This is the huge buried election news lede, if you ask me:

The Tories won the smallest number of seats since the Tory Party came into being in 1832, a truly staggering failure to drum up enthusiasm for any more Conservative rule. They hold just 121 seats, having lost 252 since the last general election, compared with Labour’s whopping 412. Liz Truss became the first former prime minister in the history of the nation to lose her seat.

Some believe that the last Tory PM, who just half-heartedly walked his party out of power, fits an odd leadership pattern.

The prime ministership itself has been a revolving door, queasily spinning the incompetent as well as the downright villainous into the top job. David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak. Each of their inadequacies was slightly different: Johnson was an egotistical liar, Truss a blundering clown, Sunak an out-of-touch billionaire, and so on. But together, they all oversaw a grinding degradation of every element of life in the U.K.

They spelled deregulation wrong.

Although at first glance that sounds truly awful, we also have to remember that in some circles outside of Wall Street such characteristics have become strangely normative (e.g. emerging “techbro” silicon valley, overrun by soulless bean-counting “hedge” thinkers).

We don’t have best-seller lists and book awards. What we have is this—the number at the end of the day.

The more villainous, the more clownish… the more likely?

People who cry “bad for business” in criticizing Twitter, Tesla or SpaceX for example, maybe don’t understand the shift in their business to the numbers behind classic military-industrial-congressional corruption.

Twitter was taken over by a wealthy white nationalist who fled the 1988 fall of Apartheid, rebranded the company with a literal Nazi swastika, who now automates information warfare with mass political disinformation… and nobody yet seems to think any of it appears extreme enough to warrant national security level precautions.

Lighting money on fire doesn’t make sense until you consider Twitter is perhaps being paid and authorized by Russia to light those fires (e.g. how Stanford was federally funded for fire-bombing Dresden, kick-starting Silicon Valley).

That’s a symptom of an even broader and less obvious problem in governance regarding the technology firms today amassing power.

We may as well be describing why Wiz landed in court, or Snowflake blames customers for the systemic lack of Snowflake security, or why Google describes massive AI integrity breaches as an exciting new feature instead of a failure of leadership.

The U.K. election, in that sense, hints at a healthy shift towards honesty, and away from public officials pandering to overly political right-wing self-interest technology firms.

Think hard about how Palantir suspiciously “won” a deal to privatize the U.K. NHS data for no good reasons (e.g. some speculate an ex-PM soon could show up on the payroll as thanks).

And then think about American elections ever taking a similar hard shift away from the right towards the center (e.g. Teapot Dome Scandal is allegedly the stuff of how Palantir “won” U.S. Army contracts).. back to enforcing an honest government logically serving the people it supposedly represents.

Here’s a criminal case of a Tesla driving at high speed into the back of a SUV, causing a major crash, and then fleeing the scene.

The SUV was northbound when it was hit, sending it over a concrete barrier, through a metal guardrail and over the east side of the bridge around 1:30 a.m., Shine said.

“When (officers) got there and did the investigation of the crash, they learned that the vehicle was hit from behind by a Tesla that drove off from the scene,” Shine said. “They didn’t have to go too far to find the vehicle. … He didn’t live too far from where the incident occurred.”

In another slightly different report, police said Tesla sideswiped the SUV at over 100 mph, smashing it through the guardrail and off a bridge, then gouged a trail all the way home with a deflated or missing tire.

Autopilot or FSD is suspected. The owner was likely asleep and incapacitated at the wheel while the car operated itself as a threat to public safety, as in so many other Tesla crashes.

Of course only the owner was charged, because police tend to say they are “UNABLE TO ISSUE CITATION TO COMPUTER”, unable to hold a robot manufacturer accountable for design defects.

A Tesla suddenly veering off a cliff has been in the news a lot lately, usually killing people.

Here’s another one, where someone actually survived:

Crash victim airlifted after Tesla plummets 200 feet off Highway 46 in north SLO County

Recently reported:

• California May 8, 2024
  

  A motorist died Tuesday after a Tesla plunged hundreds of feet down an embankment on Highway 50 in Northern California’s high Sierra,

• China May 6, 2024
  

  A couple from Jinhua, Zhejiang, were driving their Tesla Model Y home when their vehicle veered off a mountain road, leading to their deaths despite immediate rescue attempts.

The labeling of prominent women, such as political figures or activists, as insane or unstable remains a tactic used to discredit and undermine their credibility and authority.

Here’s a prominent example that seems to be a case of defamation.

It’s the usual gaslighting from this guy, so perhaps no surprise with the abruptness of a flip-flop. Note the timestamp between saying that everyone should be left alone to live their lives, and him directly defaming a woman that he disagrees with.

The inconsistency lies in the stark contrast between his two messages:

The first statement promotes a non-judgmental, live-and-let-live attitude. It suggests a philosophy of acceptance and authenticity.

The second statement contradicts this by harshly judging someone else. It promotes judgmental and dismissive comments to devalue a woman with a derogatory term.

While we could debate whether it’s possible for someone to hold complex views and make statements that seem contradictory, these two particular statements within two hours reflect completely different attitudes — one of acceptance and the other of judgment — with clear political disinformation methods behind the very calculated switch to defamation.

There is a long and troubling history of labeling women as insane, particularly as a means of controlling or discrediting them. This practice has roots in societal and medical traditions that were used by insecure men to undermine women’s autonomy and authority.

The term “hysteria” in ancient time was used for a range of symptoms believed to be specific to women, attributed to a “wandering womb.” This fallacy persisted into the 19th century, with hysteria being a baseless yet common diagnosis for women exhibiting behaviors that were called “deviant” based on bogus societal norms. The term itself derives from the Greek word for uterus, “hystera,” reflecting the absurd idea that mental illness in women was caused by their reproductive organs.

During the Victorian era, women were labelled with hysteria by men who were challenged by them. “Treatment” was intentionally invasive to reduce or silence their voice with things like “rest cures” and isolation to forced sterilizations and lobotomies. This period saw the rise of asylums where women were basically jailed after being charged with things like being unfeminine, or rebellion and disobedience — simply refusing demands of men.

The rise of psychiatry then played a significant role in the pathologization of women’s behavior. Freudian theories often continued to push dumb ideas like mental illness came from sexuality or even just roles as wives and mothers. Feminists in the 1960s and 70s debunked this political nonsense, arguing correctly they were rooted in sexism and aimed at maintaining patriarchal control.

Although much progress was made, clearly men like Elon Musk continue to push the stigma around women’s mental health. He labeled a woman as “insane” because she asserted herself in a way he felt threatened by and unable to respond to with basic logic or actual reason.