Month: April 2026

The wages of right-wingery

It has happened over and over. A population of fools falls for the lies and promises of a charismatic right-wing authoritarian. Slowly and painfully the slow learners realize that they’ve been had, but by then getting rid of a corrupted, criminalized government may not be an easy matter. Just ask Germany under Hitler, Italy under Mussolini, Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar and Caetano, Greece under the Colonels, Argentina under the military junta, Chile under Pinochet. Now Hungary under Orbán is history. Still to fully learn their lesson and throw off a criminal government: Russia under Putin and America under Trump.

It looks to me like an iron rule with no real exceptions: Right-wingery always leads to ruin, remorse, and revolution. Hungary is incredibly fortunate to be able to have their revolution with a lawful election. It remains to be seen whether the United States will be able to do that. Orbán was able to stay in power through institutional capture, patronage, propaganda, legal harassment, and intimidation. Orbán was not very violent. Trump, on the other hand (like Putin), is entirely willing to use violence to get what he wants.

The extreme right is often good at producing spectacle, enemies, and temporary, triumphal euphoria for those who are susceptible. But the extreme right cannot, anywhere under any circumstances, produce anything that is durable and decent.

Hungary’s Péter Magyar is troublingly conservative. But at least he promises to restore democracy, turn Hungary away from Putin, and rejoin Europe. If he doesn’t do that, I suspect that, given what they’ve so recently learned, the people of Hungary will catch on pretty quick.

At least we’re getting better and better laughs out of the blunders of the Trump regime. Their cluelessness in not comprehending that a visit by Vance would help Orbán lose the election was hilarious, as were the stories about Vance and Jared Kushner stomping out of Pakistan after the Iranians made fools of them. And then there was Melania’s press conference, which Saturday Night Live had a lot of fun with.

And then there’s this (⬇︎), apparently intended to keep evangelicals on board. I shudder to think what it must be like to be so stupid.

John Twelve Hawks has let us down

After I first discovered John Twelve Hawks in 2014, he became my favorite living science fiction author. He had not published a new novel (Spark) since 2014, so I was eager to read Certainty, which will be released by Doubleday on April 28.

In fact I was so eager that I requested an advance review copy from the publisher.

Certainty is not a pleasure to read. Its characters are not very interesting. The plot is confusingly complicated. The dialogue is ho-hum. The theme, I think, has something to do with the risks posed by artificial intelligence and virtual reality, though that never comes into focus.

Many of John Twelve Hawks’ fans will no doubt love this novel and will not see it as a failure. But I do see the novel as a failure, and I think that why the novel fails is very much connected with the failures of editors in the science fiction publishing industry for the past twenty years or so.

What are editors for? Once upon a time, I think the function of editors was to get good books into print and to work with writers to make books better. These days I think most editors see their jobs as serving some kind of social purpose — “to let other voices be heard” or something, or to make up for the past social sins of the publishing industry.

If a person has what it takes to get a job as an editor in a New York publishing house, then one certainly ought to have the confidence to assert some editorial judgment with writers. If I were such an editor, and if John Twelve Hawks had come to me with this novel, I’d ask him a polite but pointed question: “Is there anything else you’re working on?”

Certainty was doomed to fail the moment John Twelve Hawks finished his outline (if he works with an outline). The flaws are structural.

Certainty begins with three different sets of characters in three different settings. This is a terrible thing to do to a reader. Before the reader has any narrative investment in the story, before the author has generated any suspense or let the reader know what the stakes are, the reader must work through not one but three different sets of exposition.

Exposition is a framework in which readers can begin to follow the story. Who are these characters? What kind of place do they live in? How do the characters relate to each other? What is happening to them right now? What is at stake? Why should the reader care enough to keep going?

All stories of course require exposition, and one of the marks of a good writer is to make that exposition as transparent and interesting as possible. I’d wager that few writers are good enough to succeed at keeping a reader’s attention through three sets of exposition at the beginning of a story.

Not until somewhere near the middle of Certainty do we get an idea of how the three sets of characters are going to intersect. I found myself constantly looking back at previous chapters to remember characters’ names, or to remember where they were and what they were doing the last time we saw them. Reading fiction, to be sure, requires a reader’s attention and concentration. But a writer is on very thin ice indeed if he overloads a reader with exposition before the reader is interested in the story or cares about the characters.

Many stories, of course, involve simultaneous action. A good writer can build suspense by alternating between two or even three theaters of action. But I would argue that that can be done only after the reader has become well acquainted with the characters and deeply invested in the story. J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin were masters of that technique, but only after they had secured the reader’s investment in their characters and the stakes of the story.

In short, Certainty is a story that gets off to a bad start and never recovers. Insofar as the story is about AI, the message is so vague and so weak that it doesn’t stir up anything worth continuing to think about.

John Twelve Hawks is still my favorite living science fiction writer, because of The Traveler, The Dark River, The Golden City, and Spark. But it’s a shame about Certainty.

AI as tech support


Cartoon by ChatGPT 5.4

Here’s a use for AI that everybody could use from time to time: tech support.

A few days ago, I noticed that anything I attached to an outgoing email was being converted to a proprietary Microsoft format. The person I sent the email to, unless they were using a Windows computer, would see a file named “winmail.dat,” and there’d be nothing they could do with it.

I Googled to try to figure out what was going on. Apparently this is something that a Microsoft mail server does when it encounters an email written in rich text (RTF) format. My email is hosted at GoDaddy. They use a Microsoft Exchange server for handling email. I’m on a Macintosh.

I called GoDaddy tech support.

I was on the phone with the first GoDaddy tech support person for 40 minutes. She said she’d never seen this issue before. Eventually, after putting me on hold for four times, she said she was escalating me to the next level of tech support.

While I was on hold waiting for the next person, it occurred to me to ask Claude what was going on. Claude immediately and accurately told me what was causing the problem and said that GoDaddy or Microsoft had clearly changed the defaults on their Exchange server. The fix, Claude said, is about 672 levels deep (I’m exaggerating) in my email configuration at GoDaddy. Many people had been affected by this GoDaddy (or Microsoft) mistake, Claude said, and GoDaddy had put out a memorandum on their support site.

This second person apparently understood the problem, but his English was poor. He couldn’t understand me very well, nor I him. After ten minutes of his trying to help me navigate 672 levels deep in GoDaddy menus, I finally gave up and said that I’d run out of time and would work on this later.

Then I turned to Claude. After five minutes the problem was solved.

I learned my lesson. Hereafter, if I need tech support, I’ll ask Claude first. Any time you have a problem with your computer or need to figure out how to do something new, an AI can probably help. I’ve been using Claude rather than ChatGPT for technical matters because I think Claude is a little better at that. Keep in mind that both Claude and ChatGPT can interpret screen shots if they need to see what’s happening on your computer screen. And it’s not just computers. Claude also answered some questions about a new Bosch dishwasher.

Delivering eternal damnation isn’t easy, you know


Pete Hegseth. Source: Wikimedia Commons

I had a nice email this morning asking if everything is OK since I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks. Yup… Here in the woods everything is fine. But some days it’s an effort to manage the rage at what’s happening in the world. Rage doesn’t make good commentary, nor is it good for mental health. So back to the garden with me, or the kitchen, or the computer.

Plus there’s not much I can add when I think that the media and our public intellectuals are getting things right. Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman, in their daily Substack posts, are doing a fantastic job of writing the first draft of history. That should be the New York Times’ job. The Times, though, can’t just come right out and say plainly that what we are dealing with not only is fascism, but also complete idiots and psychopaths. Still, reading between the lines, it’s obvious that the New York Times staff now understand perfectly well what we’re up against, though they were a year or two (or more) late, and they continue to do a lot of sanewashing.

Part of the rage — you probably feel it too — is that we as civilized people have no choice but to stand back and watch as this pig circus of pluperfect idiots, who understand nothing other than domination and destruction, blunder around the world destroying things and killing people at enormous taxpayer expense. And because stupid people don’t know they’re stupid, they believe themselves chosen to instruct the rest of us on moral excellence. Just listen to this prayer by by the odious Pete Hegseth:

“Almighty God, who trains our hands for war and our fingers for battle, you who stirred the nations from the north against Babylon of old, making her land a desolation where none dwell, behold now the wicked who rise against your justice and the peace of the righteous. Snap the rod of the oppressor, frustrate the wicked plans, and break the teeth of the ungodly. By the blast of your anger, let the evil perish. Let their bulls go down to slaughter for their day has come, the time of their punishment. Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind.

“Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence. Surround them as a shield, protect the innocent and blameless in their midst. Make their arrows like those of a skilled warrior who returned not empty-handed. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve, and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse that evil may be driven back and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them. For the wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, King over all kings and amen.”

I have to believe that eventually we not only will remove these people from power, we’ll also hold them accountable. But it isn’t just them. It’s also the 77 million idiot Americans who voted for them. Fixing that kind of dumb will take generations.

What was it he said? I’m tempted to quote him, even at the risk of indulging my rage:

Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind.

That level of depravity and the blind projection of what he is onto others is almost incomprehensible. But here we are.