Nutters and Babblers and Freaks, O My!

Hey, gang. We're just a couple days away from what could very well be the biggest thing to happen in the lifetime of any living Ricardian, and, understandably, we are talking about how to behave come Monday. I have been following the discussions of what to say, and, perhaps more cogently, what NOT to say, for some time now, and it seems to me that this might be a good place to look at the matter in context. I trust you will indulge a bit of wool-gathering; if not, the abbreviation "tl;dr" stands for "too long; didn't read". (Use it wherever, no charge, you're family.)

The Internet is only the birthright of people who are not yet legally permitted to smoke. For those of us who remember the Reagan/Thatcher era personally, the ability to communicate with anyone anywhere, instantly and without restriction, is unprecedented, and likely daunting. Reading the comments on the average Yahoo! News story (or, Goddess forfend, YouTube videos) is enough to make one seriously question the notion that the Creator endowed us with the ability to reason. That we who grew up learning to be courteous to older people and avoiding challenges to religious or political beliefs at the dinner table are, perhaps, aghast at unfiltered, uncensored, unrestricted access to the human hive mind cannot be regarded as entirely an astonishment. (This doesn't really cause a Net-savvy 15-year-old to freak out, although I am kind of worried that they will go through life being shocked at expressions of common courtesy.)

We spend a lot of time being apprehensive about how we're coming across on the Web; it seems as though that apprehension often overpowers our sense of how fortunate we are that this technology has enabled all of us to find friends with whom to discuss our exotic, rare obsession. If opera-glove fetishists have a home on the Web, why not people tantalized by the potential in the story of an enlightened monarch whose lease had all too short a date?

The only thing that has changed about human nature in the Internet age, as opposed to the BC (Before Compuserve) era, is that everyone's quirks, foibles, interests, and passions are fairly likely to have been recorded in semipermanence in the vast, never-closed warehouse of the Web. I have, on occasion, lost my temper in highly-charged discussions of things that would look astoundingly arcane to those who simply do not understand the importance of which Ford truck leaf springs were superior, the '47 or the '53.

We generally exhibit the phenomenon I might as well call "Web-shy": that is, reluctance to commit ourselves to an expressions of a deeply-held opinion backed with time, effort, research, and insight, lest some drive-by character assassin on Facebook point and laugh. It's even more tempting to hide behind a pseudonym and make genteelly general comments when the topic under discussion is already so poorly understood outside we few, we happy band of experts in esoterica: say, rabid Richard reputation rehabilitators.

Yeah, so Ricardians have a rep for being ladies of a certain age madly in love with a guy who's been under the ground for half a millennium. It may help to realize that, throughout most of human history, any impulse toward social justice has been derided as the province of unbalanced, love-starved women: this includes Christianity, the suffrage movement, efforts to eradicate poverty, temperance, Transcendentalism, the abolition of slavery, and feminism, along with a host of others I can't remember just this second. You all know the slurs: "All they need is a good fill-in-the-blank and they'll quit making trouble." No doubt, lots of observers said the same thing of Joan of Arc that they did of Mrs. Pankhurst.

We need not go into specifics about what men who are similarly motivated by a wish to support progress are called; suffice it to say that the slurs compare men to women, or invoke homophobia. (Both of them are weakening as insults, as they should, and I look forward to the day when the last misogynist homophobe is greeted with one last annoyed, "Dude, seriously?" before the rest of the planet turns its collective back to the disintegrating fossil.)

In that sense, we could argue that every bray from a threatened jackass means we're on the right track. Thing is, those who insisted that the cause of justice is crucially important, no matter how long deferred or how profoundly neglected, have been pathbreakers in the service of revolution after revolution that unlocks the potential of the human race a painfully liberated drop at a time. You guys are here because a man who was motivated by vast faith to turn his considerable talents toward the cause of improving human society reigned for a pitifully short time, and was vilified by his thoroughly inadequate successor for doing so. If justice is important--and no one who is here would be here if they thought it didn't matter--then the truth about an exemplar of justice is also important.

Part of that is being a member of the curious, quirky, differently-opinioned human race, in which three people in a room might well constitute the seed of a new political party, plus a splinter group. And part of being a well-rounded human is to do things like speculate about whether mysterious music wafting through a ruined castle at twilight was coming from an insinuating shard of spacetime, or some snickering prankster with a hidden CD player. We have a habit of speculating about Richard's life, and we also have a habit of speculating about his afterlife. It doesn't make us either insightful or credulous; it makes us curious, as humans are at their best.

In the dear dead days of the Sixties (which, before it fractured into a million separate concerns and succumbed to the hazards of chemically-enhanced searches for enlightenment, had some damn fine ideas about how to build a more just and equitable society), there was this wonderful saying: "Let your freak flag fly." Freakiness laid the tracks for the civil rights movement, arena rock, women in the workforce, environmental activism, gay rights, and the very computing technology that enables us to meet to discuss a forward-thinking gent whose reaction to the Internet would probably have been exultant. I don't apologize for regretting bitterly the loss of a ruler with such incredible potential, nor do I back away from any part of the discussion because I'm afraid of looking like a mockable fanboi (or the non-gender-identified equivalent). The idiots are out there (generally, commenting on YouTube), and if I keep my mouth shut because of their potential reaction, my vocal cords will atrophy from disuse. And anyway, how bad is it, really, to say something that can be easily derided by an ignoranus? (That's a wonderful term meaning someone who's both stupid and an a--well, no call to get vulgar, I guess.)

Let us say, for sake of argument, that Monday's announcement is the solution to one of the highest-profile mysteries in the colorful, fascinating pageant that is English history. We already know that the Greyfriars Warrior was not a hunchback and did not have a withered arm. If the informal cabal of More, Vergil, Rous, Holinshed, and Shakespeare got that detail wrong, what else might they have gotten wrong? And if someone who is not currently well versed in the history of Richard III decides to seek additional information, where will s/he go? It's very likely that seekers will end up here. And, personally, I'd feel a lot more comfortable asking questions if I knew that all speculations were treated seriously, without self-consciousness or wondering how those who are not part of the group will regard the discussion. I don't believe there is any such thing as a stupid question, or a line of inquiry that should not be pursued because of the potential for mockery from outsiders who haven't done the homework and still insist on being allowed to audit the class.

Er... anyway, thanks for letting me go on at such length (if you did). We now return to the discussion, which has been fiery at times, complex and challenging at others, but never, NEVER less than fascinating.

McJohn, a superb post.  Thank you
 
Liz


________________________________
From: mcjohn_wt_net <mcjohn@...>
To:
Sent: Saturday, 2 February 2013, 1:22
Subject: Nutters and Babblers and Freaks, O My!

 
Hey, gang. We're just a couple days away from what could very well be the biggest thing to happen in the lifetime of any living Ricardian, and, understandably, we are talking about how to behave come Monday. I have been following the discussions of what to say, and, perhaps more cogently, what NOT to say, for some time now, and it seems to me that this might be a good place to look at the matter in context. I trust you will indulge a bit of wool-gathering; if not, the abbreviation "tl;dr" stands for "too long; didn't read". (Use it wherever, no charge, you're family.)

The Internet is only the birthright of people who are not yet legally permitted to smoke. For those of us who remember the Reagan/Thatcher era personally, the ability to communicate with anyone anywhere, instantly and without restriction, is unprecedented, and likely daunting. Reading the comments on the average Yahoo! News story (or, Goddess forfend, YouTube videos) is enough to make one seriously question the notion that the Creator endowed us with the ability to reason. That we who grew up learning to be courteous to older people and avoiding challenges to religious or political beliefs at the dinner table are, perhaps, aghast at unfiltered, uncensored, unrestricted access to the human hive mind cannot be regarded as entirely an astonishment. (This doesn't really cause a Net-savvy 15-year-old to freak out, although I am kind of worried that they will go through life being shocked at expressions of common courtesy.)

We spend a lot of time being apprehensive about how we're coming across on the Web; it seems as though that apprehension often overpowers our sense of how fortunate we are that this technology has enabled all of us to find friends with whom to discuss our exotic, rare obsession. If opera-glove fetishists have a home on the Web, why not people tantalized by the potential in the story of an enlightened monarch whose lease had all too short a date?

The only thing that has changed about human nature in the Internet age, as opposed to the BC (Before Compuserve) era, is that everyone's quirks, foibles, interests, and passions are fairly likely to have been recorded in semipermanence in the vast, never-closed warehouse of the Web. I have, on occasion, lost my temper in highly-charged discussions of things that would look astoundingly arcane to those who simply do not understand the importance of which Ford truck leaf springs were superior, the '47 or the '53.

We generally exhibit the phenomenon I might as well call "Web-shy": that is, reluctance to commit ourselves to an expressions of a deeply-held opinion backed with time, effort, research, and insight, lest some drive-by character assassin on Facebook point and laugh. It's even more tempting to hide behind a pseudonym and make genteelly general comments when the topic under discussion is already so poorly understood outside we few, we happy band of experts in esoterica: say, rabid Richard reputation rehabilitators.

Yeah, so Ricardians have a rep for being ladies of a certain age madly in love with a guy who's been under the ground for half a millennium. It may help to realize that, throughout most of human history, any impulse toward social justice has been derided as the province of unbalanced, love-starved women: this includes Christianity, the suffrage movement, efforts to eradicate poverty, temperance, Transcendentalism, the abolition of slavery, and feminism, along with a host of others I can't remember just this second. You all know the slurs: "All they need is a good fill-in-the-blank and they'll quit making trouble." No doubt, lots of observers said the same thing of Joan of Arc that they did of Mrs. Pankhurst.

We need not go into specifics about what men who are similarly motivated by a wish to support progress are called; suffice it to say that the slurs compare men to women, or invoke homophobia. (Both of them are weakening as insults, as they should, and I look forward to the day when the last misogynist homophobe is greeted with one last annoyed, "Dude, seriously?" before the rest of the planet turns its collective back to the disintegrating fossil.)

In that sense, we could argue that every bray from a threatened jackass means we're on the right track. Thing is, those who insisted that the cause of justice is crucially important, no matter how long deferred or how profoundly neglected, have been pathbreakers in the service of revolution after revolution that unlocks the potential of the human race a painfully liberated drop at a time. You guys are here because a man who was motivated by vast faith to turn his considerable talents toward the cause of improving human society reigned for a pitifully short time, and was vilified by his thoroughly inadequate successor for doing so. If justice is important--and no one who is here would be here if they thought it didn't matter--then the truth about an exemplar of justice is also important.

Part of that is being a member of the curious, quirky, differently-opinioned human race, in which three people in a room might well constitute the seed of a new political party, plus a splinter group. And part of being a well-rounded human is to do things like speculate about whether mysterious music wafting through a ruined castle at twilight was coming from an insinuating shard of spacetime, or some snickering prankster with a hidden CD player. We have a habit of speculating about Richard's life, and we also have a habit of speculating about his afterlife. It doesn't make us either insightful or credulous; it makes us curious, as humans are at their best.

In the dear dead days of the Sixties (which, before it fractured into a million separate concerns and succumbed to the hazards of chemically-enhanced searches for enlightenment, had some damn fine ideas about how to build a more just and equitable society), there was this wonderful saying: "Let your freak flag fly." Freakiness laid the tracks for the civil rights movement, arena rock, women in the workforce, environmental activism, gay rights, and the very computing technology that enables us to meet to discuss a forward-thinking gent whose reaction to the Internet would probably have been exultant. I don't apologize for regretting bitterly the loss of a ruler with such incredible potential, nor do I back away from any part of the discussion because I'm afraid of looking like a mockable fanboi (or the non-gender-identified equivalent). The idiots are out there (generally, commenting on YouTube), and if I keep my mouth shut because of their potential
reaction, my vocal cords will atrophy from disuse. And anyway, how bad is it, really, to say something that can be easily derided by an ignoranus? (That's a wonderful term meaning someone who's both stupid and an a--well, no call to get vulgar, I guess.)

Let us say, for sake of argument, that Monday's announcement is the solution to one of the highest-profile mysteries in the colorful, fascinating pageant that is English history. We already know that the Greyfriars Warrior was not a hunchback and did not have a withered arm. If the informal cabal of More, Vergil, Rous, Holinshed, and Shakespeare got that detail wrong, what else might they have gotten wrong? And if someone who is not currently well versed in the history of Richard III decides to seek additional information, where will s/he go? It's very likely that seekers will end up here. And, personally, I'd feel a lot more comfortable asking questions if I knew that all speculations were treated seriously, without self-consciousness or wondering how those who are not part of the group will regard the discussion. I don't believe there is any such thing as a stupid question, or a line of inquiry that should not be pursued because of the potential for
mockery from outsiders who haven't done the homework and still insist on being allowed to audit the class.

Er... anyway, thanks for letting me go on at such length (if you did). We now return to the discussion, which has been fiery at times, complex and challenging at others, but never, NEVER less than fascinating.

I am in my mid thirties. As are some of my friends who are totally "into" Richard..... So I don't know why "women of certain age" keeps getting all the publicity for being eccentrics! I want such a distinction too! No fair being ageists!




________________________________
From: mcjohn_wt_net <mcjohn@...>
To:
Sent: Friday, February 1, 2013 8:22 PM
Subject: Nutters and Babblers and Freaks, O My!


 
Hey, gang. We're just a couple days away from what could very well be the biggest thing to happen in the lifetime of any living Ricardian, and, understandably, we are talking about how to behave come Monday. I have been following the discussions of what to say, and, perhaps more cogently, what NOT to say, for some time now, and it seems to me that this might be a good place to look at the matter in context. I trust you will indulge a bit of wool-gathering; if not, the abbreviation "tl;dr" stands for "too long; didn't read". (Use it wherever, no charge, you're family.)

The Internet is only the birthright of people who are not yet legally permitted to smoke. For those of us who remember the Reagan/Thatcher era personally, the ability to communicate with anyone anywhere, instantly and without restriction, is unprecedented, and likely daunting. Reading the comments on the average Yahoo! News story (or, Goddess forfend, YouTube videos) is enough to make one seriously question the notion that the Creator endowed us with the ability to reason. That we who grew up learning to be courteous to older people and avoiding challenges to religious or political beliefs at the dinner table are, perhaps, aghast at unfiltered, uncensored, unrestricted access to the human hive mind cannot be regarded as entirely an astonishment. (This doesn't really cause a Net-savvy 15-year-old to freak out, although I am kind of worried that they will go through life being shocked at expressions of common courtesy.)

We spend a lot of time being apprehensive about how we're coming across on the Web; it seems as though that apprehension often overpowers our sense of how fortunate we are that this technology has enabled all of us to find friends with whom to discuss our exotic, rare obsession. If opera-glove fetishists have a home on the Web, why not people tantalized by the potential in the story of an enlightened monarch whose lease had all too short a date?

The only thing that has changed about human nature in the Internet age, as opposed to the BC (Before Compuserve) era, is that everyone's quirks, foibles, interests, and passions are fairly likely to have been recorded in semipermanence in the vast, never-closed warehouse of the Web. I have, on occasion, lost my temper in highly-charged discussions of things that would look astoundingly arcane to those who simply do not understand the importance of which Ford truck leaf springs were superior, the '47 or the '53.

We generally exhibit the phenomenon I might as well call "Web-shy": that is, reluctance to commit ourselves to an expressions of a deeply-held opinion backed with time, effort, research, and insight, lest some drive-by character assassin on Facebook point and laugh. It's even more tempting to hide behind a pseudonym and make genteelly general comments when the topic under discussion is already so poorly understood outside we few, we happy band of experts in esoterica: say, rabid Richard reputation rehabilitators.

Yeah, so Ricardians have a rep for being ladies of a certain age madly in love with a guy who's been under the ground for half a millennium. It may help to realize that, throughout most of human history, any impulse toward social justice has been derided as the province of unbalanced, love-starved women: this includes Christianity, the suffrage movement, efforts to eradicate poverty, temperance, Transcendentalism, the abolition of slavery, and feminism, along with a host of others I can't remember just this second. You all know the slurs: "All they need is a good fill-in-the-blank and they'll quit making trouble." No doubt, lots of observers said the same thing of Joan of Arc that they did of Mrs. Pankhurst.

We need not go into specifics about what men who are similarly motivated by a wish to support progress are called; suffice it to say that the slurs compare men to women, or invoke homophobia. (Both of them are weakening as insults, as they should, and I look forward to the day when the last misogynist homophobe is greeted with one last annoyed, "Dude, seriously?" before the rest of the planet turns its collective back to the disintegrating fossil.)

In that sense, we could argue that every bray from a threatened jackass means we're on the right track. Thing is, those who insisted that the cause of justice is crucially important, no matter how long deferred or how profoundly neglected, have been pathbreakers in the service of revolution after revolution that unlocks the potential of the human race a painfully liberated drop at a time. You guys are here because a man who was motivated by vast faith to turn his considerable talents toward the cause of improving human society reigned for a pitifully short time, and was vilified by his thoroughly inadequate successor for doing so. If justice is important--and no one who is here would be here if they thought it didn't matter--then the truth about an exemplar of justice is also important.

Part of that is being a member of the curious, quirky, differently-opinioned human race, in which three people in a room might well constitute the seed of a new political party, plus a splinter group. And part of being a well-rounded human is to do things like speculate about whether mysterious music wafting through a ruined castle at twilight was coming from an insinuating shard of spacetime, or some snickering prankster with a hidden CD player. We have a habit of speculating about Richard's life, and we also have a habit of speculating about his afterlife. It doesn't make us either insightful or credulous; it makes us curious, as humans are at their best.

In the dear dead days of the Sixties (which, before it fractured into a million separate concerns and succumbed to the hazards of chemically-enhanced searches for enlightenment, had some damn fine ideas about how to build a more just and equitable society), there was this wonderful saying: "Let your freak flag fly." Freakiness laid the tracks for the civil rights movement, arena rock, women in the workforce, environmental activism, gay rights, and the very computing technology that enables us to meet to discuss a forward-thinking gent whose reaction to the Internet would probably have been exultant. I don't apologize for regretting bitterly the loss of a ruler with such incredible potential, nor do I back away from any part of the discussion because I'm afraid of looking like a mockable fanboi (or the non-gender-identified equivalent). The idiots are out there (generally, commenting on YouTube), and if I keep my mouth shut because of their potential
reaction, my vocal cords will atrophy from disuse. And anyway, how bad is it, really, to say something that can be easily derided by an ignoranus? (That's a wonderful term meaning someone who's both stupid and an a--well, no call to get vulgar, I guess.)

Let us say, for sake of argument, that Monday's announcement is the solution to one of the highest-profile mysteries in the colorful, fascinating pageant that is English history. We already know that the Greyfriars Warrior was not a hunchback and did not have a withered arm. If the informal cabal of More, Vergil, Rous, Holinshed, and Shakespeare got that detail wrong, what else might they have gotten wrong? And if someone who is not currently well versed in the history of Richard III decides to seek additional information, where will s/he go? It's very likely that seekers will end up here. And, personally, I'd feel a lot more comfortable asking questions if I knew that all speculations were treated seriously, without self-consciousness or wondering how those who are not part of the group will regard the discussion. I don't believe there is any such thing as a stupid question, or a line of inquiry that should not be pursued because of the potential
for mockery from outsiders who haven't done the homework and still insist on being allowed to audit the class.

Er... anyway, thanks for letting me go on at such length (if you did). We now return to the discussion, which has been fiery at times, complex and challenging at others, but never, NEVER less than fascinating.

Love it...... I always loved R3!

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 2, 2013, at 3:31 PM, "Ishita Bandyo" <bandyoi@...<mailto:bandyoi@...>> wrote:



I am in my mid thirties. As are some of my friends who are totally "into" Richard..... So I don't know why "women of certain age" keeps getting all the publicity for being eccentrics! I want such a distinction too! No fair being ageists!

________________________________
From: mcjohn_wt_net mcjohn@...<mailto:mcjohn%40oplink.net>>
To: <mailto:%40yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, February 1, 2013 8:22 PM
Subject: Nutters and Babblers and Freaks, O My!



Hey, gang. We're just a couple days away from what could very well be the biggest thing to happen in the lifetime of any living Ricardian, and, understandably, we are talking about how to behave come Monday. I have been following the discussions of what to say, and, perhaps more cogently, what NOT to say, for some time now, and it seems to me that this might be a good place to look at the matter in context. I trust you will indulge a bit of wool-gathering; if not, the abbreviation "tl;dr" stands for "too long; didn't read". (Use it wherever, no charge, you're family.)

The Internet is only the birthright of people who are not yet legally permitted to smoke. For those of us who remember the Reagan/Thatcher era personally, the ability to communicate with anyone anywhere, instantly and without restriction, is unprecedented, and likely daunting. Reading the comments on the average Yahoo! News story (or, Goddess forfend, YouTube videos) is enough to make one seriously question the notion that the Creator endowed us with the ability to reason. That we who grew up learning to be courteous to older people and avoiding challenges to religious or political beliefs at the dinner table are, perhaps, aghast at unfiltered, uncensored, unrestricted access to the human hive mind cannot be regarded as entirely an astonishment. (This doesn't really cause a Net-savvy 15-year-old to freak out, although I am kind of worried that they will go through life being shocked at expressions of common courtesy.)

We spend a lot of time being apprehensive about how we're coming across on the Web; it seems as though that apprehension often overpowers our sense of how fortunate we are that this technology has enabled all of us to find friends with whom to discuss our exotic, rare obsession. If opera-glove fetishists have a home on the Web, why not people tantalized by the potential in the story of an enlightened monarch whose lease had all too short a date?

The only thing that has changed about human nature in the Internet age, as opposed to the BC (Before Compuserve) era, is that everyone's quirks, foibles, interests, and passions are fairly likely to have been recorded in semipermanence in the vast, never-closed warehouse of the Web. I have, on occasion, lost my temper in highly-charged discussions of things that would look astoundingly arcane to those who simply do not understand the importance of which Ford truck leaf springs were superior, the '47 or the '53.

We generally exhibit the phenomenon I might as well call "Web-shy": that is, reluctance to commit ourselves to an expressions of a deeply-held opinion backed with time, effort, research, and insight, lest some drive-by character assassin on Facebook point and laugh. It's even more tempting to hide behind a pseudonym and make genteelly general comments when the topic under discussion is already so poorly understood outside we few, we happy band of experts in esoterica: say, rabid Richard reputation rehabilitators.

Yeah, so Ricardians have a rep for being ladies of a certain age madly in love with a guy who's been under the ground for half a millennium. It may help to realize that, throughout most of human history, any impulse toward social justice has been derided as the province of unbalanced, love-starved women: this includes Christianity, the suffrage movement, efforts to eradicate poverty, temperance, Transcendentalism, the abolition of slavery, and feminism, along with a host of others I can't remember just this second. You all know the slurs: "All they need is a good fill-in-the-blank and they'll quit making trouble." No doubt, lots of observers said the same thing of Joan of Arc that they did of Mrs. Pankhurst.

We need not go into specifics about what men who are similarly motivated by a wish to support progress are called; suffice it to say that the slurs compare men to women, or invoke homophobia. (Both of them are weakening as insults, as they should, and I look forward to the day when the last misogynist homophobe is greeted with one last annoyed, "Dude, seriously?" before the rest of the planet turns its collective back to the disintegrating fossil.)

In that sense, we could argue that every bray from a threatened jackass means we're on the right track. Thing is, those who insisted that the cause of justice is crucially important, no matter how long deferred or how profoundly neglected, have been pathbreakers in the service of revolution after revolution that unlocks the potential of the human race a painfully liberated drop at a time. You guys are here because a man who was motivated by vast faith to turn his considerable talents toward the cause of improving human society reigned for a pitifully short time, and was vilified by his thoroughly inadequate successor for doing so. If justice is important--and no one who is here would be here if they thought it didn't matter--then the truth about an exemplar of justice is also important.

Part of that is being a member of the curious, quirky, differently-opinioned human race, in which three people in a room might well constitute the seed of a new political party, plus a splinter group. And part of being a well-rounded human is to do things like speculate about whether mysterious music wafting through a ruined castle at twilight was coming from an insinuating shard of spacetime, or some snickering prankster with a hidden CD player. We have a habit of speculating about Richard's life, and we also have a habit of speculating about his afterlife. It doesn't make us either insightful or credulous; it makes us curious, as humans are at their best.

In the dear dead days of the Sixties (which, before it fractured into a million separate concerns and succumbed to the hazards of chemically-enhanced searches for enlightenment, had some damn fine ideas about how to build a more just and equitable society), there was this wonderful saying: "Let your freak flag fly." Freakiness laid the tracks for the civil rights movement, arena rock, women in the workforce, environmental activism, gay rights, and the very computing technology that enables us to meet to discuss a forward-thinking gent whose reaction to the Internet would probably have been exultant. I don't apologize for regretting bitterly the loss of a ruler with such incredible potential, nor do I back away from any part of the discussion because I'm afraid of looking like a mockable fanboi (or the non-gender-identified equivalent). The idiots are out there (generally, commenting on YouTube), and if I keep my mouth shut because of their potential
reaction, my vocal cords will atrophy from disuse. And anyway, how bad is it, really, to say something that can be easily derided by an ignoranus? (That's a wonderful term meaning someone who's both stupid and an a--well, no call to get vulgar, I guess.)

Let us say, for sake of argument, that Monday's announcement is the solution to one of the highest-profile mysteries in the colorful, fascinating pageant that is English history. We already know that the Greyfriars Warrior was not a hunchback and did not have a withered arm. If the informal cabal of More, Vergil, Rous, Holinshed, and Shakespeare got that detail wrong, what else might they have gotten wrong? And if someone who is not currently well versed in the history of Richard III decides to seek additional information, where will s/he go? It's very likely that seekers will end up here. And, personally, I'd feel a lot more comfortable asking questions if I knew that all speculations were treated seriously, without self-consciousness or wondering how those who are not part of the group will regard the discussion. I don't believe there is any such thing as a stupid question, or a line of inquiry that should not be pursued because of the potential
for mockery from outsiders who haven't done the homework and still insist on being allowed to audit the class.

Er... anyway, thanks for letting me go on at such length (if you did). We now return to the discussion, which has been fiery at times, complex and challenging at others, but never, NEVER less than fascinating.