I realise this is now moot but :
This is classic kettle logic - either you didn’t see it, OR you didn’t understand what you did see. Both can’t be true at the same time.
Which in practice means it’s allowed to be a troll, as long as you are trolling for a “popular” position. And that people with unpopular options will be called trolls whether they are or not.
That sort of thing is why I long since stopped taking the term troll very seriously, here and elsewhere.
No, trolling is not allowed on any position, and sincere arguments are allowed on any position. It’s just that enforcement is tricky and asymmetric, because it’s not generally possible to directly determine sincerity. But if, for instance, a poster says “Nah, I was just saying that to get a rise out of you”, then they’re going to get moderated for trolling regardless of the position or their level of politeness.
Though, of course, someone who is attempting to troll by making a polite argument on a popular position is doing a very poor job of it.
They don’t have to be true at the same time. At the time he made the offending post he hadn’t seen it, but he eventually did see it and at that point he didn’t understand it. Pretty straightforward. The significance of the second point is that even if “didn’t see it” is not accepted as an excuse, “didn’t understand it” might be, as turned out to be the case.
If I could make a suggestion to the OP, it might be a good idea to read all posts before responding to any of them. Not just because of the possibility of missing some mod instructions, but because many times the thread has moved on by that point, and he (she?) ends up making a lot of posts which have already been addressed and/or duplicating points others have made. (This happens a lot.)
I want to also offer here that not seeing moderator guidance is not generally a defensible argument. Were that the case it would be difficult to moderate at all.
Posters are responsible for reading the posts in the threads in which they participate. If they choose not to do so and run afoul of moderation the fault is, in general, theirs.
I generally find Tomndebb to be pretty objective and able to separate his moderator hat from his participant hat in a thread. Sure, it might look bad but upon reflection, its not an out of bounds moderator instruction, I don’t like but its not out of bounds, and as Trinopus points out, I have to be willing to be subjected to a higher standard of behaviour if I am going to take an unpopular position.
I am not pleading bias just good faith ignorance, both of the existence of the moderation note and of its meaning.
I couldn’t figure out how to use the quote function in a different thread.
Thanks. The infraction was an error made in good faith.
Faith based moderation and posting? 
I agree generally but imagine a near simulpost. Surely that would be one of those, “it depends” 
That’s not the point - he can only appeal for leniency on one point or the other, not both at the same time.
Indeed. I know for sure I’ve seen cases where moderators have forgiven a poster for not following mod directions when the offending posts were made very soon after the directive was issued. This case–five minutes later–seems to fall into that category.
No reason for that. Of course he could. As indeed he successfully did.
Respectfully, had you led with this in your OP I suspect you’d have generated more sympathy and your claim would have looked more credible.
If I might suggest, you might next time just PMing JC say “I didn’t see the note at the time I was making my post and also the note is unclear for reasons XYZ”.
I obviously won’t speak for JC but had you done so I suspect he’d have rescinded the warning or just modified it to a note.
Obviously if you already did and he didn’t respond, what I said above should be disregarded.
However, if you didn’t, then started up a thread like this without first PMing the mod particularly with an OP worded the way you did, doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in those of us reading it.
I think that why he says “not generally a good argument” instead of “never” or even “rarely”.
Again, from personal experience, I’d say sending a PM right away with a reasonable explanation is vastly more likely to get a positive response from a mod then just opening up a thread like this.
“kettle” logic?
Source? Explanation/connection to your definition “either you didn’t see it…” ?
Never heard the word before. Good noun for type of common rhetorical get-around you point out.
wiki calls it: “argument in the alternative”
*Originating in the legal profession, argument in the alternative is a strategy in which a lawyer advances several competing (and possibly mutually exclusive) arguments in order to pre-empt objections by his adversary, with the goal of showing that regardless of interpretation there is no reasonable conclusion other than the advocate’s.
Bart Simpson’s classic “I didn’t do it, no one saw me do it, you can’t prove anything!” could be considered a somewhat humorous example."*
“I didnt see the post and I misunderstood it anyway” is a classic.
So, it’s like Johnny Cochran’s “Chewbacca defense,” then?
Nah, more like “I didn’t kill him, and it was self-defense if I did.”
No… not viable.
Self-defense generally requires an admission that your action killed along with the claim that your action was taken in self-defense.
I suppose we might find ourselves in this spot if there was some debate about which injury killed the victim, and the accused inflicted only one.