Why The Beatles Matter
I’ve been planning a post on the Beatles for awhile, but thought today would be a good day for it, partly because it’s so well planned it can get past my writer’s block, and partly because everyone in the world seems to be talking about them thanks to the new game (which I’m not getting) and the reissues (bought the mono box today).
While most people are perfectly aware of why the Beatles were so important, there are many – including some who I know normally have excellent musical taste – who just don’t ‘get’ them. They certainly don’t get why I spent two hundred quid today on a box of albums I already own, just because they’re very slightly differently mixed.
The simple answer to that is this:
Yep, that’s a mildly racist kids’ Saturday morning cartoon from the mid-60s, which includes a drone setting of a section of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead and a bouncy singalong section which encourages the kiddies to sing “She said I know what it’s like to be dead, I know what it is to be sad, and you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born”.
Personally, I think the idea of a ‘best band ever’ is a rather fatuous one, and presumes that the Monkees and the Sun Ra Arkestra were trying to do the same kind of thing and should be judged by the same criteria. But on pure quality alone, I think if there *were* a best band ever, it would be hard to argue that the Beatles were a bad choice – when you consider that songs like I Am The Walrus, Yesterday, Norwegian Wood, Girl, Revolution, Across The Universe, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Here, There And Everywhere,Here Comes The Sun and All My Loving were never even released as singles because they always had something better or more commercial lying around, the sheer depth of their catalogue becomes quickly apparent. There are few if any other bands where almost everyone knows almost every album track.
But the key thing about the Beatles is the kind of band they were. When they started, they were disposable pop – their competition at the time was Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and The Tremeloes – and they were a huge success for reasons only very tangentially related to their talent. They were a *good* band of that type – Please Please Me is still a remarkably good album – and they obviously, even then, were music lovers rather than just performing puppets, as their choice of cover versions showed, but there was no immediately obvious reason why they should be bigger than, say, The Searchers.
But they did get big, and what matters is what they did when they were big. Most bands in their position would have continued cranking out formula hits and shaking their mop-tops as long as they could, raked in a huge amount of money, and then retired. The Beatles instead – presumably as much through boredom as through any finer motives – decided to try and expand their art as much as possible, and incorporate as many different influences as they could, everything from Dylan and Ravi Shankar to John Cage and Stockhausen.
The mere *existence* of a track like Revolution #9 (a Stockhausen-esque sound collage on The White Album) is extraordinary. Whether you like it or don’t (I actually do), tens of millions of people own that album and have heard that track at least once. For many of them that will have been their first – and possibly only – exposure to the techniques of the avant-garde from the previous twenty years. Likewise, millions of people first heard of Ravi Shankar via the Beatles.
To understand how unusual this is, imagine if Beyonce decided she was going to have a John Zorn phase, or whatever today’s equivalent of the Spice Girls are (I don’t keep up with the young person’s pop music of the day) citing Throbbing Gristle as the biggest influence on their new album. Normally when teenpop stars try to ‘be a serious artist’, they’re George Michael – just doing the same pabulum without any of the fun.
There have been a few other Pop-with-a-capital-p stars who’ve been quite daring, of course – the Monkees did a hell of a lot to subvert their own image, as well as making some truly great records – but the only one to undergo such a total metamorphosis I can think of is Scott Walker, who did it over a much longer timeframe, was much less popular to start with, and lost most of his original fans along the way.
The Beatles, because of a once-in-a-century combination of luck, talent and willingness to experiment, got six-year-olds singing along to songs about Peter Fonda causing bad acid trips, and teenage girls listening to atonal avant garde tape-loop experiments. And *THAT’S* why they’re important.
As for today’s releases – I’m not buying the stereo reissues, as I have them all on vinyl anyway, and Rock Band doesn’t appeal (partly because I can play real instruments, a bit, partly because I’m no good at video games, and mostly because I own neither a Wii or a TV) but the mono boxset is wonderful – every album up to the White Album, plus the non-album tracks, in their original mono mixes. The sound quality is astounding – I’m hearing all sorts of tiny little details I’ve not heard before, like Ringo’s sticks clicking the vocalists in on Paperback Writer (which I’m sure the rest of you heard on the old versions, and I’m stupid for not noticing before, but anyway), and I also love noticing all the differences between the mono and stereo mixes (the processing on John’s voice on Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, the different tape-loops on Tomorrow Never Knows, the different ending to Penny Lane). The bass response in particular has improved drastically.
Is it worth two hundred quid? Unless you’re the kind of obsessive fan who actually owns and has listened to Liverpool Sound Collage and who knew that the second half (but not the first half) of Please Please Me was a different take in the stereo mix to the mono one, then no – unless you don’t own this music at all, in which case yes, but why don’t you? But if, like me, you’re the kind of person who’s been to see Pete Best live, then yes, it is worth it. It’s only a little over a quid a song, after all…
Linkblogging for 08/09/09
Well, the ‘one a day’ plan hasn’t gone very well with the hyperposts, has it? In my defence, I’m so ill that I’ve been to the doctor today, for only the third time in my adult life. I’ve got 680 words written on Jack Kirby so far, but it’s all prelude to the main point – I need to write about the same amount again – and writing is just like pulling teeth for me today. That’ll *definitely* be up tomorrow, along with – I hope – the Beatles post (which will be much easier to write) and with a bit of luck I should be back on schedule to get these finished by the end of the week.
In the meantime, read some stuff what other people have writ:
A Bayesian method for evaluating counterfactuals – this actually ties in with the sciencey part of the Hyperpost stuff…
Costigan Quist states the incredibly obvious by talking about how social networking and online campaigning won’t really make any difference to the election.
Fred Clark on how banks are evil.
Via Lew Stringer, The Guardian are giving away free copies of old 80s kids’ comics every day from Saturday.
Laurie Penny on hypocrisy and the death of the welfare state .
And Matthew Rossi says that Captain America: Rebirth is so fucking boring it makes him sad.
Can You Rewrite History, Even One Line? Doctor Who, The Web Of Time, And A Response To Millennium (Hyperpost 7)
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
ceci n'est pas un blog post
To start with, let’s look at Millennium Elephant’s response.
Now, I actually agree with the vast majority of what Millennium is saying here – only really disagreeing with the assertion that free will exists, which I think is a debatable proposition (but he’s intelligent enough to say “Though if we are wrong about that it makes no difference because all our actions, including believing we have free will, are all pre-determined anyway!” – acceptance of the possibility that one *could* be wrong is, to my mind, the basis for all rational discussion). I’m also less convinced of the Copenhagen interpretation than he is – but like him, don’t actually see it as incompatible with the many-worlds interpretation, but rather that they’re both metaphors for what’s Actually Going On, which is some not-readily-describable combination of the different interpretations.
(Luckily, for the purposes of this series of essays, I’m more interested in what’s interesting than what’s right – I’m trying to play with a whole bunch of interrelated ideas here, about canon and continuity, time and hypertime).
However, what I *do* disagree with is the assertion that, for Doctor Who at least, the Copenhagen Interpretation makes us more responsible for the consequences of our actions than the variant of the Many Worlds interpretation that I have been referring to (with a hat tip to Messrs. Morrison & Waid) as Hypertime (Doctor Who fans may be familiar with a similar-but-possibly-distinct idea under the name of The Fugue).
I’m going to attempt to show this, in the time-honoured tradition of Doctor Who fans, by referring to a single line from one story – in this case 1985′s Attack Of The Cybermen, where the Doctor refers to ‘the web of time’ in passing.
Now that line has got a lot of attention in various fanfics and spinoffery in the twenty-four years since the episode was transmitted, and there’s a reason for that – the image of time as a web, rather than the more conventional line, says quite a lot.
And this image is compatible both with the ‘hypertime’ view, and with actions carrying a *lot* of weight.
Imagine that time *is* like a web – all the points of all the multiple universes are connected to other points. A normal person’s life follows a line from one point to another to a third, and will always be a consistent timeline, because they’re only travelling forward at a rate of sixty seconds per minute.
Now imagine that every time you make a decision, you strengthen one connection (the one where you make that decision) but break other connections from that point – from a point of view outside time (and such a point of view exists in Doctor Who, though I suspect not in reality, whatever that is) – something like the collapse of the waveform in the Copenhagen Interpretation, but this is breaking off connections between different objectively-existing universes.
This would mean that everyone had a consistent history – once you’ve broken a connection, there are universes you ‘can’t get to from here’, those that directly contradicted the past decision. But it would also mean that the Doctor had an awesome responsibility as a time traveller, and his decisions would matter not only for him but for all the universe.
For the other thing about a web, along with its interconnectedness, is its fragility.
Every time the Doctor makes a decision, he breaks and makes connections between different points of time – those he’s been to before and will be again. He can alter some things – so long as there’s a way for a consistent timeline to route through all the points he’s visited. So he can save a life that wasn’t saved before, because there is a consistent universe where that person was saved, but he can’t kill Hitler in 1933, because there’s no way to make that consistent with the universes he’s visited in the past.
Because the Doctor is very aware of something – as he travels up and down his ‘timeline’ in the web of time, he’s selecting a smaller and smaller number of possible timelines, and condemning more and more to impossibility. That’s bad enough in itself, but we all do that every time we make a decision.
But he could – all too easily – break a segment of his own timeline off altogether. If he makes the wrong decisions at points A and B, then the whole section of his timeline between those points could become completely detached from the rest of the web, inaccessible from either past or future. Which would of course mean condemning all the inhabitants of that fragment of the web of time to nonexistence… the more he interferes – the more he does *anything* – the more likely this becomes, but he can’t use that as an excuse *not* to intervene.
(And of course from there we can get to all sorts of story possibilities like villains trying to make ‘pocket timelines’ to control, people in broken-off fragments trying to rejoin their fragment to reality, the Doctor unable to save entire planets because doing so would break the last connection between universes, and so on).
This would also, of course, help explain why the rest of the Gallifreyans never meddle (with the exception of all the meddlers). It’s just too dangerous – making choices has *too many* consequences.
(I’m not suggesting that this is the case in real-world physics, of course – in fact I think it’s nonsensical for multiple different reasons – but I think it *is* the case in my own Doctor Who ‘canon’…)
Linkblogging for 05/09/09
Odd… I posted this yesterday, but it disappeared. Here it is again. Working on the first of the posts mentioned below now…
I’ve had to take a few days off the hyperblogging, as some of you have probably noticed, because it’s been a tough week at work and my brain’s not been up to it. But for those of you who’ve been enjoying this series of posts on (as Millennium Elephant so delightfully put it) Quantum Comic Dynamics , they are returning tomorrow. I plan to do one a day for the next week, and that should finish the series. They will be:
Sunday – Can You Rewrite History, Even One Line? Doctor Who, The Web Of Time, And A Response To Millennium
Monday – Degrees Of Freedom – Mister Miracle, Darkseid, and Morrison Doing Kirby (or Why Kirby Matters)
Tuesday – Modernism Vs Post-Modernism – Why Can’t Comics Reviewers Define Terms?
Wednesday – Crisis On Multiple Blogs – A Response To Pillock’s Response To Me (this and subsequent posts may be delayed by my Big Beatles Post which I plan to make at some point)
Thursday – A Bit Of Fun – the briefest possible outline of the fanfic giganta-novel this sparked off in my brain.
Friday – Canon And Fugue – A return to the subject this started with – canon and continuity
Saturday – In Conclusion – I’ll link all the hyperposts separately, plus Pillock and Millennium’s responses and any other interesting thoughts people have had along these lines, plus links to various other resources on these subjects. I must say, the response has been hugely gratifying – I thought this stuff was going to be seen as grounds for dismissing me altogether as a navel-gazing moron. Thank you all.
Anyway, today’s links…
The 10:10 Project wants people to sign up and try to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions by 10% in a year. It’s an obviously worthwhile idea (even if you’re one of the libertarian minority who read my blog, and who tend to dismiss global warming, most things that one can do on an individual level to cut emissions tend to make sense *even if you don’t accept that carbon emissions are dangerous per se*). Unfortunately, almost all their suggestions are aimed squarely at middle-class homeowners who go on several foreign holidays a year, like to keep their house ridiculously hot, and are in the habit of throwing away food, none of which applies to me. But if it does to you, please do sign up (I did anyway, just to show willing).
Just noticed that someone had put Ghostwatch up on Google Video. This is by far the scariest drama I’ve ever seen, though I suspect its effect will vary a lot based on age and nationality. It’s a pitch-perfect recreation of the kind of light-entertainment pseudo-documentary that still fills up the TV schedules – a live investigation of ‘Britain’s Most Haunted House’ along with interviews with parapsychologists, audience phone-ins and so on, broadcast on Hallowe’en. Except of course, this being fiction, stuff starts happening…
The power of the show (for me at least) comes from the fact that the people presenting it are *exactly* the kind of people who would have presented a real documentary like that – people who were in fact all over the TV in programmes just like that at the time (early 1990s) it was broadcast. If you’re used to those faces being in ‘non-fiction’, to them telling you the truth and being ‘themselves’, then this breakdown of the walls between fiction and reality is absolutely terrifying.
I’m not sure how much anyone who wasn’t around in the UK in the late 80s/early 90s would get out of this, but I suspect Orson Welles would have approved…
33 1/3 have posted a great ‘mix tape’ featuring the Monkees, the La’s, Johnny Guitar W atson and Larry Williams, and other such good stuff.
Chris Bird points out how the rich benefit disproportionately from taxation.
Archive Binge is a service that will supply you an RSS feed of a webcomic you’ve just discovered, so you can catch up a few strips at a time rather than have to read through the whole thing.
And pillock lists ten things Star Wars got wrong
A Big Finish BBC Audiobook A Week – Hornets Nest: The Stuff Of Nightmares
This CD only came out today, so for once I’ll precede my review with a Spoiler Warning. I don’t actually have a *lot* to say about it, but it’s worthy of comment, so…
Have you been adequately warned?
Then I’ll begin…
Hornets Nest: The Stuff Of Nightmares, by Paul Magrs (who I’ll be talking about in a future hyperpost, incidentally), has been getting a lot of publicity, because it’s Tom Baker’s first ‘proper’ return to the role of The Doctor since he left in 1981 (he did a thing for the godawful charidee Dimensions In Time excrescence, and he reads some of the audiobooks of the Target novels and narrates some of the soundtrack CDs of lost stories, but it’s the first actual new story he’s done since Logopolis).
Rather surprisingly, he’s chosen to work with the BBC rather than with Big Finish, who up to now have produced every legitimate Doctor Who audio story since 1999. This caused a huge amount of worry among some people, until it was announced that Big Finish’s license had been renewed. Judging by this, they needn’t have worried – rather surprisingly, the BBC can’t compete with Big Finish when it comes to producing audio drama.
Partly, that’s because that’s not what they’re really trying to do here. The format isn’t like Big Finish’s regular range – an audio play with dialogue, sound effects and music. Rather it’s closer to their Companion Chronicles format – a narrator or narrators doing what amounts to reading a prose story, but with dialogue supplied by other actors, along with background effects.
This similarity is unfortunately exacerbated by the fact that this story has two narrators and a storyline about inanimate objects coming to life – just like The Mahogany Murders, a recent and rather better Companion Chronicle.
In fact, the story, while well-written (some great lines, like “I opened the badger’s brain, using very tiny brain scissors”, from the Doctor) , is surprisingly generic. In fact, it ‘reads’ like a Pertwee (or first-Baker-series) story – the plot (a factory owner, originally motivated by environmental concern, is brainwashed by evil insects and used by them to turn stuffed animals into drones controlled by the insects, which then kill prominent political figures) sounds like someone’s half-remembered the plots to The Green Death and Spearhead From Space and turned them into one story. It’s Generic Pertwee Plot #12, and feels like something Bob Holmes (and Holmes is definitely the influence here, with the mind-control and inanimate objects coming to life, but it’s the comparatively restrained Holmes of the Pertwee years rather than the Gonzo Gothic of the Baker era) tossed off in five minutes as a gap-filler.
It also doesn’t play to Baker’s strengths – Baker does a great job here in the bits where he’s narrating (the narration switches between Baker and 70s companion Mike Yates, played by Richard Franklin, another link back to the Pertwee years), but he’s always been at his best when interacting with others – the contrast between his Doctor’s eccentricity and the normal characters around him always being a big part of his appeal. By having so much of the story told as infodump, that appeal is largely lost – there is very little actual dialogue in this (and for the first long chunk of the story it seems horribly like the Doctor will be confined to the odd line here or there, before he takes over the narration).
For an audience coming to this from the other BBC audiobooks – straight readings of novelisations of TV shows – this will be a pleasant change, but compared to Big Finish’s productions it seems slightly underwhelming – it’s just not using the medium well enough.
That said, I will still be buying the rest of the series – it’s definitely entertaining, and while the story is not up to the standard of Big Finish’s best, it’s definitely not *bad* either – it’s a pleasant, diverting hour-and-ten-minutes of entertainment, with Tom Baker getting to do his thing again. It’s firmly aimed at a casual nostalgia market, rather than being aimed at either hardcore fans or people who are interested in innovative drama, but that’s not a bad thing. On its own terms it’s enjoyable enough, but I hope if Baker does any more, that he will turn to Big Finish…
Linkblogging For 03/09/09
Just a few quick links this morning:
Millennium has a great post on quantum physics, inspired by my own hyperpost series. Again, if you’ve been reading that, you should read this.
If you like the stuff I write, you’ll like Jess Nevins’ post on Zeppelin Pulps
Power Pop Criminals have a couple of albums people might be interested in – a Sparks bootleg, and an album by Captain Sensible that I’ve not listened to yet but which is compared favourably with Robyn Hitchcock, Andy Partridge and Martin Newell.
Seebelow tell us How To Write Comics The Geoff Johns Way
Gavin Burrows talks about how Spotify is changing the way he listens to music.
And The Mindless Ones continue their annocommentations of Batman & Robin
Liberalism And Cybernetics : Hyperpost 6
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
I was only going to linkblog today, but I’m going to have to push on with these… I’ve said for a while that were this series of posts ever to be complete, it would actually take the form of two full books – one non-fiction series of essays, and one gigantic fanfic epic crossover novel. Today my friend Tilt, based on the content of my earlier posts, sent me an email titled “My silly idea for the day” which was actually the core of the plot of the epic fanfic thing (which remains unwritten, but is entirely there in my head). So if people are jumping ahead, I need to write more.
This one’s on politics and science, but it does relate to the others in the series…
As most of you know, I am a member of the Liberal Democrats, a British political party that are liberal in the British, rather than the American, sense – while for the most part the beliefs of the party as a whole (though not of every member) tend to overlap with the USian definition, for us liberalism is based around the idea of allowing the individual the maximum freedom to run their life as they wish – the role of the state being to remove, rather than to add, restrictions on individual liberty. (In the opinion of some/most of us, those restrictions include things like poverty, illness and lack of education, so the state has a role in those areas).
So we support things like greater democratic representation and accountability, mutualism, devolution of power to local levels, civil liberties, and so on.
Now, I actually support these things because I’m arrogant and stroppy – I’m arrogant enough to think that no-one is my better, or knows better than me about… well, anything really, but certainly not about how I should live my life, and I’m stroppy enough that if anyone tells me what to do I’ll do the opposite just to spite them. So I want as much freedom as possible for myself. Politically, that gives me two choices – either become absolute dictator of the world and crush the wretched masses under my bootheel for all eternity, or try to get freedom for *everyone*, so I can have some myself. The first sounds like a lot of work, to be honest. and I’m also phenomenally lazy, so I joined the Liberal Democrats.
However, if you *tell* people that you support a political position because you’re arrogant, stroppy and lazy, they tend to see that as a bad thing, for some reason (this kind of thinking almost tempts one to the whole bootheel thing…) so it’s better to say you do it because it makes sense practically, or there’s evidence it’s a better system, or something like that. Happily, this happens to be the case – it’s called Ashby’s Law Of Requisite Variety.
Assuming that governments are meant to control things (and we can argue about what, and how much, they should control, and why, but their function does appear to be to control stuff), then they are subject to the laws of cybernetics, which despite what many many bad SF TV shows have told you isn’t about turning people into hideous machine creatures, but is rather the science of control systems. Ashby’s Law is the most fundamental law in cybernetics, and simply states that if you want to control a system, you must have more options open to you than there are possible things that can happen.
As an example, say you’re driving a car, you don’t want just a button that says ‘left’ and one that says ‘right’ – you want a steering wheel, so you can constantly correct the direction. Even if it just goes in a straight line, you need to be able to compensate for drift, by making minute changes. Anything other than a steering wheel with a huge number of possible positions will cause you to crash almost instantly.
The same goes for controlling systems made of people. You need to have an option for *every possible thing that can go wrong*.
Now, the problem with this is that people can do quite a lot of different things, and there are quite a lot of them. And that means quite a lot of different things can happen.
For example, say you’re a manager, and you manage three people, and you have to keep track of all the different relationships between them. And say the only real relationship you’re interested in is who’s ‘formed an alliance’. With three people, A, B and C, there are only three possible ‘alliances’ of two or more people – A&B vs C, A&C vs B, B&C vs A. With four people, that number increases to thirty-six. With five, two hundred. So imagine how many possible ‘alliances’ could be made in a country of sixty million… (hint – it’s several orders of magnitude higher than the number of subatomic particles in the known universe…)
If you want to control that, then, you need as many options open to you as there are possibilities. Clearly, no government has more options open to it than there are particles in the universe – and even if it did have, it would be impossible to find any way to choose between them. So what can a government do?
The simple answer is – prioritise, localise, and allow as much freedom as possible. The effect of Ashby’s law is that attempts at control actually lead to increased chaos (in fact one can formulate Ashby’s law as a corollary of the second law of thermodynamics – anyone who thinks they’ve found a perfect method of controlling people with no unforeseen results, that won’t lead to increased societal chaos, is saying something that is *exactly equivalent* to having invented a perpetual motion machine, or at best a time machine, and their claims should be treated with the same scepticism one would apply to those claims).
But we don’t care about some kinds of chaos – or shouldn’t, anyway. It might be possible for a hypothetical government to, for example, completely stop all murders from happening (a desirable kind of control), but at the expense of, say, a relaxation in what society considers an acceptable dress code (a kind of control that doesn’t matter to our hypothetical government). The key is to only try to control – at the national level – a small, relatively simple, subset of things, and accepting that this control *will* have unforeseen, probably bad, side-effects – so only trying to control something when the alternative is worse than the side-effects, rather than trying to micro-manage away the side-effects as the current government does.
You then devolve as much as possible to low levels – a regional government has to deal with fewer factors than a national one – and allow as much freedom as possible in implementing the details.
Incidentally, this is *not* saying ‘let the market decide’/'let corporations run everything’ – large corporations. some of which have a hundred thousand or more employees, and on top of that have millions or billions of customers, are just as inefficient as any government for exactly the same reasons (in fact, more inefficient – democratic governments have to pay at least token attention to the will of the people, which corporations don’t). It’s saying that if you’re going to have publicly funded education or healthcare – as I think you should – the decisions should be made by pupils and teachers, or patients and care staff, rather than being based on centrally-imposed one-size-fits-all targets.
This is also *NOT* saying that ‘progressive’ aims shouldn’t be pursued by government – in fact if governments stop trying to do stupid stuff like punish kids for swearing at old ladies or give everyone in the country an ID card, they’ll be able to concentrate on doing stuff like health services and education *properly*. Governments have power, but it’s not unlimited, and the problem comes when they think it is…
But what does this have to do with Darkseid and Doctor Who? Find out tomorrow
Linkblogging for 01/09/09
Just a very quick one here – I had an insomniac night last night, and a long work day, so I can barely see the screen. Here’s some links…
For those of you who are reading my Hyperpost series, Pillock has a response, on Crisis On Infinite Earths, which you need to read…
Tim at the Hurting looks at Daredevil 500, while David at Vibrational Match compares a Darwyn Cooke cover with a panel from Batman: Year One
Laurie Penny on the recent scaremongering about how – shock! horror! – black people have babies too…
The artist formerly known as the Fortress Keeper has returned
Millennium on anonymous blogging
And finally Wesley at Superdoomedplanet has some words on the monstrousness of those opposing public healthcare in the US.
To which I’d like to add – I’ve had to ban people from commenting on this site three times in total, and two of them were commenters on my healthcare post (one was today). Just to make this very, very, very clear:
If you are personally abusive to a named individual, especially my friends or wife, you will be banned.
If you make racist, sexist, homophobic, disablist or transphobic comments – and *I* decided what does and doesn’t count there, not you – you will be banned
But worst of all – If you presume bad faith on the part of those with whom you are talking – and especially if you pretend you know better than they do the reasons for their stated views, YOU WILL BE BANNED, and not only that, you will join a very small, select group of people for whom I have nothing other than contempt. As far as I am concerned, people should be presumed to be acting in good faith unless good evidence suggests otherwise, and they should be presumed to know their own reasons for their opinions, not to have secret reasons that only J. Random Commenter can actually see.
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