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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   23081 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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The point is to show you are doing something and standing strongly against whatever is the villain of the day, the rewards are various, ranging from promotion and pay raise to clicks and retweets.

You do not need wait for internet age, actual censorship of physical books was long string of defeats since the invention of printing press.

Tsarist Russia, was know for the most extensive censorship in the world back in 19th century.

Despite it, poor boy from Caucasian boondocks was able to acquire and read books by Marx and Darwin, and the system was powerless to stop him.

When he was about thirteen, Lado Ketskhoveli took him to a little bookshop in Gori where he paid a five kopeck subscription and borrowed a book that was probably Darwin’s Origin of Species. Stalin read it all night, forgetting to sleep, until Keke [his mother] found him. ‘Time to go to bed,” she said. “Go to sleep — dawn is breaking.” “I loved the book so much, Mummy, I couldn’t stop reading.” As his reading intensified, his piety wavered.

One day Soso [Stalin] and some friends, including Grisha Glurjidze, lay on the grass in town talking about the injustice of there being rich and poor when he amazed all of them by suddenly saying, “God’s not unjust, he doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived. If God existed, he’d have made the world more just.” “Soso, how can you say such things?” exclaimed Grisha. “I’ll lend you a book and you’ll see.” He presented Glurjidze with a copy of Darwin.

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