I think that he's trying to rile up wealthy workers and small business owners who view their (better, but more expensive) private insurance as a luxury good and fear it might be made worse or more expensive if a national Healthcare scheme were implemented. I think it's pretty clear he's also flailing and making mistakes because of it, but we shouldn't overlook that Trump does have a handle on what some slice of Americans interests are, and his stament there isn't totally insane. Shit, it might just be a reflection of his own personal fears, but there's absolutely a real constituency for it.

I often wonder who these are for. It makes no attempt to engage in an honest way with criticisms and hesitations that non-Democrat voters have so it doesn't have any ability to persuade them. It also infantalizes the view points of both the republican opposition and anyone outside the two party system so it's not helpful for self-critique for "centrists". So as far as I can tell it's just red meat aimed at Democrat supports to keep them all hopped up and believing that they are "the party of responsible governance" (in comparison to the Republicans) and therefore all criticism is invalid and everyone else is childish. Like, if this is supposed to be something else you really need a new way of engaging, because this "there is no alternative" shit is what turned me away from Democrats back in the Obama years.

My girlfriend always jokes with me that despite being tech-competent I am an old Luddite about tech. It is never more true than when something asks me to make an account.

I think the thing to keep in mind here is that those midrise mixed use buildings are housing, and can help the housing supply issue. The issue with them is often that wealthier neighborhoods and suburbs resist them so much that they end up being new expensive housing in the areas that were already doing the heavy lifting housing supply-wise.

Near where I live there is an estimated housing supply deficit of literally several hundred thousand units. My city, a medium city in the Metropolitan area of a big city, has built more than 50 of these buildings in the last decade, but wealthier suburbs a little farther out have gone to absurd lengths to prevent more than one or two token multi-family units from being built in them. The metro area cities, who's inhabitants feel the rise in housing price most sharply, cannot possibly build hundreds of thousands of units, there needs to also be significant building in suburban areas nearby if we want to hit that number and move the needle on housing.

tldr: Those housing units are fine, we just need to get wealthier less densely developed suburbs to build them too. Oh and build a fucking train station there while you're at it.

National Conservatives... hmmm Nat Cons... Nat Cs

Nominally pretty far from it. She's part of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's (the current president of Mexico) Morena party.

While everyone is right about the reasoning, no one brought up the relevant historical example: Eugene Debs in the 1920 Election... which is unfortunate because it's a good one.

Euegen Debs was a socialist candidate who ran in the 1920 elections after being jailed by Wilson's Sedition Act of 1918 for opposing the US joining WW1 and the accompanying draft.

Fascists fundamentally support political violence as a method for "solving division". Anyone who is not a fascist and supports such violence at this moment needs to understand that political violence is going to backfire and play into the fascist's hands unless you can first build alternative systems of power and support outside of the government.

If you start violence without that network of support in place, you will disrupt people's lives, and the only support structure that can help will be the current Government. The military will be the ones providing food, medicine, and shelter. If you don't have a strategy to get regular people affected by the disruption food, water, healthcare and shelter, you're going to make the government the hero.

If you're not a fascist, and believe political violence is necessary, your first step isn't violence, your first step is to take a page from The Black Panthers and starting a community breakfast program.

But he... wasn't. He lost the presidency in 1932 to Paul Von Hindenburg (53% to 37%. not even particularly close) who later appointed Hitler under pressure to the channclorship (which was an appointed role) in 1933. Hindenburg died in January of 1934 and Hitler de facto merged the presidency and chancelorship into one office (Fuhrer). The story isn't "regular people put Hitler in power", it's "broken legislative systems are vulnerable to facists".

There's good reason to presume carbon is required. Carbon has some nice, and totally unique properties that allow it to facilitate life.

The most important features to carbon in this context are:

1. Stable catenation of atoms. Carbon atoms can bond to other carbon atoms in a long chain, and that chain does not become appreciably more reactive. This allows for the construction of very large molecules with specialized mechanical functions.

2. Ability to form stable multiple bonds. Carbon can form single, double, or triple bonds with itself (and oxygen and nitrogen), which allows carbon-based molecules to have ridgid shapes. Double bonds are found all over the place in life because they allow molecules to have sections that aren't just wiggly noodles of atoms.

3. Bond stabilities that fall in a kind of "goldilocks zone" where carbon bonds to other atoms are strong enough to resist falling apart, but weak enough to be broken later.

4. Nearly identical electronegativity to hydrogen. Carbon pulls on the electrons in its bonds about the same amount as hydrogen. This allows it to make stable bonds that are non-polar, which, when used in conjuction with other, more electronegative atoms (particularly oxygen and phosphorus) allow Carbon-containing molecules to be hydrophobic, hydrophilic, or both simultaneously. This property is what allows for complex structures like Lipid bilayers and proteins to be formed.

No other atom, not even silicon, has this set of properties, and it's very hard to imagine how you would make all but the most simplistic verson of life without these.

I mean, I can agree that simple autocatalytic reactions can occur with chemistry based on other elements... but it's a stretch to say that suggests "alien life might not be carbon-based". Maybe very, very simple, life-like chemical systems, but life as we know it is defined by large, many-atom molecules, and no other element can do this the the way carbon can (not even silicon, whose bond energy decreases with catentation of more silicon atoms link, which, combined with it's poor ability to form multiple bonds ruins the possibility of silicon-based life). Anything that we can conceivably think of as "life" beyond simple self-reproducing chemical, or bizzare Boltzmann brain-esque systems will have carbon-based chemicals in it.

Well, y'know, we were an explicit apartheid state for 80% of our history, and were founded on the back of slavery and genocide so brutal it served as the blueprint for Nazi Germany... The more alarming part is that anyone is proud of our nation.