Even more: an interest rate of <3% is basically blown away by annual inflation.

That assumes your salary goes up with inflation, though.

Hitler didn’t take power democratically. Neither did Mussolini or Franco. They each found cracks in how liberal democracy worked in their respective countries. Those cracks were usually the places where the system was decidedly undemocratic, which in those three cases, was generally something where the old nobles still had some power and they lined up behind fascists to save them from leftists.

America never had nobles, but it does have plenty of cracks in its liberal democracy to be exploited by fascists.

So to answer your question simply, no, there are no instruments to fix this. Congress can potentially either reign Trump in with legislation, or even impeach him, but I don’t expect either one to happen. If the GOP can be swept out of Congress in 2026, then we can maybe start to fix some things without resorting to extralegal methods. Even that is only a starting point.

I do know for sure that we can’t go back to the old trajectory as if Trump was just an outlier.

Don’t worry about it.

In Chrono Cross, when entering Time Fortress Chronopolis, you immediately encounter the PolisPolice. This isn’t framed by the game as a boss encounter, but it is.

There is a design problem with this boss that you probably wouldn’t see in a more modern RPG. To survive its big attack, you need the White Plate to absorb white-based magic attacks. You get the White Plate by stealing it from the Sky Dragon. If you already fought the Sky Dragon and forgot to steal at the time, you are hosed. The game doesn’t let you go back and redo that, and the PolisPolice encounter is about 2/3rds of the way through the game–very late to be starting over again.

I replayed that encounter 20 times before I finally lucked out on the attack cycle to keep the party alive. Then I encountered the actual hardest boss: a disc scratch that prevented the game from continuing towards the very end.

Buzz Aldrin went to the moon, and only then did he understand why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Billionaires fell over themselves to be a part of Trump’s second inauguration. The connection to fascism is right in front of you.

Windows running WSL running a VM running Debian 2.2.

You have to be pretty damn naive to think Trump pardoned the guy in a vacuum. That’s not tribalism, but a simple observation that Trump doesn’t do anything unless it benefits himself.

Democrats do the minimum. Republicans make sure we don’t even do that.

Hell, I got GTA V for free (legally, yes). It was the first GTA game I played, and I think its launch reviews were massively overrated.

I doubt I’ll find a free deal for GTA VI, but I ain’t buying it new.

Nobody attributes it, except for people who have studied it beyond pop culture.

“Gandhi even said that he disagreed with their methods but believed that they’re committed patriots and that they’re right to refuse to take on the creed of nonviolence,” Ghosh said. “It’s very interdependent; you can’t tell the story of Gandhi without telling the story of the revolutionary terrorists.”

Yeah, I don’t think that proves your point at all.

There were violent groups working for India’s independence against the British.

Which brings me to this: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780231156837

This book sometimes gets framed as “this proves non-violent protest is always better”, but its text is far more nuanced than that. For any peaceful group that succeeds, you can find a more violent group working for the same goals. This is so consistent that making an academic case that peaceful protest works in isolation is an impossible task. For MLK, it was groups like the Black Panthers. For Gandhi, it was the Indian National Army.

Fascists would very much like it if you swallowed the idea that peaceful protest on its own is sufficient.

On today, the day we celebrate MLK Jr. maybe you could give peace a fucking chance.

So if we come back tomorrow, do we get to argue without this shield around bad facts?

Would you like to investigate what the Black Panthers did? The number of times they shot their guns in anger is very small, but having guns was integral to their strategy of protecting the rights of black people being harassed by police. They were so effective that they changed to rules to prevent them from using guns the way they did. There were little more than 100 Black Panthers around at the time.

Perhaps you’d like to have a broader view of history beyond peaceful protests? Peaceful and violent means of protest rarely exist alone, and are rarely effective alone.

You know the whole “you have mettled, Mr Beele” speech in Network? The one where the business guy lays out a capitalist cosmology, and is willing to lose money on spreading the word of that cosmology? Turns out, it’s close to the truth of these guys.