Charlie Stross on the new potentially hands-free ‘final’ solution

Charlie Stross is a good and prolific author. He also maintains a mean blog in which he displays his talent for thinking beyond the world of putting words on paper for a living. In other words, he is engaged with what’s happening to real people living real lives as well.

He also lives in Edinburgh, which wins him extra gold stars from me.

His latest blog post is well worth a read. Its title is a trigger warning of sorts: Some notes on the worst-case scenario.

This is not cheery reading. But then he’s not discussing the outcome of The Six Nations here. (That’s rugby, by the way.)

The post is about Trump and about those around Trump (Trumpeters?) and what their policies — deliberate or accidental — might mean for the world’s poorest. (And, by extension, the rest of us as we get poorer, I suppose.)

There is nothing in the post that seems ill considered or obviously wrong. Go read it. And get stuck into the comments. Charlie’s Diary is a popular destination and in the first day he had almost 200 comments after the post. Best of all, Stross tends to engage with commenters. He doesn’t make a statement and then stand aloof as the proles debate.

The more that writers and artists like Stross take up the verbal cudgels in the face of what appears to be a rapid descent into fascism — and not just in the US — the better the chances we have of, at best, stopping it short and, at worst, shining a shaming light on complicity and inaction.