The Gist: Theatre of the Absurd

Obviously, let's start with the Tories.

Too Cleverly By Half

OK, so imagine, right, that you're running for leadership of a really, really badly defeated political party. The voters so despised you they elected an underbaked batch loaf in a pair of glasses just to get rid of you.

Now imagine you have an insane two-stage electoral system, where the Elected MPs (who have a stake in choosing someone who might actually function) keep voting until they whittle down the candidates to two. At which point the electorate is completely swapped for approximately 100,000 old, rich thickos who previously looked at Liz Truss and thought her glass-eyed gaze and mince-brained ideas were PM material, if the alternative was a man with brown skin.

Obviously, in these circumstances, what you want to win is a) be in the final two and b) have the other candidate be your weakest possible opponent. Maybe, to achieve b), you'd get some of your surplus supporters to switch to your weakest opponent. Of course, you'd need to make sure you knew just how many you could afford to switch.

James Cleverly, a former Home Secretary and the closest thing the party had to a sane candidate, was leading the field in the penultimate vote and his weakest opponent Robert Jenrick looked likely about to drop out. But when the last MP vote was announced to gasps, Cleverly was in third place, behind both Kemi Badenoch and Jenrick. It appears that we may add 'counting' to the list of things Tory MPs are manifestly incompetent at.

The result is that the final choice presented to an electorate of people who actually pay money to be called Tories will be what sort of swivel-eyed loon would they like. Given their previously expressed preference for swivel-eyed loons, (see Liz Truss) they may find this appealing.

Jenrick's weakness is that he is both a loon and yet, also, profoundly dull. If you were required to describe him for a photo-fit you would just get a vaguely rectangular shape on a page. He once resigned as a Minister because Sunak's illegal Rwanda deportation plan wasn't illegal Rwanda-deporting enough. People who have heard him speak struggle to recall anything beyond a sort of undulating drone, as if the school experience of a Thursday afternoon double class of Geography had started trying to communicate directly.

On the other side, Kemi Badenoch has much to attract Tory party members. For example, she has both 'Bad' and 'Enoch' in her name. She has literally promoted her policy to fight with Doctor Who, reflecting her electorate's natural affinity for racist authoritarians seeking to Exterminate all life. And, although she is Black, she assures her electorate that she will act to support that most oppressed of groups, white men.

Both options for leadership of the Tory party are bad options, which are the only sort of options its electorate really want, or deserve.

Tesla's Imaginary Robots

Elon Musk, a man who will die like all men, has been facing a growing threat to his personal fortune. Tesla, the car company he didn't found, has been comically over-valued based on rubes believing his loudly-spoken baloney that it is just two years away from introducing autonomous driving vehicles. He has been making this and similar claims for nearly ten years now.

In recent years, the market for electric cars made by Tesla sagged after its owner accidentally bought a social media network to promote how much of a far-right wierdo he was. Its Q1 2024 deliveries were 9% lower than the previous year's same quarter, while the overall electric car market grew 25% in the same quarter. This gave pause to some of the rubes who had bought its shares in anticipation of owning, not a stake in a company that made bad cars, but one that owned an entire robot economy.

Musk's fortune is basically built on the back of this rube gas balloon of Tesla shares. If the gas goes out, it will plummet to merely obnoxious wealth. To avoid this, he announced he was going to show all the haters out there Tesla was getting real with its robots. It was going to unveil its new Cybercab, a driverless car that could be used as a taxi while you weren't using it yourself. A sort of physical side-hustle.

This is a big ask, given no such thing exists anywhere. There are driverless taxis, but they are limited to specific intensively scanned and mapped locations, so that they don't get lost or mistake a queasy child for a green light and plough into a birthday party.

But announcing you'll be doing the same thing as other companies, only later and with less preparation isn't going to cut it down the rube mines. You've got to give them some showbiz, some sizzle. So this week, Tesla put on an actual show in a Hollywood back lot in Burbank, and unveiled a car that didn't exist and a bus that didn't exist. Although there were models of what they might look like, they were not the promised vehicles, which Musk claimed would be able to drive themselves anywhere. Both of the things that didn't exist were promised to be about two years away.

I don't know how long the rubes will keep buying this, but for some at least, it was the end of the line.

The Hardest-Working Honeypot In Russia

This week I happened to be in Leinster House to make submissions supporting Patrick Costello TD's Bill to make RTE's Archives more available for non-commercial use. But, fortunately for you, dear readers, that is for another day. Instead, what I discovered while there was that everyone was talking about the Sunday Times story of a sitting Irish parliamentarian who had offered his influencing services to Russia.

Although not named in the piece, there was only one name on everyone's lips. If true, then the described means of persuasion (luring the mark in with sex before using it to pressure them to turn) demonstrates that at least one Russian agent has gone far beyond what ought to be expected of her in service of the mother country.

Also, I have a LeCarré pun all ready to go, once defamation laws permit.