• ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This was a wild ride of a post. Once I hit the historical research part I thought I knew where you were headed, only for it to get worse in that way that anything to do with history seems to do.

    • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      If you want even worse, I know somebody who needed a manuscript that wasn’t digitized, so he had to actually fly to the UK and go to the small university that had the manuscript. As if that isn’t enough of a pain in the ass on its own, the actual research consisted of carefully leafing through a moldy 700 year old book written in medieval Latin, analyzing the handwriting to decipher certain nonsense words that it turned out were actually just spelling mistakes, and shining special lights at weird angles to read faded ink. And then in the end, he found out the part wanted to cite (about a clergyman burning a granary to punish a village for their sinfulness) was was actually just a passage about tax levies that was deliberately mistranslated by one of those charlatan gentleman archaeologists from the 19th Century who wanted to discredit the Catholic Church.

      • ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And then in the end, he found out the part wanted to cite (about a clergyman burning a granary to punish a village for their sinfulness) was actually just a passage about tax levies that was deliberately mistranslated by one of those charlatan gentleman archaeologists from the 19th Century who wanted to discredit the Catholic Church.

        This is a great example of how much effort it can take to pick apart bullshit, damn. Thanks for these comments, they’ve been really interesting to read!