The Weekly Weird #63
Crime and gun-ishment, Germany "protects" democracy, America's "assassination culture", das meme, Zuck in China, Labour shills for digital ID (again), the UK's £20 million FaRT, even more robots
Hello again, fellow Weirders, and welcome back to your weekly window onto the dystopian doings darkening our doorsteps!
The new episode of the podcast drops this Sunday - I speak with Dr Chris Day, an NHS junior doctor who blew the whistle on unsafe conditions at a south London hospital and got a decade of legal wrangling instead of an “atta boy”. Make sure you tune in, he’s got one heck of a story to tell.
Let’s hop to it…
Crime and Gun-ishment: The great state of Idaho, famous for potatoes and (apparently, according to a cursory search) a 1960s band called the Fabulous Chancellors, has once more etched its name in American history books. Governor Brad Little of the Potato State has signed a bill, effective from July 1, permitting the death penalty to be sought for offenders convicted of lewd conduct involving a child under the age of twelve. The Idaho Capital Sun reported on the bill, noting that since “[t]he U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 blocked death penalties for child rape in Kennedy v. Louisiana”, a legal challenge is likely. Less than a month ago, Little also signed a bill making “the firing squad the primary death penalty in Idaho”, with one legislator explaining that Idaho’s firing squads will be “mechanized”. So from later on in the year, Idaho could be the only state in the U.S. to execute paedophiles by firing squad (mechanised or not). They’ll need to call in a decorator first, though, because “[r]enovating Idaho’s execution chamber to allow for firing squads will likely cost more than the $750,000 lawmakers previously appropriated,” according to the Idaho Capital Sun.
KTVB News with more:
The UK’s £20 million FaRT: Biometric Update reports that “UK’s law enforcement agencies have awarded a £20 million ($25.2 million) contract for live facial recognition to three suppliers, including NEC.” Despite “concerns over the lack of regulation and police transparency…compounded by the vacant role of the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner”, the contract will develop software for British authorities to “compare live camera feeds of faces against watchlists to locate persons of interest.” Why is the deployment of FaRT in the hands of the authorities a serious issue for civil liberties and privacy in the UK? Well, since you asked:
“In March, media uncovered that UK airport passengers are being secretly scanned by facial recognition cameras while boarding aircraft. The scheme was backed by the Home Office which has been fighting to keep the orders secret. The government agency was ordered to release documents related to the scheme after advocacy group Big Brother Watch complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).”
The Telegraph reported on the issue as well: “The orders, made under Schedule Two of the Immigration Act 1971, are the first known examples of the Government making facial recognition a legal requirement. They have been in place for at least 15 years, since the last Labour government, but have never been publicly disclosed. The rules require airports with a single departure lounge to capture a facial biometric photo of domestic passengers entering and leaving this area before they board their planes.”
Also in March, the BBC reported that “[t]he National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) has advised forces not to reveal information on topics including the use of banned surveillance software” and “[o]n another occasion, it cited concerns about "negative press" when advising forces to retract earlier responses and instead neither confirm nor deny if their officers had used the facial recognition search engine PimEyes,” software that “has been banned by Scotland Yard.”
Let’s give the same people bespoke software worth millions of pounds to help them track, log, and identify the faces of British citizens. Let’s do that, that sounds like a great idea.
Das Meme: Germany’s Federal Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser (pictured above demonstrating what she expects from a romantic partner), has won a case against “[t]he editor-in-chief of the news website Deutschland-Kurier…for sharing a satirical meme on his X account.” David Bendels digitally altered an image of Faeser holding a sign reading “We remember”, originally taken to commemorate the Holocaust, to instead say “I hate freedom of expression”.
Displaying an off-the-scale lack of self-awareness, Faeser brought a lawsuit under “a set of laws “against hate and hate speech” [that were] passed under then-chancellor Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)…[t]hat made it a criminal offence publicly to insult a German politician”, according to Brussels Signal. Bendels was “handed a seven-month suspended prison sentence from a judge in Bamberg, Bavaria” for being too good at Photoshop. The court’s reasoning, as per Brussels Signal, was: “It was not clear to see for an unknowing reader that the photo had been manipulated”. So a German politician, after claiming that she and her government “remember” the Nazi era, pursued a journalist in court for “criminal defamation” because he suggested she hates freedom of expression. This might be April’s Irony Award Winner, although the month isn’t over yet.
The kicker: “In its verdict on Monday, April 7th, the district court in the Bavarian town of Bamberg also ordered David Bendels to apologise in writing to Nancy Faeser,” according to the European Conservative. Bendels has said that he will appeal.
Zuck In China: A whistleblower has come forward to defend her tell-all book and allege that Zuckerberg’s tech behemoth Meta “undermined national security in order to build a $18 billion business in China”.
“Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global public policy director at Facebook, said she watched as executives decided to provide the Chinese Communist Party with access to the data of Meta users, including that of Americans.”
“Ms Wynn-Williams also alleged the parent company of Facebook and Instagram worked "hand in glove" with Beijing to build censorship tools aimed at silencing critics of the Chinese Community Party.”
Wynn-Williams also claimed that “Meta capitulated to China's demands that it delete the Facebook account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese dissident living in the US.” Meta maintains that it “unpublished Mr Guo's page and suspended his profile because it violated the company's Community Standards.”
Meta claimed that Wynn-Williams is “divorced from reality” because they “do not operate [their] services in China today”. Her book, Careless People, led Meta to seek (and win) “an emergency ruling in the US that temporarily blocked her from promoting [it]”.
You can watch the full hearing below:
Labour Shills For Digital ID (Again)
Running with the baton proffered by former prime minister and Great British Smile model Tony Blair, 42 Members of Parliament have signed a letter demanding “the development of an ambitious digital ID programme…to allow the citizens to engage with the state more seamlessly.”
It’s true: Whether strolling down Oxford Street, or hiking in the Peak District, the refrain one hears from citizens right across the British Isles is “You know what, I really feel like it would be great if I could engage with the state more seamlessly.”
The British public are so lucky to have representatives with their fingers on the pulse. Upcoming policy suggestions (presumably):
Root canals for all!
Down with cake!
Ban orgasms!
According to these 42 MPs, digital ID can do almost everything except for curing cancer: It will solve “illegal immigration”, “‘off-the-books’ employment”, “modern slavery”, “benefit fraud”, “tax avoidance and evasion”. What a list! Apparently, “countries around the world are leaving [Britain] behind”, including India.
India has had the world’s largest and most sophisticated digital (and biometric) identity schemes since 2009. How are they doing with modern slavery and off-the-books employment?
Modern Slavery: “India has the highest estimated total number of people living in modern slavery globally, and the sixth highest prevalence in the Asia Pacific region.”
Off-the-Books Employment: “India is home to the largest informal economy in the world…[in which]…around 86 per cent of those employed – including in hi-tech, in private corporates, and in the entrails of the state – have work-arrangements which lie outside the formal contractual framework of labour law with no, or compromised, work rights.”
Granted, India is the world’s most populous country, so it isn’t an indication of failure (or success) that it has the biggest anything in absolute terms, but, for a country being included on a list of digital ID success stories, it’s pretty damning that after sixteen years of the Aadhaar system there is “a prevalence of eight people in modern slavery for every thousand people in India, ranking sixth out of 27 countries in Asia and the Pacific and 34th out of 160 countries globally” (an estimated 11 million people), 86% of workers are “off-the-books”, and cyber fraud “jumped more than four times in fiscal 2024”.
While waiting in an emergency room for more than four hours, or over 18 weeks for an appointment with a specialist, or navigating the ever-changing and ridiculously punitive parking charges and driving regulations and emissions standards and exclusion zones, being convicted of a crime for standing silently in the vicinity of an abortion clinic, being arrested for having an opinion in a private WhatsApp chat, being sentenced to 15 months in prison for posting on Facebook, being fined and denied an appeal for making a joke YouTube video, being arrested and convicted for dressing as a terrorist for Halloween, witnessing the alleged cover-up of decades of mass rape, or struggling to obtain a Freedom of Information release from the government, the real issue, the thing that makes it all such a headache, the reason the UK was listed as “the world’s second-most miserable country”, is that none of the above is “seamless” or “efficient” enough.
The issue isn’t the government, the chilling of speech, the institutional intransigence, the decades of underfunding, the failure to adequately plan and invest in infrastructure, the monotonous drumbeat of corruption stories from the petty to the egregious, no matter the colour of their tie or dress. The problem, we’re being told, is that technology isn’t pulling the citizens closely and tightly enough into the bosom of the government. If only you were held tighter in the Nanny State’s embrace, you wouldn’t have enough wriggle room to be so inconveniently frustrated with it.
Why won’t you just shut up and let them rule you, Britannia?
America’s “Assassination Culture”
According to a new report from the Network Contagion Research Institute and the Social Perception Lab at Rutgers University with the snappy title of Assassination Culture: How Burning Teslas and Killing Billionaires Became a Meme Aesthetic for Political Violence, political violence is so hot right now.
Following the July 13, 2024 attempted assassination of President Trump, tolerance - and even advocacy - for political violence appears to have surged, especially among politically left-leaning segments of the population. This pattern builds on a broader trend NCRI identified in two December 2024 reports which analyzed how viral social media narratives were legitimizing political violence, particularly in the aftermath of the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s assassination. The reports found widespread justification for lethal violence - including assassination - among younger, highly online, and ideologically left-aligned users. A spillover effect into offline domains is already occurring, as illustrated by a ballot measure recently submitted in California that is macabrely named “the Luigi Mangione Access to Health Care Act.”
Yeah, that’s right, a healthcare ballot measure in California was submitted in the name of the alleged assassin of a healthcare executive. Like the advertising slogan from the old Sunkist ad, “Everybody knows the best nuts come from California.”
The chronically online, especially on the “extreme left”, are becoming increasingly convinced that violence is not only permissible, but necessary and righteous.
A broader “assassination culture” appears to be emerging within segments of the U.S. public on the extreme left, with expanding targets now including figures such as Donald Trump and Elon Musk. NCRI empirically assessed this shift with original survey data and open source intelligence analysis to assess how normalized and justified violence against the administration has become in public discourse. The findings signal a threat to political stability and public safety.
The report cites some unpleasant statistics:
“31% and 38% of respondents stated it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively.”
“Nearly 40% of respondents (39.8%) stated it is at least somewhat acceptable (or more) to destroy a Tesla dealership in protest.”
“Users are increasingly associating the memeification of Luigi Mangione with calls for political violence against Musk, Trump, and others, reflecting the growing cyber-social presence of assassination culture.”
The team used a rating of 1 through 7 to measure whether a respondent considered violence or even murder “completely unjustified” up to “completely justified” while tracking their self-reported political alignment.
“Over half of those who self-identified as left of center (55.2%) reported that if someone murdered Donald Trump, they would be at least somewhat justified,” they found, with “similar proportions supported murdering Musk and destroying Tesla dealerships”. That 55.2% “includes 13% who said [Trump’s] murder would be ‘Completely Justified.’”
Elon didn’t fare much better: “nearly half of those who self-identified as left of center said the murder of Elon Musk would be somewhat justified (or greater), with about 9% saying this is ‘Completely Justified’”.
Seeking “to explore the underlying structure of support for political violence—specifically, whether attitudes justifying actions like assassination or property destruction are isolated opinions or part of a broader ideological framework”, the team created a “correlation matrix” that tracked various data points about their respondents to establish context around their answers. Believing that murdering Trump or Musk would be justified was correlated with other factors, like “support for Luigi Mangioni”, age, and, hilariously, “BlueSky Usage”, to see what kind of picture emerged.
The correlation matrix reveals that support for political violence—including property destruction and assassination—is not expressed in isolation, but as part of a tightly interconnected belief system. Those who justify the murder of Elon Musk or Donald Trump are also more likely to support Luigi Mangione’s killing of Brian Thompson (r = .36 and .31, respectively). This pattern suggests a broader worldview in which violence is seen as a legitimate political response—not just a reaction to individual figures. Central to this belief system is Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA), characterized by moral absolutism, punitive attitudes toward ideological opponents, and a willingness to use coercion for progressive aims.
I’ll let the authors of the report sum up in their own words:
This report points to disturbingly high levels of support for political violence, particularly targeting President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
[…]
The data reveal a structured endorsement of political violence targeting figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. These attitudes are not fringe—they reflect an emergent assassination culture, grounded in far-left authoritarianism and increasingly normalized in digital discourse.
Germany “Protects” Democracy
Fresh off the news that Germany’s Interior Minister thought she was disproving the accusation that she hates freedom of expression by bringing a court case against the journalist who mocked her, I’m delighted to tell you that I was wrong: Nancy Faeser doesn’t win the Irony Award for the month of April just yet - there’s some hot competition.
The German government has been formed following detailed negotiations between the CDU/CSU (which came first in the polls) and the SPD (which came in third) - more on that later.
First, from Politico, emphasis mine:
Germans take their politics seriously. So seriously, in fact, that the next government has banned selfies during the ongoing coalition negotiations.
The country’s incoming coalition is laying down strict rules — right down to font sizes and line spacing — to ensure the talks remain disciplined and on time.
They have also banned leaks, according to a leaked copy of the rule book seen by POLITICO.
Next in line, the New York Times reported on the coalition’s formation, with some added background some readers might have missed:
The far-right Alternative for Germany, which finished second in the February election, has continued to rise in polls, but the mainstream parties had vowed not to partner with it because it is considered a threat to German democracy.
That’s right - the party that came in second has been excluded from the governing coalition which instead has been formed with a less popular party…to protect democracy.
In fact:
Recent polls suggest that the AfD, which won 20.8 percent of the vote in February, and the conservatives, which took 28.6 percent, would be running neck and neck if an election were held now. On Wednesday, one poll put the AfD at the top with 25 percent, ahead of the conservatives, who got 24 percent. It was the first poll showing a far-right party in the lead since the end of the Nazi era.
While noting the shift in sentiment, little has been made of the cause of such a shift. Of the possibility that the German public have noticed and may not have been pleased by the fact that the second-place party in the general election was deliberately excluded from participating in government amid ongoing attempts to discredit and even disqualify its candidates and potentially even ban the party entirely, mention was there none.
Meanwhile, as reported in The Pinnacle Gazette, “the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is reportedly planning to abolish the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (IFG), a law that has been a cornerstone of democratic transparency since its inception in 2006”, a move that “raises significant concerns about the future of press freedom and citizens' rights to access official information.”
Why is the IFG so necessary?
The IFG has been instrumental in uncovering critical issues, from the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic to military operations abroad. It has allowed journalists to obtain crucial documents, such as reports from the Federal Chancellery regarding the Red Army Faction and insights into the government's pandemic response. The law has also played a role in exposing various political scandals, including the controversial dealings surrounding the Wirecard financial scandal.
The coalition agreement also has a ‘Culture and Media’ section which drew the attention and ire of Nikolaus Blome of Der Spiegel (translation from German by Google Translate):
There are sentences that are so well-intentioned that they scare me…And you don't have to belong to one of those rabid AfD front-page portals to find these sentences worrying, because they seem so completely unthought-out: "The deliberate dissemination of false factual claims is not covered by freedom of expression. Therefore, the media regulator, independent of the state, must be able to take action against information manipulation, as well as hate speech and incitement, while preserving freedom of expression on the basis of clear legal guidelines."
What? "Lying prohibited"?
Germany already has legal precedents that don’t protect plainly false assertions, but they aren’t prohibited:
There has long been case law at the highest courts that does not consider demonstrably false statements of fact ("The earth is flat") to be constitutionally protected by freedom of expression, simply because they do not constitute the expression of opinion, but rather the assertion of false facts.
[…]
However, there is also case law of the Constitutional Court according to which (false) statements of fact that are intertwined with the expression of opinion are constitutionally protected by freedom of expression, as it were, because of the element of opinion they contain.
So there is no protection for a “false fact” (a lie stated as if it were true) under Germany’s Basic Law, but freedom of expression does protect opinion. If the coalition government press ahead with a more sweeping legal framework to ban what the government claims is bullshit, where does that leave journalism, or even heated discussion?
As Blome writes, the legal determination of the difference between fact and opinion is a “distinction [that] only applies to individual cases, and the pragmatic conservative next door therefore advises great caution when it comes to blanket legislation.”
Alice Weidel, the AfD’s leader (or, as they say in German, “führer”), noted the implication of the poll result on X: “Citizens want political change – not a "business as usual" coalition between the CDU/CSU and SPD!”
Meanwhile, it is rumoured that an attempt to ban the AfD is not yet entirely off the table, but even if such a ban was attempted, as Politico wrote in January, “the bar for banning a party is high, and German courts have only done so twice before: in 1952, for the neofascist Socialist Reich Party, and in 1956, for the Communist Party of Germany.”
So for now, Germany’s new coalition government will protect democracy by shutting out arguably the most popular party in the country, attempting to repeal their version of a Freedom of Information Act, and cracking down on “the deliberate dissemination of false factual claims” and “information manipulation, as well as hate speech and incitement”. What could go wrong?
In short, the competition for this month’s Irony Award is wide open.
Even More Robots
Leeds City Council have confirmed that “[a] supermarket delivery service that uses robots to drop off food at customers' homes has covered 36,000 miles” in the city, according to MSN.
Here’s one of the little guys in action:
Meanwhile, Reuters reported that “a half marathon originally scheduled for Sunday in which humanoid robots will race alongside human runners” has been postponed “due to forecasts of very strong winds”. The robotics and AI fields are indeed prone to “very strong winds”, although perhaps of a different sort.
UBTech Robotics has set up a vehicle assembly line in which AI-powered robots connected by “swarm intelligence” do the work:
Robotics firm 1X also recently released footage of their Neo Gamma model doing household chores, although suspiciously they didn’t go into too much detail on whether the robot was performing its duties autonomously or not:
In case you need some nightmare fuel for a chase scenario, here’s LimX Dynamics’s Tron 1 robot demonstrating its agility and ability to adapt to terrain:
Finally, Black Mirror’s seventh season has just dropped on Netflix. With everything that’s changed since the last time the show tried to imagine horrible, uncomfortable, troubling visions of the future, here’s hoping they managed to come up with something worse than what’s already happening. Happy viewing!
That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone. Thank you as always for reading.
Outro music is Army of Lovers with Ride The Bullet, dedicated to the lawmakers of Idaho, and everyone else who feels like they’re getting fired into the future faster than they’d like.
Stay sane, friends.
Actually, the 'Chinese community party' sounds quite nice.
Sheesh! That was a mixed bag of nuts!! I can’t really single out one to comment on because it’s apparent we are living in an increasingly mad, mad, world!
Although, I will say I don’t know how the little grocery delivery robot doesn’t get run over 🤣 and it might be handy if you only ordered a six pack of brew and some limes!! I mean its compartment can’t be too big since its battery and its machinations have to fit somewhere…right?