in any case that thread there once about a specific case and incident has now been entirely hijacked by the group insisting on elevating the male circumcision to the equivalence and minimizing the impact and the severity of the prevalent forms… even inventing the idea of hadiths supporting the concept for the female pleasure…
Speaking only for me, I’d like to see this specific type of hijack stopped, even in the pit. Maybe make a 6 month rule against bringing up circumcision in a FGM thread (and vice versa) since they’re totally separate issues. After 6 months, see how many one-track trolls are banned or got bored and left, and see if this habit has spread to the misinformed non-troll of keeping the two unrelated topics apart.
Imagine if baking brownies were a regularly brought up topic* but EVERY time you tried to discuss it, a small but vocal group of people kept bringing up the French Revolution (because Louis XIV=Marie Antoinette=“Let them eat cake”=cake equals brownies. Which has about the same correlation between them as FGM and circumcision) to the point that it’s impossible to get an actual discussion of brownie recipes.
And for our oppressed male supremacists, it should go both ways: want to talk about how having a teeny, tiny scrap of skin snipped off when you were 7 days old is the reason you live alone in your mommy’s basement, go for it and apply the following to anyone who brings up FGM
As a penalty for conflating the two topics, I'd suggest the following:
First offense: A warning that the next offense will be a suspension.
Second offense: A 2-week suspension.
Third offense: Ban them.
And I'd be perfectly comfortable cutting out step 2,
but the SDMB has a tendency to move slowly on bannations.
I know mods don’t take user votes into consideration, but at least this is a specific proposal for the mods that the users can comment on, because you’re right Bone, there’s a “Do…um…something” attitude that might leave the mods saying “Ok. What precisely do you want done?” (like you did)
*And, dammit, it should be. Someone start a bunch of brownie recipe threads in CS this instant. 
Why is this simply not being modded as a hijack/threadshit using the existing rules? Why would we need a special rule for this? I’m asking, no snark or sarcasm…I really don’t get it.
I’ll admit I haven’t looked at the thread in question and generally don’t participate in those sorts of threads.
I’d be happy with a simple ruling that circumcision IS a hijack/off-topic for threads about FGM. Right now, there are a lot of people who don’t think that.
In an ideal world, I’d like some people to realize that their behavior is rooted in a compulsive low-level grinding misogyny that seeks to minimize female-centric issues, or redefine them as variants of male norms.
My preference would be to craft general rules, rather than specific ones about FGM. If we have general rules that exist that already cover the particular fact pattern then I think we should rely on those rather than craft additional specific rules. Only when the general rules aren’t sufficient should we look to add additional ones.
I think the biggest impediment is that the Pit isn’t going to have strong rules against thread derailment. I’m not Miller, and he can correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s just the nature of that forum. Posters there can self police both through ignoring offenders and shouting down offenders. That’s the nature of that forum - less moderation, less rules, less civility are par for the course.
In other forums, that type of staying in the lane discussion can easily be had. See post #42 in this thread.
I agree, it doesn’t need to be a new rule, it just needs to actually be moderated. This thread is complaining about how it is NOT being moderated.
As a rule, I’d agree that “no specialty rules” is a good plan, but once every few months we have a topic that keeps getting derailed, and this would be a tool for the mod’s arsenal for such a topic.
As for the Pit, I normally think it should be mostly a free-for-all, but again, for the hot-button trollish/misogynist threads, given the constant attempt to pollute the topic, I think this might warrant a short-term exemption. I’d like to rant about say, this crazy-assed butcher who roofies unwitting girls without a half dozen usual suspects coming in to say “yeah, but every day men are MUTILATED!!! and it ruined my life! What about that!!!” and I don’t post it 'cause I think “Why bother?”
Yes, JDT.
Thanks. I thought he was just plain banned, not topic banned. (Granted that was a good 18 years ago or more)
That second paragraph may be the best expression of the general issue that I’ve read. Spot on, Manda JO. It’s also an excellent reason why it should be a general policy.
I could be wrong, but I am not aware that Jack Dean Tyler was ever specifically topic-banned from discussing circumcision. At least, he was talking about it in a Pit thread the same day he was banned. I do recall, however, him being told not to hijack other threads about his obsession.
My recollection agrees with you, Colibri.
Whatshisname…the anti-Bush guy…the one who thought Bush II had (literally) a phony accent for purposes of (literal) mind-control…dammit, what was his name? Anyway, he was limited to one thread on Bush in the Pit at a time, and that was more-or-less concurrent with JDT, IIRC.
I think the first actual topic banned person was way later than JDT; I think it was Evil Captor who kept dropping his gross bondage/rape fetishes in completely unrelated threads all over the board and was eventually told to either limit it to one thread or maybe to knock it off all together.
Reeder.
I believe handy’s ban on medical advice predated that topic ban by some years.
Someone should write down the annals of Straight Dope History. I’ve been here for years but I don’t know some of these stories .
Upon reflection, I retract my claim about JDT being topic banned.
You have a weird way of agreeing with someone:)
Thanks! It was driving me nuts! 
I completely forgot Handy. He did predate Evil Captor by many years.
Babale: Handy was one of those posters who HAD to be the first to answer questions. HAD TO BE. Therefore, in the pre-Google days, someone would ask a medical question and Handy would pick a random search engine and take whatever result it spit out first, regardless. He didn’t actually read what the search engine popped up with, so you could ask a question about chicken pox, and he’d post a link to a chicken recipe. Or the origin of the phrase “A pox on your house”.
There used to be a poster here (DuckDuckGoose) who was magic with pre-Google search engines. She could find exactly what you were looking for. Handy was the opposite of her.
Yeah. He was the first person to 10,000 posts, too. And he knew it. When he got to 9,999 he waited for a week or so to make that next one. What he was waiting for, who knew?
Checking, even now, 15 years after he was banned - last activity 11/26/2003 - he’s STILL at AVG Posts per Day: 2.43.
Prolific and empty.
I think it possible to enforce that same kind of hijacking rule in the Pit. That thread was a rant against a specific incident from the news, but was being hijacked not by people trying to defend FGM, but men trying to decry “the hypocrisy of being anti-FGM while supporting male circumcision”. That’s a thread-shit. Maybe once to make the point, but not changing the topic to debate whether the two are equivalent or not, yet again. Not necessary in that thread.
Let’s hope the moderators can be more aware of these types of hijacks and catch them early.