Tech industry has sold itself for years on the premise that companies can and should use its products to replace the human beings it employs, ie that the mere presence of human beings is a problem to be solved. That misanthropy pervades Silicon Valley, and is the common ground between Trump and Musk

My point really is that they may end up being correct about that, de facto. They have already flipped the Monopoly board upside down and started a fistfight. No amount of citing The Rules will help beat them, they just need to be defeated on the terms down to which they have brought the fight.

So my question is, who will/can credibly threaten to cease Trump et al's game here? I mean, who would even dare?

If the answer is "no one at all", then I'm afraid that implies that the US isn't a democracy anymore, and that the true political system of the United States has already been transformed

Sure, but the banker only *has* to play by the written rules if other players can force them to, which is a question of who has the power. Like, a Monopoly banker disregarding the rules is usually asked to stop, under a credible threat that the game will simply cease if they don't comply.

No, I don't think so. I think politics and economics are intrinsically linked. Political systems are the authority by which values are allocated in society, including economic ones. So you can't separate political and economic systems, because an economic system is just the political system at work

Wait a sec. Everyone agrees that concentrated power is bad. The contention you're responding to here, though, is that the capitalist system is the thing doing the concentrating of the power. So saying 'regardless of the system' doesn't really make much sense in the context of a *systemic* critique.

Yes, they are weak, but not just morally as you describe. Frankly, the basis of Trump's power is also highly unstable. His kingmakers were essentially a corporate oligarchy, and within oligarchies, power is usually very transient, it can be seized by essentially anyone. Musk/DOGE is evidence of this

Yes, and it's anti-feminist in ways besides its open alignment with fascism.

Feminism isn't a social group, it's a way to think. Doing feminism demands our rejecting any and all 'commonsense' that might justify robbing women of their freedoms. Making appeals to such a sense is deeply anti-feminist.

Agree, a good practice. So much of the contemporary internet is a vague malaise where nothing productive ever happens, and that's primarily because its discourse is allowed to be unfocussed. If we want our online discussions to be focussed, then we should expect such focus to be enforced sometimes.