Aufhebunga Bunga

The irony of progressive education is that it actually shuts people in their place rather than open doors.

—@varnvlog

🤔 The problem with a post-literate society is that we don't have a model of an oral culture without memory.

If the internet has fried our brain, how do we go back?

Listen to @varnvlog on the newest Bungacast!

Time is a flat circle

🎧 LISTEN HERE: buff.ly/wyOQnnC

🔥 SPECIAL EPISODE 🔥

Talks given by contributing editor @CLiuAnon and co-host George Hoare on the paranoid style.

Richard Hofstatder’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” + The Paranoid Style in British Politics + "Zombies Clowns and Gangsters"

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"If we want to have a society that's flourshing, that society needs to be equal but it also needs to be excellent."

Dustin Guastella on art and culture after postmodernism—when no one can say if Beethoven is better than Taylor Swift.

For Patre*n subscribers!

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🚨 NEW EPISODE 🚨

We discuss C. Wright Mills' White Collar w/ Dino Guastella.

🗣️ Does Mills' account of the “economic psychology” of the White Collar worker still ring true today?

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🗣️ Silicon Valley is attaching itself to the state like a leech says @g_shullenberger

📚 FROM THE ARCHIVES 📚

Revisit our conversation w/ Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser on the tensions between hating your national culture and wanting to leave it behind. The past really does not go away!

bungacast.podbean.com/e/147-the-pa...

🎧 LISTEN: buff.ly/yJMT19h

🚨 NEW EPISODE 🚨

w/ @g_shullenberger on free speech, the tech right, and politicisation and the antichrist.

🗣️ Does it make sense to talk of "right-wing cancel culture"?

🗣️ Is countercultural trolling in tension with "defending Western civilisation"?

More “adventures in de-socialisation” in this month's recap.

Maybe society really does need to be defended—but for real this time?

📖 buff.ly/DBN0vym

Also, random, but this guy from Dragon Age was all about enchantment: buff.ly/hdBiVOO

If enlightenment means disenchantment—maybe we need some form of re-enchantment?

—@alex_1789

Listen to our talk with @pptamburelli on the big ugly wonders of the modern world: buff.ly/e1XOeyN

8. Chronicle of Georgia, Tbilisi (1987)

Zurab Tsereteli’s brutalist Stonehenge: massive basalt pillars engraved with saints & Soviet heroes.

7. Wat Phra Dhammakaya, Bangkok (1970)

A golden UFO-temple of 300,000 Buddha statues in the Khlong Luang district, in the Pathum Thani province north of Bangkok, Thailand.

6. Batu Caves, Kuala Lumpur — (2018 refit)

272 rainbow steps lead to a limestone sanctuary of Hindu temples. Two million pilgrims climb them yearly for Thaipusam.

5. Basilica of Notre-Dame de la Paix, Côte d’Ivoire (1985–89)

A West-African St Peter’s. Commissioned by President Houphouët-Boigny; its marble dome nearly doubled Côte d’Ivoire’s debt.

4. Great Mosque of Touba, Senegal (1963)

Spiritual heart of the Mouride Brotherhood. Built by disciples with French colonial engineers. Every year millions gather for the Grand Magal pilgrimage.

3. Mount Rushmore, South Dakota (1927-41)

Four US presidents carved in granite. Tourist trap or America’s marble self-portrait? 450,000 tons of rock removed. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum also worked on the pro-Confederate Stone Mountain project in Georgia.

2. The Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart (1927)

A model village for modernity. Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Gropius & others built this sleek “white city” of flat roofs and light. Bauhaus ideals, made concrete.

🧵 WONDERS OF THE MODERN WORLD 🌍

We still build colossal temples, mountains, and monuments — structures that are very big, that pretend to be ancient, and are mostly ugly. 👇

Contemporary wonders and monuments do exist — they just might not be very beautiful.

— @pptamburelli

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🔥 NEW EPISODE 🔥

w/ @pptamburelli

Everyone is still making modern monuments but the new wonders of the world aren't so wonderful.

Why?

Mood.

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