Raucous? I don't believe I've ever encountered raucous.

Thank you for the warning, but the views of my friends and acquaintances are well-known to me by now, and I don't foresee my opinion of them changing based on that - barring any clearly unforgivable behaviour, or course. They are people with good qualities, in addition to the bad, and I choose to believe that what's good in there can be nursed into something with more substance.

In short, people can be terribly simple to manipulate, if you just know them well enough to know what button to push.