Not sure that the behaviour of Parliament was "batshit insane" as they repeatedly withdrew taxes due to colonial complaints.
This is at best questionable. Colonial complaints made little difference, it was the English merchant complaints that appeared to have actually caused Parliament to make changes to the tax laws, because the way the Colonies showed their displeasure with the taxes was simply to boycott the taxed goods and either do without, find local alternatives, or... well some did indulge in the purchase of tax free smuggled goods. However, the boycotts were so effective that not only did expected money from the taxes effectively not show up, they also threatened the very companies that specialized in shipping English goods to the colonies, hence why Parliament eventually repealed most of them.
But bear in mind, it wasn't just the taxes the colonies objected to. For instance, part of the the Revenue Act of 1767 involved the use of
Writs of Assistance in enforcing these acts, as these writs allowed the personal property of the colonists to be searched without reason or warrant, which was long considered a violation of rights of Englishmen, as laid out in
Semayne's Case (1604) and
Entick v. Carrington (1765).
Another serious issue was in the Vice Admiralty Court Act. This act altered the jurisdiction of smuggling cases from colonial courts to Royal Naval Courts. This might seem reasonable on its surface, after all, smuggling in the colonies was predominately a naval affair; however, the act did not stop there. Firstly, these Courts were judged not by juries, but by judges appointed by the crown. This alone would be considered a violation of the right to jury that was afforded to all freemen in England
since at least 1641, but
it gets worse, not only were these judges empowered to hear and judge cases without trial by jury,
they were also awarded 5% of any fine the judge levied when they found someone guilty. In other words, the judges were financially incentivized to issue guilty verdicts regardless of the facts of the case.
Stripping the colonists of their right to trial by jury (in some circumstances) while structuring an inherently biased court (can you seriously tell me that a court where the judge is financially incentivized to issue guilty verdicts is in any way impartial?) and the requirement for warrants for search and seizure, long standing rights of Englishmen that had previously been recognized in the colonies and even ensured by their colonial charters goes well beyond the pithy "taxation without representation" that most remember.
And all these are in place, along with those taxes and mercantilist policies, long before a small group of colonial radicals dressed up as Natives and performed one of the largest acts of vandalism in history. But once that Tea Party happened, Parliament went even stupider and began issuing collective punishments against the ENTIRE Massachusetts Bay colony over the actions of a minority, the injustice of which seriously incensed the other colonies. For example, the
Massachusetts Government Act functionally abolished local self-rule of the colony and prohibited Town Hall meetings without the royally appointed governor's assent. This act literally prohibited a local community from meeting in a common area just to DISCUSS ongoing events without permission from the Royal governor, a pretty serious violation of the rights to assembly and speech that applied to everyone in Massachusetts, even people tens of miles away from Boston and completely uninvolved with the unrest in that city (remember, this was the 1770s in an underdeveloped colony, tens of miles could be multiple DAYS of travel at the time, depending on the weather).
This is what folks mean when they say Parliament acted batshit insane. The collective punishments issued against Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party seem almost tailor made to INCREASE civil unrest in the colonies and escalate the situation rather than deescalate. There's a reason the Whigs in Parliament (who were in the Opposition) kept calling the Majority out for their handling of the American Colonies, it was clear to them that not only did the American colonies have good points calling out the acts of Parliament, Parliament itself was being utterly incompetent in their handling of the leadup to 1776...