You're the one pretending here. The economy is unfortunately designed around most people relying on an income stream that remains at the whims of someone else.

> I understand she's free to speak but there may be consequences

nit: this isn't generally a valid analysis. Rather, it's a common refrain used by people undermining freedom of speech while pretending to support it. This trope is often even trotted out in full-powertalk mode where it's applied to consequences coming from the government itself.

You're invoking a common "libertarian" trope, so I'm going to address that larger topic. Right-fundamentalist (ie axiomatic) "libertarianism" is fallacious. Logically, by asserting an unlimited "right" to contract, one can straightforwardly reframe any totalitarian state as merely being contracts between the state and its citizens/subjects/victims. And simply renaming things clearly does not make for a society that respects individual liberty!

The only sensible way to approach libertarianism is to qualitatively evaluate individual liberty. And being prohibited from speaking 8 years after the fact, especially when there is a compelling public interest, is in no way equitable. If they want her continued silence, they should have to buy that on the order of year to year.

> Part of the issue is there's no real opposition in the US to what's going on. The Democrats being the controlled opposition party aren't in opposition to the war

Most emphatically yes. We've seen occasional bursts of spirited dissent but that's about it. As far as sustained opposition, it still seems that they're hoping to just wait out the clock for things to go back to "normal".

> But US foreign policy is uniparty

No, I'd say even with this senseless "war" the "uniparty" model has still become invalid with Trump. While the US fear industry ("news media") has been beating the drums against Iran for quite some time, the US military/intelligence community has resisted attacking. If we had a President Harris, I would bet that we would not be attacking Iran, especially in this manner - not because of Harris herself, but rather because she wouldn't have gutted the domain experts who come up with reality-based plans, and who have presumably been saying "If we overtly attack Iran they close the Strait and actually end up stronger".

I like to refer to that system as bureaucratic authoritarianism - no meaningful checks on government power itself, but there are checks on how it's exercised. The critical difference is that Trumpism is autocratic authoritarianism (especially the second round after he broke so many laws the first time without consequence) - the experts and other group-project stakeholders (eg Inspectors General) were all fired (or at the very least sidelined), and replaced with glaringly incompetent yes-men who execute any simplistic "plan" regardless how bad it is.

The Devil doesn't need an advocate, he won the election.

You're missing that the difference is incentives, specifically perverse incentives being scaled up. If we were talking about an individual hacker who programmed their car for automated driving and it made the above wrong decision, people would straightforwardly attribute fault to the individual. The problem here is that large corpos, who will eagerly tout their perogative to do whatever they want as long as it's within the law, going beyond even that and breaking the law with impunity.

We can easily imagine a crash from such a thing being declared "no fault" (or even the fault of the turning driver!) based on corpo-sympathetic police, judiciary, and regulators who have succumbed to the inevitable "computer can't be wrong". That perceived lack of justice is the problem - when another individual does something wrong (either accidentally or willful) and gets away with it, we can brush it off as their bad behavior will eventually catch up to them. Whereas with corpos it has been thoroughly demonstrated that this will not happen.

It's amazing how some people can read Tolkien's works and come away with an idea that it would be a good thing to create new powerful artifacts that will inevitably fall under the control of evil. Perhaps because their minds have already been corrupted by the One Ring.

I suppose it's just the Don't make the Torment Nexus effect with a different motif.

You're really bashing a straw man of "the sensibles rightfully in charge of the plebs" to argue in support of a system that will be overtly in charge of the plebs without even nominal democratic accountability? Talk about mental gymnastics.

Where else is there to go?

It's not like bonds/currencies, metals/commodities, or real estate have intrinsic value that make them productive assets in an economic depression.

And big picture, if you look at Trumpism as a gloves-off corpo attack on the Constitutional US government, then equities look like a safe haven regardless of their diminished growth prospects - especially as Trump is itching to get his grubby hands onto the controls of the money printing press (the next big step of neutering the power of USG over corpos).

It feels like we're facing a pan-asset "inflation" type effect as an outcome of the everything bubble, where every non-financial thing is about to get a lot more expensive and the goal is hedging to preserve the paper "wealth" you have accumulated.

(having written that last part out, it would follow that labor is about to get more bargaining power in comparison. which is so decidedly against the apparent trend that I'm back to scratching my head)

I'd guess to make sure we know his reasoning - as it all makes sense in his own head, from his perspective the problem must just be that the People don't understand.

The same effect as why a certain type of criminal will readily confess everything, thinking the police will empathize with them and accept their need to have done it.