Michael Bevan

American expat in The Netherlands. Best known for playing Kevin on the hit CBS sitcom, The Revenant.

[New Left EViews @NewLeftEViews]

The United States of America were founded by wealthy slave owners and arch-Stuart reactionaries who rejected their monarch because he couldn’t prevent Parliament from taxing their colony, whose violent settler peasantry just wanted to continue murderously expanding their frontier.

They were one of the last countries to abolish slavery and didn’t become a formal democracy until the 1960s. Their advantage of being a freer and more open society was short-lived and their attempt to build anything resembling a social state crumbled. Instead of a society of mass affluence, they ended up with a barbaric carceral system of historically unprecedented proportions, a top-heavy rapaciously extractive economy, a state thoroughly captured by oligarchic interests.

The last decades have been marked by America’s centrality to nearly every damaging social, cultural and ideological trend. It continues to export its accelerating domestic psychoses to the world. It has become the ultimate destabilising hegemon, blundering around like dying ogre, ever swelling a mountain of rotting corpses.

American isn’t the cause of all ill in the world, but the increasingly nihilistic, zero-sum social culture of contemporary capitalism, that has ramified into every corner of society, is fundamentally American, and the umbilical chord is very much still attached. There is no Post-American world—but with a little luck there will be one day.

Happy 4th of July

[Melanie Bracewell @meladoodle]

I’m in the wedding planning subreddit and this seems like a bit of an overreaction

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

Pull yourself together. He won a landslide victory, and then immediately betrayed his main promises, betrayed the working class, and then went on to participate in a genocide. He deserves contempt and punishment.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Keir Starmer was not merely a disappointment. He is a mendacious figure of ethical decrepitude, a man who won the Labour Party leadership based on promises that he jettisoned five seconds after winning - a Labour leader who dared banish from the Labour Party not only his predecessor but also remarkable human beings like director Ken Loach - the gentleman who has taken the historic Labour Party and transformed it into a vessel for the very oligarchy it was elected to restrain.

Consider the litany of Starmer’s moral and logical failures. He promised a 'different Britain', yet his actions were a masterclass in Tory-lite politics—using the same maxed-out credit card analogies that once served the austerity brigades to justify his own failure of vision. He promised a human rights lawyer’s approach but he embraced a racist-lite version of Farage.

On Europe, Starmer promised Brexiteers that Brexit is Brexit yet stood before those who yearn to rejoin the European Union, winked at them to make them feel that Britain would gradually reconnect, even rejoin, with the EU while offering nothing of substance. This is not leadership; it is a fraud.

And then there's the manner in which Starmer and his government rushed to offer Israel unequivocal support in pursuing its genocide in Gaza, sacrificing precious political and civil liberties in the UK by imprisoning grandmothers, priests and peaceful activists who dared support Palestine Action, an organisation that Starmer and his minions proscribed as terrorists for practising the usual activist tactics of trespassing to spray paint military planes that had demonstrably aided in the genocide. To add insult to injury, Starmer performed the diplomatic pantomime of recognising a Palestinian state, in a manner that ensured it would never happen.

But above all else, this is a government that has learned nothing from the post-2008 era. Starmer and his Chancellor are playing the same tired austerity game while enabling and empowering the Finance Curse perpetrated by the City of London, throwing in forgood measure cuts in international aid to fund a military spending trickle under the guise of a "Strategic Defence Review" . It is the same old doctrine: austerity for the masses, socialism for the financiers and the arms dealers.

History will remember Mr Starmer as a man without conviction, a Prime Minister who offers not a shred of honesty, but merely the cruel illusion of change. He is ethically decrepit because he had chosen, consciously, to abandon principle for power. And for that, history will indict him. Good riddance, I say.

https://t.co/sGfebPkDXR

[aarøn. @ayroned]

dawg i FUCKIN LOVE pointing at a store and telling people what store used to be there a couple years ago

[Bay Area People’s Republic 🚩☭ @21stcentury_ML]

Lots of money, little stress…but at what cost?

[Soviet Visuals @sovietvisuals]

"Penguins" porcelain coffee pot and milk jug by Oktyabrsky Porcelain Factory, USSR, 1970s.

[Georgie 💫 @hagiosgeorglus]

Joan Didion was so real for this

[Lei Gong @gonglei89]

If you only have time to read one explainer for the current state of global political economy make sure this is the one. You won’t find a more succinct encapsulation for the fulcrum of economic and political forces shaping our contemporary condition in the 21st century.

[Pierre L’Fauex @LFauexProd]

Americans love cars because they combine their two favorite things: sitting down and killing people

[Fish ΘΔ @algae_fish]

Getting hit by one of these at full speed and all evidence of me even being there in the first place is wiped away instantly

[Lee Vinsel @STS_News]

David has taught me much about how lousy the word “technology” is and why we should avoid it, which I try to do whenever I can.

“AI” is so, so much worse, as many have noted.

[UltraNosk @UltraNosk]

Mulan for Americans

[Jon 🔬 @JonnyMicro]

No reason to do this by the way

[Not Deirdre 🍉 (check bio) @_uojihcin_]

It's like the people who discovered it wanted to name it penis worm but couldn't so they had to choose something that sounds similar enough

[Keith Black Trudeau @Charlottean28]

Happy 50th anniversary to the most insane 19 seconds in the history of the NBA Finals:

[NEXTA @nexta_tv]

A Chinese robot wearing a clown wig kicked a child in the stomach.

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

Compelling essay by sci-fi writer Ted Chiang on why LLMs are nowhere near consciousness, but why it serves the interests of LLM companies to constantly suggest that they might be.

I've pulled one quote below, but the whole article is worth reading.

[Yasha Levine @yashalevine]

collapse level delusions