OK, not news. But I don't mean it just as an insult, or even "stuff I don't like". In 1995 Umberto Eco's essay "Ur-Fascism" (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism) laid out 14 points by which future fascists might be known. Trump ticks almost all of them. So in this series of posts I'm going to go through his points and check Trumpism on each one. Note that I say "Trumpism" rather than just Trump, because Trumpism is larger than just the one man.
/1
Newspeak, an impoverished vocabulary and elementary syntax to prevent complex or critical reasoning.
Trump has a habit of making speeches in half sentences. His followers have used the word “woke” extensively, often without being able to define it. All opposing points of view are dismissed as “fake news” and “lies”.
Eco has given a precise description of the anatomy of fascism. By measuring Trumpism against Eco's points I have shown that it meets the criteria laid out, with the exception of "permanent warfare" (point 9).
So saying "Trump is Fascist" is not mere polemic, or a statement of opposition. It is a simple statement of fact.
WRT "permanent warfare", Eco also notes that movements tend to accumulate more fascist aspects over time, so it probably won't be long.
There is a line of argument I keep seeing which goes like this:
Capitalists are doing this bad thing which is hurting this group of poor people.
2 They are doing this in order to hurt the poor people because doing so maintains the capitalist power structure.
The jump from 1 to 2 bothers me. AFAICT (1) is happening because the individual capitalists are making a profit out of it, and the wider socio-legal system is letting them get away with it. (2) implies that these capitalists /1
/4 If you follow environmental news you see plenty of big companies drilling for oil, ignoring global warming. But if they were capable of joining together in mutual self interest, they would see that not drilling more oil would be in their mutual interest and so agree not to do it (capitalists need a livable planet as much as anyone).
/5 In Umberto Eco's essay on Ur-fascism he writes that fascists see their enemies as simultaneously too strong and too weak. Socialists seem to see their enemies as simultaneously too clever and too stupid. Clever enough to form complex conspiracies in pursuit of long-term goals, but at the same time too stupid to avoid sleepwalking into a disaster.
Souls are indivisible, and only death separates soul from body, right?
So if an #embryo acquires a #soul at the instant of conception, what about identical twins, formed when an embryo splits in two? Do they share a soul, or is one of them a soulless monster? OTOH, what about chimeras, formed when two embryos fuse, so that the resulting baby is a patchwork of cells from both? Two souls in one individual? Or what happens to the other soul?