Asbestos insulation is actually perfectly safe, in the wall.

Older apartments, particularly ones that have been regularly renovated or poorly maintained, don’t do a good job of keeping asbestos inside the walls. Also, asbestos itself tends to break down over time and become more difficult to keep contained. This makes asbestos cleanup extremely difficult and expensive.

A good article for understanding the relationship between the police and other unions. But it doesn’t answer the question

Why don’t the cops simply seize the means of production themselves? What keeps them loyal to the bourgeois?

Sitting and not doing anything

Why are the only two options “Be a three term Congresswoman” or “Do Nothing”?

Having an influence increases the chances of getting what you want.

The problem is that AOC has no influence. She can’t impact the language of legislation, the priorities of national spending, or the operation of her assigned committees.

Imagine if people primaried Nancy Pelosi.

Its been tried, repeatedly. Her position is unassailable, largely by way of name recognition. The cost of running a campaign in a media market as expensive as San Fransisco’s is astronomical. That, combined with her influence in state and local political leadership, means Dems close ranks and shut more left-leaning candidates out of public leadership in local political establishments.

Nancy Pelosi is likely trying to tank AOC’s committee bid because she feels she’s making the best decision for the party

Oh well, in that case, I guess who are we to question her judgement.

Odds are that the Kims and probably a number of people at the top would be worse-off if things changed.

I mean, when you compare North Korea to the poorer parts of the periphery that capitulated to neoliberal capital - Haiti, Liberia, the former Yugoslavian states, Argentina right now, the Philippines, Lebanon or Iraq or Gaza - even the lay resident is getting out reasonably well off. They aren’t living in an active war zone, they’ve got a backwards but still functional economy, and they’re even making inroads on foreign trade at long last.

The xenophobic siege mentality of the Kims appears to have spared them a far worse fate, just by keeping the country isolated from shit like COVID and The War on Terror. They never got the windfall of the 20th century industrial economy, but they also didn’t get systematically wiped out like American Natives or Black Angolans or Rohingya Muslims.

No. But its worth understanding why AOC has survived in her seat longer than Cori Bush or Jamal Bowman did. She’s been following the Sanders entryist playbook, thinking she can eventually get a seat at the table. But every two years, she gets played as a sucker - raising the party a ton of money, then getting stuffed back into the box when her usefulness has passed.

Bush and Bowman couldn’t bring in that kind of coin, so they’ve been punted from the organization and replaced with more doctrinaire loyalists. AOC gets to hold her seat just so long as she finds enough people to keep bankrolling the consultant fees.

At some point, she needs to recognize she’s being strung along or she just becomes another part of the problem.

The top brackets are manifestations of the bottom bracket. Its a divide-and-conquer strategy, and foolish to ignore on its face.

For centuries women couldn’t own property, couldn’t hold professional jobs, and couldn’t participate in politics. Same with ethnic minorities. Queer sexual preference was outright prohibited by law and used to disqualify candidates from office, to break up organizations with police action, and to deny people access to private careers and public services.

You can come at this from a vulgar Marxist perspective and only see the Owners v Workers. But you’re missing why owners have power if you neglect the layer upon layer of privileged class surrounding them.

If it really does just boil down to Workers v Owners, why don’t the cops simply seize the means of production themselves? What keeps them loyal to the bourgeois if they themselves are not invited to the Epstein Island Bunga-Bunga parties? What keeps suburban professionals loyal? What keeps religious radicals loyal?

There’s more at play than mere title to real estate or collection of rent. You have to face an ideology that’s caked on thick.

You can attend local Democratic party meetings in your city. You can also vote in the primaries and you could also call Nancy Pelosi yourself.

Good news, everybody. I put in a quick call and made a few salient points. Nancy agreed with me on all of them and says she’s reversing her decision.

even if I disagree with her sometimes I still wish her a full recovery

Why are you so invested in licking boots?

All comes down to $$$

AOC is fine when she’s getting trotted out on Twitch-Plays-Pokemon to beg for dollars. But actually giving her power? Fuck that. No business interest would ever donate to the party again if they thought she was what they’d be buying into.

how do workers in other industries prevent the corporation they work for from taking in the revenue

Keep doing what you’re doing without operating the cash register, whether that’s serving meals or fixing cars or whatever.

For some stuff this won’t work (entertainment, for instance, needs a full work stoppage to compel capital concessions). But if you’re working to rule at a point of critical infrastructure, the only thing that really needs to stop is the financial side of the business.

It won’t. He’ll be lucky to make it to trial at all. Good chance he’s found suicided to death in prison, like good old Jeffery E.

moreover the idea that Marxists have never achieved change ignores the existence of the USSR, Cuba, PRC, Vietnam, Laos, and so forth.

The Westoid Brain is incapable of appreciating AES. Everything is either Not Real Communism or a book club that contemplates their own navels indefinitely.

When the SRs in pre-1917 Russia celebrated “an end to theory” as a unifying principle and claimed “assassinations transfer power,” they were wrong. Assassinations create temporary voids taken by those closest to the spot, always another bourgeois and never a transfer. What is required is organized effort to rise above the Bourgeoisie as a class so that Capital is controlled by humanity, and not the inverse. It was the dedication to theory and organizing the working class that proved the Bolsheviks, and not the SRs, correct.

Need that vanguard party to occupy the vacuum and initiate the reforms. It can’t just be stochastic violence.

That said, guys like Luigi aren’t operating in a vacuum either. They are the consequence of their material conditions (in this case, excruciating back pain in a country that refuses to deliver medical care in an efficient manner). So it seems trite to get mad at a man who was subjected to these horrifying economic forces. This stochastic violence is a consequence of the contradictions in the capitalist system, not a solution to it or an avoidable symptom of it.

You have to read guys like Luigi (and Thomas Matthew Crooks and Dylan Roof, etc, etc) the same way you’d read a cork going off a bottle you just shook up. Or the hurricane that slams into your coastline after decades of climate change. Praising/villanizing Luigi for offing a CEO makes about as much sense as praising/villanizing a tornado that levels a gas plant.

Is the diamond made out of me or am I made out of diamonds?

Its long protein strands all the way down.

Remember when the railroad threatened to strike and nacy pelosi said they would throw them in jail if they didn’t go to work…fucking unreal.

There’s a great WTYP on this, detailing how the inability/refusal to strike has resulted in an exodus/early retirement of train engineers sufficient to knee-cap the industry already. Increased incidence of train derailments, higher rates of rail jams and mechanical failures, and generally slower delivery times are all the result of the decline in experienced and knowledgeable industry workers.

None of this matters to the train management, which has reaped an enormous windfall in profits at the steady marginal decline in network efficiency. Monopoly means you either pay the cartel for degraded service or you ship using a more expensive method.

Solidarity will be hard to achieve because those threats will be too much for people on the ropes in their day to day life to endure.

Its important to recognize modern capitalist control as a form of hostage taking. “Pay us the ransom or your critical infrastructure get its”, even as we’re receiving fingers and earlobes in the mail with every passing year.

Solidarity is about liberating these critical components of infrastructure and operating them for the benefit of the public. The goal isn’t to shut down these institutions, but to run them without profiteers leeching the excess revenue. That’s why some of the most effective popular economic protests don’t involve suspending services, but operating them while refusing to collect fees for service.

Do I need to be worried because I said something that some asshat with a gun who was having a really bad day misinterpreted as transphobic

I’d be more worried the police/surveillance state flags me as gender non-conforming and comes bursting into the restroom guns blazing.

We’ve got a Congresswoman who can no longer legally take a proper shit in the Capital Building. If she went postal, I could hardly blame her.

So you’re saying that Gandhi accomplished nothing

Gandhi achieved a socio-economic mass mobilization. Boycotts, work stoppages, supply chain failures caused by mass mobilization. It wasn’t just people parading through the streets. They inflicted real economic damage on the British Imperial State.

when millions followed him, they couldn’t just arrest them all

Thousands were killed by British-aligned police. Millions more were impoverished in retaliatory trade sanctions, embargoes, and other economic retaliations. The Indian state was set back decades by the English response to independence - not unlike how Cuba and Haiti have been deliberately impoverished in retaliation for bucking the American and French former overlords.

They could arrest Gandhi and Congress leaders all they wanted to, but the movement they inspired couldn’t be stopped.

The current Modi government is a stark reversal of policy from the Gandhian Indian socialist state. They’ve embraced a very western-oriented capitalist-friendly militant hierarchy that has fully rebutted the movement Gandhi lead. That is, in large part, through continuously aggravating tensions between caste cohorts and between Hindu and Muslim regional populations.

When millions follow you, and refuse to cooperate, the ruling class will suffer

Mobilizing and orienting millions of people requires a large, cohesive popular media campaign. Gandhi was able to tap into a huge underground of anti-British opposition. But even that wasn’t able to overcome the base anti-Muslim sentiment that the Brits had fostered for centuries. Gandhi himself was the victim of this unfettered hatred, when he was assassinated at age 78 by an anti-Muslim fanatic during an interfaith prayer meeting in 1948.

Assassination of leading civil rights activists and organizers by hyper-partisan radicals has consistently worked dismantle national movements. From the slaying of US civil rights leaders in the 1960s to the bombings and assassinations of Latin American, African, and Pacific Island socialist organizers in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, we’ve seen the ruling class triumph through a persistent campaign of organized violence and stochastic terrorism.

It was also preceded by a violent act of terrorism

Its so easy for people to forget the decades of violent acts committed in and around the Saudi Peninsula, and fixate instead on a handful of retaliatory strikes against US interests. The Battle of Mogadeshu, which involved Black Hawk helicopters obliterating Somali mosques with hellfire missiles. The brutal occupation of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, from 1992 to 2001 as a US-backed narco-state. The entire Iran-Iraq War, sponsored by US arms dealers and double-dealing diplomats, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab and Persian young people. The occupation of Saudi Arabia by a western-backed military dictatorship going back nearly a century. The violent overthrow of democracies from Indonesia to Egypt in pursuit of neoliberal international trade policy.

9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum any more than the Brian Thompson assassination or the aborted coup in South Korea. These have long historical tails that trace back to a geopolitical policy that’s racked up a staggering death toll.

To quote Mark Twain:

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

The answer is neither peaceful organizing nor individual aggression, but mass, millitant organizing!

This is true, but also extremely difficult, especially in an era of mass media induced paranoia and alienation. Mass militant organizing requires a large cohesive social class that has a center of gravity - a church house or a social club or a workhouse floor - that increasingly no longer exists.

Social media was supposed to be the new venue for mass mobilization, and we saw the beginnings of it in the early '00s. But media consolidation, saturation from automated marketing accounts, and counter-programming have largely washed it out.

Read theory and get organized.

One is significantly easier than the other.

That said… go look for local unions in your town or neighborhood. Look for chapters of the DSA or the PSL or other labor-friendly organizing groups. Go to your local PTA meetings and city council meetings when you can, and get to know the people who show up there regularly. Get out of the house and meet people where they are.

That’s all good advice. But its also hard, exhausting work. And its done in the face of enormous headwinds. Don’t mistake the failure of leftism as a simple failure of “human nature” or whatever. We’re in an entrenched system and attempting a Herculean feat to change it.

Yeah, this is disappointing and I’m getting out of here. I prefer sperm that don’t miss.

You say that, but everyone gets offended when I put the “UnderpantsWeevil creampied his wife” onesie on my son.