• pimento64@sopuli.xyz
    9·
    3 days ago

    What possesses a person to highlight over 50% of a passage instead of just drawing a line in the margin?

    • PugJesus@piefed.socialOPMEnglish
      22·
      3 days ago

      Beatings Some primitive form of aversion therapy, one presumes. Man still “often” talked about how happy he used to be, so it was more “He was cured of going down to the docks” not “Cured of the thought processes”

      • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
        61·
        3 days ago

        Every time somebody pontificates about history instead of just saying “we don’t know”, another right-wing revisionist history book gets catapulted onto the NYT bestseller list.

        • PugJesus@piefed.socialOPMEnglish
          13·
          3 days ago

          You’re right, some secret Ancient Greek form of mind-altering medicine far beyond our own modern capabilities is more likely.

          Fuck, man, extrapolating the behavior of the ancients from limited evidence by what we know they were capable of, and by what practices continued in pre-modern societies, consists of a great deal of my fucking field.

          • FishFace@lemmy.world
            21·
            2 days ago

            I mean, I wouldn’t normally criticise a shitpost for engendering wrong and possibly harmful ideas about the nature of neurodivergence (and sexuality, gender, and all the rest) by implying that it’s possible to determine them by reading some ancient writing. For the simple reason that it’s usually just a laugh and most people won’t take it seriously.

            But this goes beyond that. In addition to not having the slightest clue what may have affected him, we don’t have the slightest clue how he was “cured” unless the text goes further into it. Maybe the doctor made him eat a boiled frog and dance clockwise around a rowan tree while reciting lyric poetry in a Cretan accent. People get obsessions and then abandon them all the time, so it’s not like some legitimate therapy must have occurred.

            No-one here believes that the Greeks possessed some magic way of curing autism.

          • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
            12·
            2 days ago

            Yes, that is indeed different from asspulling baseless speculation, in much the same way that an offhand comment is different from a concerted effort at attacking your field. Can I point out that you just tried to refute me making fun of you by agreeing with me, or will that also undermine Mr. Always Right’s field of expertise?