The Weekly Weird #58
Here come the robots, Switzerland's "burqa ban", RIP Gene Hackman, heil to the chief, Vance's stance gives Starmer a chance, the Unfree-ening
Welcome once more to your Weekly Weird! Yet again the world has delivered dystopian developments worth a head scratch and a snide remark, so let’s get to it!
RIP Gene Hackman: The actor Gene Hackman was found dead at his home in New Mexico this week, along with his wife Betsy Arakawa and their dog. Reports say they had been deceased for some time, with no overt signs of foul play but circumstances warranting further investigation. The much-admired actor was 95, his wife was 65. While his death is not directly related to anything dystopian, Hackman famously played Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation, and then starred with Will Smith in the 1998 conspiracy thriller Enemy of the State in a role that some movie buffs considered a callback to the surveillance expert he embodied so brilliantly, so here’s a brief burst of Hackman yelling at Will Smith in an elevator and protecting him from being tracked.
Switzerland’s “Burqa Ban”: Since January 1, 2025 it has been illegal to cover your face in public in Switzerland except in certain circumstances. The Swiss voted for the ban in 2021 and it is now officially in force. The fine is 1,000 Swiss francs. The ban “does not apply on board civilian airplanes and in consular or diplomatic premises” and face coverings are also permitted “in places of worship, to protect and restore one’s own health or the health of a third person, to ensure one’s personal safety, to protect against weather conditions, to cultivate local customs, for cultural and entertainment performances and for advertising.” Now Der Staat can get a good look at your Chevy Chase any time you want to gather in public to say “boo” to a government goose. According to The Indian Express, “[t]he Swiss government, however, opposed it arguing it was not up to the state to dictate what women wear.” Instead, it was the public, spurred on by the Swiss People’s Party, who decided to mandate facial nudity. I’ll take Things Made In Switzerland for $500, please Alex: “What is irony?”
Ro, Ro, Ro Your (Scape)Goat: Romania’s campaign against the presidential election candidate Călin Georgescu has intensified. Georgescu, who won a 2024 election that was subsequently annulled by the Constitutional Court and then had his appeal denied by the European Court of Human Rights, has been charged “on six counts, including anticonstitutional acts and misreporting his finances,” according to Euronews. Georgescu has “also been barred from leaving the country and is not allowed to create new social media accounts on top of the ones he already owns.” The legitimacy and good faith of the allegations against Georgescu that have led to the tossing of the election result and his subsequent legal woes were undermined slightly by Thierry Breton, the former EU Commissioner when he told a television interviewer: “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary” in reference to the annulment of Georgescu’s election victory and the possibility of an AfD win in Germany.
Heil To The Chief: Germany’s federal election results are in, and it’s a simultaneous shock to the system and sigh of relief from concerned quarters. Friedrich Merz and the CDU/CSU won with 28.6% of the vote, while the much-maligned Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) came in second with 20.8%, doubling their share compared to their previous showing in 2021. Merz will be chancellor and plans to form a coalition attempting to freeze out the AfD, while the SPD, the ruling party, saw their worst result in a century and, proportionately, their biggest loss of votes from election to election. The Left Party, risen from the ashes of East Germany’s Communist Party, had a surprisingly good result as well, finishing with 8.8%, solidifying the perception that Germany’s politics are bifurcating into a much more polarised state. The Green Party, whose influence has seen Germany take an aggressive stance in favour of renewable energy and against nuclear power, lost 3% of their vote, with 700,000 people switching to the Left Party. The doubling of the AfD’s vote is either a harbinger of a dramatic rightward tilt in German politics (if you think, as the bien pensant seem to) that they’re essentially resurgent Nazis, or a sign that the twin impacts of immigration and inflation are leading the electorate to look for drastic solutions elsewhere. Either way, AfD are now the #2 party in Germany, so claiming that they are ‘fringe’ or outside the mainstream won’t fly anymore. Somebody call Thierry Breton…
Vance’s Stance Gives Starmer A Chance: During a state visit to the United States, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was put on the spot by a reporter’s question about Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he had called out censorious policies limiting freedom of speech in Europe and the UK. Starmer attempted to rebut the suggestion that the UK wasn’t playing a straight bat on speech issues, but merely talked up the “long history” of free speech in Britain, which of course is not in question. It’s the future of free speech in Blighty that has citizens and Vance concerned. You can watch Starmer get defensive in the following video, but please bear in mind, this is the same leader who, when challenged by MP Tariq Ali during Prime Minister’s Questions a few months ago to commit to reinstating a blasphemy law to protect “the Abrahamic faiths” from ridicule and disrespect, spouted some waffle about Islamophobia and made no mention of either Britain’s “long history” of free speech or the current government’s commitment to preserving it.
Here Come The Robots
Figure unveiled their new Helix AI-enabled robots in the above video, aimed, apparently, at people who want to pay a lot of money so that an automaton can put away their groceries more slowly than they could themselves.
The hypnotic Philip Glass-eqsue score somehow emphasises the oddity and otherworldliness of the two modern golems as they move in slow motion, almost like a performance by the Japanese butoh dance troupe Sankai Juku.
There’s something quite haunting about watching the two robots work together, their hand movements calling to mind the way a baby palpitates its fists as it discovers what it feels like to have hands.
Here’s a second video, demonstrating the robots being deployed along a conveyor belt to sort packages:
With “stereo vision” and an “onboard camera feed”, the robots are recording what they look at and beginning to see the way humans do, while humans can watch what the robots are doing. How long before we see the law enforcement or border patrol demo?
Meanwhile, Unitree have released video footage of their G1 robot running and dancing, just in case you were worried that the robots would just take your job and not also hog the dancefloor or clog the path through the park where you like to jog.
Clone Robotics have taken it even further. They’ve attempted to create the most human-like robot possible, with a full skeleton, ‘skin’, and limb articulation that mimics human motion.
You can reserve one of the first 279 ‘Clones’ they’ve made on their website. The ‘Alpha Edition’ comes with a tagline that can land as reassuring or incredibly disquieting, depending on how you feel about humanoid robots:
Forever.
Forever.
The Unfree-ening
Freedom House just released Freedom in the World 2025, a report on the state of global freedom.
Spoiler Alert: It ain’t great.
Here are the lowlights (emphasis in original):
Global freedom declined for the 19th consecutive year in 2024. Sixty countries experienced deterioration in their political rights and civil liberties, and only 34 secured improvements. El Salvador, Haiti, Kuwait, and Tunisia were the countries with the largest score declines for the year, while Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Syria recorded the largest gains.
Another element of political life that ratcheted up in 2024 was violence.
In over 40 percent of the countries and territories that held national elections in 2024, candidates were targeted with assassination attempts or assaults, polling places were attacked, or postelection protests were suppressed with disproportionate force. Elections in authoritarian countries were manipulated to prevent genuine opposition candidates from participating.
Attacks on candidates happened in 20 countries and were “the most common form of election violence”.
In Mexico and South Africa, the violence was perpetrated by criminal groups trying to wield political influence and control territory. In France, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others, extremism or partisan grievances motivated physical assaults on individuals campaigning for office. Voters too were exposed directly to violence: voting places were attacked during elections in 14 countries and territories, making it dangerous or impossible for people to cast their ballots. Violence during election-related protests was widespread, taking place in 11 countries, including Georgia and Mozambique, where security forces used disproportionate force against protesters.
Tunisia had particular issues, which fit into a pattern seen also in Venezuela and other countries staging elections for show.
In Tunisia, which received one of the year’s two largest score declines, President Kaïs Saïed oversaw an escalating crackdown that included arbitrary prosecutions of journalists, trade union leaders, and other perceived critics of his regime. He was reelected in October after the regime-controlled electoral commission disqualified most of his opponents and refused to reverse its decision even after being ordered to do so by a court.
Tellingly, especially as we’ve been covering Vice President Vance’s focus on freedom of speech in Europe and the UK, freedom of expression was particularly hard-hit in 2024.
Of the civil liberties tracked by Freedom in the World, freedom of expression has declined the most over the last 19 years. The number of countries and territories where the indicator for freedom of the media is scored at 0 out of 4—meaning there is virtually no space for independent media to operate—has almost tripled between 2005 and 2024, rising from 13 to 34. Last year, attacks on the media in the form of censorship, arrests and imprisonment of journalists, physical and legal harassment, or violence were recorded in over 120 countries and territories.
Transnational repression was exemplified by Vietnam, where “a Hanoi court sentenced blogger Duong Van Thai to 12 years in prison in October for social media posts and videos that criticized the Communist Party government” after “he was kidnapped from Thailand and returned to Vietnam to face charges.”
The Freedom House report ends with an exhortation worth quoting in its entirety:
In the year to come, all those who understand the value of political rights and civil liberties must work together in the defense of democracy and be prepared to exploit opportunities for progress when they arise. Democratic governments, international organizations, civil society groups, the private sector, and ordinary people have critical roles to play in safeguarding institutions at home, supporting democracy advocates and human rights defenders abroad, and finding durable resolutions to armed conflicts that give the affected populations an opportunity to live in freedom.
Amen.
That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone. I hope you enjoyed it.
Outro music is this robot dance battle - at least for now, we can do what they do, but they can’t do what we do.
Stay sane, friends.