting on a corner an inch from my face, you apparently heard “I agree with you about 100% of what you say and have no disagreement with anything” even though you had previously picked up and explicitly disagreed with the part where I said that propaganda and media also had something to do with it.

You seem like you are doing literal backflips to avoid the conversation of whether that propaganda is happening, in favor of just shrieking at me that the Democrats carry some blame for losing the election, no matter how many times I attempt to express that I, also, think that.

I have literally no idea why you are that way. I hope you come out of it someday. Let me know if you do, and we can talk about the propaganda thing.

You have a lot of theories about why the dems lost, but none of them seem to be touching the point I was making.

Wait. Are you telling me that I have a different opinion than you about why the Dems lost? And you found that whole concept confusing, to the point that you had to reboot and repeatedly just explain your entire thing, from start to finish, including getting more and more strident about explaining to me the things I did agree with even when I told you I agreed with them, and interpreting me disagreeing with you in any respect into wild mischaracterizations of what I was saying, repeatedly and even after I explicitly explained that I believed the opposite of those mischaracterizations?

Well, I’m terribly sorry. In the future I’ll strive to be better about “touching the point you are making” when I say things, so you won’t have to be disturbed by the concept of reading something you don’t already agree with. I can understand how that could be discombobulating and might make you start hitting the bold and all caps to just say over and over again what you think to the person you’re talking to. That sounds super productive, and like a gateway to an enjoyable and enlightening internet experience.

I think you and I disagree on what the most important takeaways from this election are

It is absolutely sending me that you just figured this out. Like that was the big mystery that you finally cracked, in this whole conversation, that finally made it make sense to you.

but I’m fine with letting it lie.

I think that would be best. I wish you the best in all your future endeavors.

I don’t consider the core issues of that failure to be ‘pet issues’

They’re definitely not. They are foundational to the problems in America today. The KPD’s obsession with the SPD specifically and settling the scores of the past was a pet issue.

Addressing the economic and democratic crisis is the only way they could possibly win, and the only way to (maybe) fix some of the failures people are feeling.

Agreed.

A blip on a shear cliff, and pales in comparison to the immense growth of wealth in the form of capital. Musk didn’t buy twitter with a pile of cash from years of profit.

Agreed.

I do not think voters should take any blame for an electoral system that has completely failed them

I’m not really trying to say “blame.” Like I said, most of the failure I think is a failure of media and education that failed the voters. You were the one that invented the idea that we had to “blame.” You also seem to be sticking implicitly, without really addressing it outright, to the idea that it can either be the voters’ “fault” or else the party’s “fault” but not both, and because I said that who won the election is partly a result of who it was that people voted for, you are still lecturing me sort of an infinite length about how it is the party’s “fault” that they got not enough votes, as if that’s not something I agree with already.

I have no idea why you keep repeating this or explaining it to me over and over again in different ways. For variety, would you like to try predicting what my response will be, to this message where you’re explaining it to me again?

Whether or not there are propaganda accounts actively trying to disperse and confused resistance is absolutely pertinent to what we do from here.

It’s definitely true that 95% of the Democrats haven’t really been doing shit now that the horrors have started, and that talking about the election and how Trump shouldn’t have won is kind of a lost cause now. The propaganda accounts I am more concerned with at this point are the ones going into /r/50501 and doxxing and confusing people, trying to drown out useful organization, generally trying to defeat anything that might oppose the fascists. I haven’t seen those ones on Lemmy too much although I’ve seen a few. And misleading people about the bigger picture “in politics” as opposed to out of politics is still certainly a problem. They’re both problems.

the Great Depression + the Gilded Age + the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand + the Civil War + segregation + Asian-American internment camps, but instead of happening over the course of a hundred years, we’re packing it all in to Thursday.

You forgot that on top of all that, the people on top have in their possession an integrated surveillance state superweapon the likes of which has never really been seen before.

How effective they’ll be able to make it, in service of destroying anyone who opposes them politically, remains to be seen, but people who’ve managed to build pale imitations of it have in the past been able to accomplish terrifying things, and they got this version all for free and all complete, someone else having built it for them.

I definitely wasn’t saying it will be a straightforward struggle or a fun time.

Biden presiding over the best-functioning economy in 20 years does nothing to improve the share of profit that goes to labor. Literally everything people feel desperate about only gets worse when the economy is doing well, because it accelerates a wealth disparity that makes it even less affordable to buy a house or groceries, let alone have time or money to contribute to a political project to make things better.

Biden improved the share of profit that goes to labor. He also raised corporate taxes by a huge amount to fund all this stuff he was doing. Houses and groceries both got more expensive, because of Covid, but also, wages went up by this pretty large amount (particularly for the working class you are concerned about here) so that they both got more affordable for the average person overall. They got way more affordable for the average poor person.

I don’t know whether you know that or not. Almost no one does. That’s why I say that our systems of political education are extremely bad. Would it be better if he was Bernie Sanders? Abso fucking lutely. But he actually went to bat for the working class in a way that almost no one in America has for a long, long time.

Outside of that one detail point, which is somewhat pertinent to my whole point that I’m making here, I completely agree with you about the despair people feel about the system, Biden being part of that whole broken system regardless of the good that he did, and that being a key reason why people aren’t excited to vote for anyone, and pretty much 100% of the rest of it. I have no idea at all why you keep lecturing me on this and using bold and italics, as if somehow I’m not grasping the point.

We could be talking about issues of political propaganda, having a factual discussion about whether my assertion about Biden reducing income inequality for the first time in decades in America is even true, that kind of thing. But you seem like you’re absolutely committed to pretending I’m not grasping the point and just raising the volume of your messages until the speakers are rattling, pretending that I am not. Why are you doing that?

People were getting born into slavery, live their whole lives working in the fields not knowing how to read, and there was a massive political and paramilitary fight over whether that was going to continue and how and where, which presaged the explicit military fight the whole country had about it.

Then we had the civil war.

Then we had the labor movement, people getting born basically into slavery again, and having paramilitary battles to fight for their right to simply live and exist and have some kind of voice in how their daily life was organized, and have some life outside of their slavery existence, instead of living on corporate fiefdoms obeying the owner of their company like a king.

Then we had segregation, poll taxes and voter literacy tests, police brutality, water cannons and tear gas and police dogs and lynching. When people talked about making lynching illegal it was a huge debate. Without lynching, what would we even do? To keep order?

Somehow, from that, we made it to today. People today can expect that they can vote, they can have newspapers or web sites that say whatever they want, they can be free of police public or private just coming around and fucking up their shit because they irritated someone powerful. (That last one is debatable in the modern day, but for 99.9% of people I would say that most of what I just said is still true.) But none of that happened because “constitution” or because “America.”

It happened because people fought and died to make it happen. Maybe it’s useful that there was a piece of paper somewhere that was giving them something to hope for when they wanted to give up, give an end goal in mind and remind them why it was important. They had something to talk about to other people about why they were doing it. But “the country” didn’t do shit to help them in that fight. They just had to go and do it.

Russia defeated the Nazis, America came in to take the credit as they were also funding the Nazis, similar to what is happening in Ukraine today.

I feel like at this point you’re just inviting someone to say something so you can pitch a fit about “how DARE you” and write more screeds to jam up the conversation that’s going on, and accuse the other people of being victims of propaganda.

Fuck that, man. Stay and fight.

Have a passport (definitely apply for one today if you do not), have a plan, if shit really goes sideways then it’s every person for themselves and their family. But as hard as it might seem if you’ve grown up in a time of stability, we’ve been through way worse than this bullshit in this country, and we’ve usually come out of it stronger and wiser.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

go for it

Will do

Insisting that ‘it should have been enough that she wasn’t trump’

Yes. In an “objective” sense if we separate away the realities of what it takes to sell people and win elections, it should have been enough that she didn’t want to kill immigrants, destroy the government, and seize power forever, and the other guy did. And you seem to agree with me on this, up above, so presumably you’re using the definition of “should have been” that I use in the following paragraph.

Clearly, in a “reality” sense instead of the objective sense, it wasn’t enough to actually win, in this election. You are saying the American people are having an understandable reaction to both three decades (at least) of Democratic fuckery, and to bland corporate-friendly “status quo” messaging from a deeply flawed DNC campaign apparatus. Yes, I agree. As I keep saying. That’s pretty sensible.

(Edit: I adjusted some things in the preceding paragraph)

I would also add to that that they suffered from an incredible amount of misleading propaganda that led them to believe absurd fantasies about the candidates. That’s not paternalistic, that’s reality. I don’t think it is fair to ask them to look at corporate news, paid shills and total random idiots on social media, Russian-funded podcasters, and so on, and form an informed picture of reality. That’s not saying they are dumb, it is saying that our systems of news and political information in this country are so shockingly bad that it would literally be better if people were throwing darts at a board to pick the president.

insisting that the base doesn’t have legitimate concerns that depressed their motivation to vote

Claiming that, instead of having legitimate grievances with democratic governance

Anything to avoid having to consider the possibility that the moderate approach to governance is what created the populist radicalization we’re now having to deal with.

Okay, I’m just going to stop my reply here.

Go back and read my message. It says 100% the opposite of that. You’re spending time that you could have spent on your reply, telling me what I think on my side, and what you are telling me is 100% backwards. And then, in passing, you’re lecturing me about how some things I already believe are true. I mean there’s a little side issue of whether propaganda and voter miseducation was a factor in this election (and for some reason you are claiming that it was not), but you’re barely even dealing with that. You’re mostly just telling me what I think and arguing with me when I tell you I think different.

Again, I think this is actually a pretty important issue. I actually think I’ve said pretty much everything I wanted to say on the original discussion, and spending extensive time just repeating “No, I didn’t say that, I actually said the opposite of that” seems like a screaming waste of time. We’ve gone back and forth about it for a couple of messages now and I’m not real into continuing for a bunch more.

I think this is a such a big problem that it deserves a specific real solution, way beyond just you and me talking about this specific issue. I think actually I’ll try to write something up about it (as I threatened to do below when talking about the issue of propaganda accounts), or maybe work on a more sustainable solution of some sort.

“I’m not planning to kill you and the other guy is and I can win” should be a winning electoral platform whatever else is in it.

“Should be”, maybe, but it wasn’t.

Correct. Which indicates to me that something other than the content of the platforms was the issue.

Like I say, I mostly agree with you about the shittiness of the Democratic establishment and particularly as pertains to kneecapping Bernie, who would have addressed your (extremely valid) complaints and also would have won the election. Assuming no one shot him.

I’m just saying two things can be true. The Democrats can be ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform, and also the electorate can be so addled by propaganda that they missed noticing that Biden did absolutely historic things to help the working class, address climate change, basically all the core issues except for Israel and even his Israel atrocity didn’t apply to Kamala Harris except in people’s minds. And that addled understanding and confusion was what cost them the election. The DNC consultants have dogshit messaging, also, which certainly didn’t help, but people were mostly convinced that Trump would bring inflation back down again and Kamala Harris was just as bad so why bother (depending on which side of the aisle they were on).

Those two things can both be true. You seem like you’re spending incredible words lecturing me on the first thing. Yes. I agree with you. Two things can be true.

If you read down to my comments down below, you’ll find some examples of people doing specific fuck-ups that strongly indicate that they are non-American fake accounts, and not someone who is frustrated, angry, or restless.

I do think that a lot of people on far-left-Lemmy are in fact genuine accounts who also do the things OP is saying, and that maybe calling them fake accounts isn’t productive. I actually think fake accounts on Lemmy is also a huge problem, but the tells that I consider are a little different than the ones OP talks about.

For that, all I can say is that I agree that leftists can do better and should. I’ve seen the good suggestions before. Things like mutual aid, education, organizing, joining events — all of these are very useful things that are significantly more important than one vote in a broken electoral system.

Yes. Whether or not someone is fake, talking about those things constantly would be a much better (and also less suspicious) thing to talk about, as opposed to incessantly talking specifically about how important it is not to vote and not so much about those other things.

A lot of the accounts I’m talking about are still talking about how important it is not to vote for Democrats, and haven’t bothered to say more or less anything about joining the protests that are going on right now. Actually, I’ve seen a little scattering of the current generation of fake commenters who are talking about how dangerous the protests are, how some might be “false flags,” how we need to be careful or they’re going to sit this upcoming one out. Things like that.

I’m not saying that everyone should have spent all their time on Lemmy agreeing with each other that Ghengis was bad. I’m saying that spending all our time leading up to that election talking about what a problem Kamala Harris was, and how we shouldn’t vote for her, would be weird and suspicious in precisely 100% the exact same fashion as what people were actually doing. Thank you for making my point for me, in fact, that’s a really good analogy to explain it.