While I broadly agree with the view that debate was sometimes a part of religious institutions in the past, this changed dramatically in the 20th century, especially with regards to Islam, perhaps due to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. When is the last time you’ve heard of a madrassah teaching that homosexuality is natural? Not to be Muslim-phobic, I am aware if the rich history of debate and science in the Middle East, but the material conditions have changed now, conservatism has been on the rise since the 70s.

You speak of mahaviharas, but Buddhists I have met are just as conservative as the average religious person when it comes to women’s rights, feminism and gay rights. Madrassahs were not ‘open’, even during the Islamic golden age. Even when Islam was less rigid, Mansoor al-Hallaj was executed for saying ‘Ann-al-Haq’, Omar Khayyam had to go on a pilgrimage to prove he was pious, al-Qadir ordered to kill every Mu’tazilite in Baghdad and no doubt there are countless other stories of persecution. That rational thought survived when people were religious is hardly to the credit of religion, and even in periods of prosperity when religious institutions weren’t on the defensive, such things happened anyway and under the sanction of religion. As long as religion is under an institution, it is the nature of institutions to cling to power and hence, suppress dissent.

I bet there are a lot of machines like that. I knew this one person, a biology teacher whose lab computer still had 7, but it ran perfectly well. She refused to upgrade it to 8/10 because there really was nothing wrong with it. Many people I know with very old machines still have their OS because it just … works. Might differ in the States though, tech becomes mainstream here at least five years after it is released.

No, lol. She got a ~400 page ‘children’s encyclopedia’ because she liked it and I liked reading. Fairly cheap, and useful if you want to look up something like ‘types of volcanoes’. Besides, it was a little home laptop, which my dad used before. I doubt if she had even known how much porn existed on the internet, since we used it rarely and it was terribly expensive (dunno about the US, since I am not an American) at that time. I’m pretty sure the reason she didn’t want me using the internet was because kids are dumb and break stuff. Laptop was already sluggish as hell.

Also, it was far easier to just pick up a book you’ve read many times and find the section you’re looking for than turn on the laptop, wait for the damn thing to boot, call an adult to connect it to some outdated Modem that’s slow as hell, ask that person to search something because you have no idea how that stuff works and then get some long ass site, summarise it and finish your homework. Just saying. Has got nothing to do with repression, since we also had a book full of paintings and quite a few were nude. If anything, my mum was kind of more open than most since she had a masters in biotech and taught high school science for many years.

I still remember the XP error sound. It was the stuff of nightmares. And in those days, we weren’t taught how to use a Modem because my mum didn’t like us using the internet and instead brought an encyclopedia for school stuff, so I would have to fix all the shit I fucked up without google before anyone found out. Fun times. Really improved my troubleshooting skills, though.

Understandable. .world is generally Eurocentric or US-centric. I stay away from most political comms there for my own sanity.

Lucky you. I live in southern Sanghiland, Karnataka.

Dude, I know. I am an Indian too, and a socialist. Getty and Thurston definitely aren’t cold war propagandists. It is Robert Conquest, Anne Applebaum and more recently, Timothy Snyder who portray the famine as an intentional genocide done by evil Soviets. Getty and Thurston, especially Thurston was actually notorious for taking a more pro-Soviet stance. Wheatcroft and Davies did important work showing that the famine was caused by a combination of bad harvest and poor planning. As far as I am aware, the popular genocide/deliberate starvation line is not the historical consensus and has not been for some time after the opening of Soviet archives. Even liberal historians like Fitzpatrick and Krotkin debunk the many capitalist lies about the famine. People discussing it online generally have a very strange assortment of sources - from Snyder’s terrible book ‘Bloodlands’ to obsolete books like Tottle’s ‘Fraud, Famine and Fascism’ which was written before the opening of Soviet archives. r/AskHistorians is a good source for finding both Marxist and liberal sources, and it generally avoids neoconservatives like Conquest.

I am from the South too but am Marathi.

Yep.

.world really isn’t very tolerant of certain views. They are very quick to dismiss people as Russian shills/bots for instance. I disagree with this instance’s views of China and the Russo-Ukraine war, and am not an ML (though I do kind of lean Leninist) and haven’t seen much bad faith name calling. It certainly is prevalent in leftist spaces (CIA bot, NAFO shill, etc) but this place is surprisingly decent.

Thurston and J Arch Getty have good books on Stalin. They’re both pretty well respected historians, so you can read stuff about the famine from their books. It’s not a pretty picture. Also, which part of India, if you don’t mind?

Narcissus poeticus, or poet’s daffodils are called ‘nargis’ (nuh-ruh-giiis) in a a number of languages. The root word is Persian. It is often used in poetry as a metaphor for a person’s eyes (generally your girlfriend) as it is supposed to be ‘eye shaped’. There is, of course, the Greek myth which is often alluded to in English literature. It’s also a pretty flower.