I agree that this is a warning in search of a problem.
When I got an unnecessary warning several weeks back, I asked Jonathan Chance to keep his warning finger outside the trigger guard. I’ll reiterate that request here. Such haste toward issuing warnings does not do the board a service; it does not improve the tone of debate; it does not increase civility. All it does is frustrate posters and make us cranky.
I wonder how many other threads will find me, LHoD, Bone, and Shodan (along with others) all on the same page? 
I agree. Getting warned annoys people, it rarely improves their behavior. Afterwards there is a tendency to look upon the staff as foes, rather than allies.
That’s not what LHoD was saying. He was talking about unnecessary warnings, not warnings in general. I think they more often than not do improve behavior.
Well, yes, that’s what I mean also, also questionable warnings.
Look if you post “Fuck off and die you fuckhead” in GD, that’s one thing.
Posting a bad joke in GD, riffing off a common meme on any message board, that’s another thing.
A warning should never be a surprise and should not be something that is seriously debated here in ATMB.
That sort of warning does* no one* any good.
Heh–I just saw Jonathan had made the latest post in Great Debates, and I was like, “boy, I bet he’s issuing another warning, let’s go see.”
Okay, sometimes, warnings are justified :).
Not just warned, banned.
I concur. I see more of a problem in threads about Clinton where a poster will put up a non sequitur about Trump. Will they start being warned?
Only if it’s excessive.
I know CarnalK upthread said he didn’t see any notes or such about adaher and such incidents but there’s already a warning or two for injecting excessive Clinton-bashing into threads. In fact, all of his warnings have been for some form of political hijack or other.
A normal poster, one without such a record, might be allowed to slide. But adaher’s habit of trying to skew everything into his pet causing increases sensitivity to it.
But in this particular instance, the discussion started as a comparison between the honesty of the candidates, which seems entirely on topic. It meandered very slightly into a disagreement about how to evaluate the honesty of one of the candidates, but that seems like an awfully minor “hijack” for a warning. Considering that adaher doesn’t seem to be a “problem poster” by any means, and he wasn’t behaving poorly in any way except for perhaps a very minor hijack (even if it was similar to past hijacks), wouldn’t a mod note have been enough?
Maybe this thread should be merged with Controversial encounters between law-enforcement and civilians - the omnibus thread.
[All I will say here because this is not the Pit.]
IMHO being disliked by some doesn’t make him a “problem poster.” People who break rules consistently are problem posters.
And his warning history reflects that.
I also object to your naive One True Scotsman concepualization there (in general not of the OP’s subject). There have been plenty of people here over the years who, while they might not have piled up any (or many) warnings, would nonetheless be considered problem posters by many.
As someone who has recently made the elections sub-forum my second home I really feel that calling one thread the Hillary thread and the other one the Trump thread is really more of a distinction than a difference, and that so-called transgressions such as the one that led to adaher’s warning are inevitable and are just going to multiply over the next two months. I certainly respect the point that Jonathan Chance was trying to make however, for all intents and purposes, they are more or less duplicate threads, so can we not just treat them as hijack-related-warning free zones?
Naive One True Scotsman or semantics :D? i think I’ve been pretty consistent over the last ~16 years*. I disagreed with the banning of annoying-ass pests like december over something trivial, despite him driving me up the fucking wall with his horrible, bullshit-style of argumentation. And I agreed with the banning of posters like collounsbury, who I liked and appreciated, but who just couldn’t keep his shit together.
I’ll agree to disagree.
Doh!! “can we not just” = “can we just” Sorry!:smack:
THanks for the defense, folks, and at first I was surprised by the warning, but then I realized that I was getting us into a long discussion about something that didn’t really matter for the purposes of the thread.
Donald Trump is less honest than Hillary Clinton. I was just offended by yet another poster using Politifact to try to prove something that is not provable with data and that led us into a pretty long discussion that was probably best for another thread. If Trump had been some paragon of honesty who just got his facts wrong a lot then I think the discussion would have been appropriate for the Trump thread, but instead of being about Trump(or Clinton) for me it became about that “analysis” that always gets my goat when I see it posted. so Jonathan’s warning got me to just knock it off on that discussion.
But I would say you weren’t remotely the sole driver of that hijack so a “stop it everyone” would have been more appropriate. Since the mods seem to be missing this thread, adaher do recall receiving a note to stop making threads all about Hillary? As I mentioned a couple times, I couldn’t find it.
Cite?