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.

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.

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.

They’ve been building her up for the entire series. She’s playable in 3.

That’s why complaining about this would be such a joke

People will call it Woke

most climate activists are seen as spoiled kids

This message brought to you by the Oil & Gas Industry of America.

O&G! It’s where you get the ad bucks! Say what we tell you to say or GTFO the airwaves.

farmers vote for the right

The majority of field hands don’t vote, either because they don’t have legal residency where they’re working or they don’t have access to voting infrastructure due to their ghettoization or they don’t have citizenship under current naturalization laws.

The folks who vote are the exurban land-owners and their administrative staff. They’re regularly organized within religious institutions to instill certain socio-economic ideology, they are promoted based on their fealty to the local land barons, and they benefit from the disenfranchisement of their landless field hands which gives them a strong incentive to defend the anti-democratic status quo.

Farmers Large Land Owners

FTFY.

Civility is reserved for the rightful aristocracy. The serfs receive the privilege of bowing and the honor of knowing their place.

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.

In the 2020s, as the United States is being taken over by a literal dangerous cult (the white Christian nationalist movement centering around Donald J. Trump)

I mean, I’d go so far as to argue the US has always been a government of, by, and for religious extremists of one strip or another. Occasionally, those extremists break in a favorable way (abolitionism, environmentalism, anti-war movements). But by and large, its been the 30 Years War for nearly 250 years around here.

Trump is the latest incarnation of Christian Radicalism. But you can find guys just like Trump echoing through every banana republic governorship and tin-pot mayoralty going back to the Mayflower landing. The flip side of the coin is just Obama’s Moderate Rebels - the Black Baptists and Unitarians and Reform Jews and Liberal Catholics - who think Trumpism on paper is fine (immigrants bad, LGBTQ weird, education not sufficiently privatized, young people music makes me angry, brown foreigners are an existential threat), he just took things too far / executed them too sloppily.

This all stems from the font of infinite money - the big banks and the federal treasury - ultimately resting in the hands of religious leadership. Big Protestant/Catholic run banks like Blackrock and JP Morgan and Bank of America earmark billions toward their religious institutions and bankroll a host of sectarian social services to create a patronage network of millions.

Meanwhile, actual elected officials are all products of their religious communities. Mitt Romney is literally a Mormon Bishop, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis are inducted members into Opus Dei, big chunks of the House are ranking members in their local Christian mystery cults, even the “good ones” like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are ultimately just proxies for their local mosques.

Example: I’m queer and white. I have white privilege, but some people have straight privilege over me.

But then privilege is a consequence of the society, not the individual. You can be in a community that doesn’t discriminate, at which point neither applies. You can be in a community that overvalues queerness or undervalues whiteness.

The way the last comment frames it as ‘the privileged’ precisely plays into the problem it’s addressing.

People who bought homes in the 90s, when real estate was more in line with wages, benefited from the historical moment. You can call that privileged.

And people inherit property from family. That’s definitely a privilege.

But it all overlooks a broader system of cheap lending for mega-rich financial institutions, which allow groups like Blackrock and Berkshire Hathaway to become some of the largest landlords in the country.

Talking about “white privilege” or “millennial privilege” or “native born privilege” in the face of a historic real estate consolidation at the hands of a tiny aristocratic elite seems trite and misplaced.