In the “Is the doom and gloom environmental movement another expression of moral/religious anxiety?” thread on the “In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)” forum, grude started a topic that has only peripherally to do with global warming and I accidentally hijacked it and that’s all the last dozen or so posts have been about.
Besides feeling bad about it, I just want to say that maybe people out there could be aware of this and not veer into topics like global warming that are very hot and get everyone talking if the OP is about something else, especially if the OP is about something only slightly different.
What other topics does this regularly happen to? If a list could be made, then maybe there could be a protocol where hot topics can be cleaned out and restarted in a new thread, or at least people could be aware and start new threads when a peripheral topic inspires someone to talk about a hot topic.
Ultimately, this would make for a more interesting (not to mention neater) forum.
I have edited the title to make the subject of the thread clearer.
Basically, it’s up to the moderators to make sure that threads are not hijacked into other subjects. If you believe a thread is being hijacked, then report the post(s).
Besides global warming, other hot button topics that are likely to cause a thread to veer out of control are gun control, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, declawing cats, and the Game of Thrones.
Did not want to comment here, but since the OP did mention this thread on GD I have to mention that global warming does belong in that thread mentioned by the OP because many deniers out there and even posters on the SDMB do continue to use that tired argument about this being based on religion and faith “just like many environmentalists of the past” as many who are misguided do think.
IIRC even one poster got a mod note by repeating that accusation many times in a thread when an environmentalist issue like AGW was mentioned in a past discussion.
And it had to be noticed too that AGW was mentioned early in the thread pointed in the OP before the poster posted that weird tirade.