There’s always been room in GQ for some leeway. Hell, in the very thread we’re talking about here, another poster got nothing more than a mild admonition for a snarky post that was, IMO, at least as much of a violation of the rules as Habeed’s post.
Still, i think it’s good to keep GQ as clutter-free as possible. It really is designed for factual answers, and i think it can be one of the most useful forums on the boards, especially if you don’t have to wade through a bunch of extraneous bullshit to see the factual stuff.
And Habeed, if you’ve been admonished for this sort of stuff before, you probably need to be a bit more careful. This is especially true if you’ve run across the same person admonishing you on more than one occasion, because while they’re supposed to apply the rules impartially, the mods are human, and are as prone to partiality and grudges as anyone else on the boards. And while your own indiscretions add up over time, with patterns of behavior often cited as a reason for discipline, any error of judgment a mod happens to make is treated de novo, with no consideration of whether the person in question might have fucked up once or ten times or 100 times before.
I think, actually, that the most problematic warning in the thread you’re talking about wasn’t the one given to you; it was the one given to race_to_the_bottom.
Emphasis mine.
If the post deserves a warning by itself, that’s fine. But the highlighted section is completely unfair. I have, on literally hundreds of occasions, been reading through a thread, come to a post i wanted to respond to, and hit the “Quote” button without reading the rest of the thread. If you do that, there’s every reason to believe that you will not see a mod note or a warning. Mods often excuse their own omissions using the (very reasonable) argument that they don’t read every post; i think the same benefit of the doubt should be extended to posters as well. Especially if race_to_the_bottom, unlike Habeed, had no history of political jabs in GQ.
I would also suggest that race_to_the_bottom’s post, while containing some political barbs at the beginning, is more factual than anything else. He’s talking about civil asset forfeiture here, and while i understand John Mace’s point about the use of the term “hopelessly,” i would argue that, if there’s a single law-enforcement policy in the United States that can accurately and factually be described as “hopelessly corrupt” (at least in its current iteration), it is the process of civil asset forfeiture. The ACLU says it’s corrupt; the Cato institute says it’s corrupt; John Oliver says it’s corrupt; Democrats say it’s corrupt; Republicans say it’s corrupt; conservatives and libertarians and liberals all say it’s corrupt.