Some good points up top, and some not-so-good-ones.
To Diesel: Yes, it’s an off-topic forum, and yes, everyone has a right to post what they want. No argument there. It’s the sheer volume that’s bothering me here. See, I was cool for the first, oh, half a year or so. But lately, it’s kind of gotten on my nerves to have this become basically the Half-Iraq-and-Half-All-Other-O/T Forum. You complain about Patricia’s movie posts? Take a look at the number of movie posts that have been put up in the past two months or so, and then compare it to the number of Iraq-related posts. I think you’ll see a fairly large disparity. Furthermore, there’s rarely more than ONE post about any given movie. I think that if people were to post over and over about the same fuckin’ movie for months on end, there’d be some complaints.
Furthermore, a lot of posts that start out as being not specifically about Iraq get highjacked and sucked into the “debate” - as was evidenced by your response (pretty knee-jerk immediate, too - it was the second one) to the guy who asked what readers were members of the Canadian army. Notice that no one logged on and said, “Hey, did anyone see that WWII movie …?” on that thread.
So I think your comparison is a bit, um, off.
Oh, and yes, I’m arrogant. And you are…what, exactly? 
To iscariot: Bud, I actually like you. I think that a lot of what you have to say on a lot of issues makes quite a bit of sense. Even if I don’t agree with you 100% sometimes, I can at least see what seems to me to be an intelligent point of view behind it.
However, I think that your “clique” comment above was unwarranted. At this point, it’s basically impossible to count the number of times I’ve given good advice to people who’ve posted on the T/N board - and the vast majority of them have not been friends of mine. My only criteria are that the post be literate, somewhat intelligent, and not lazy. In the majority of these cases, I have received no thanks for my input. So I’m not really sure what your point is.
Also, I don’t see you over on the T/N board giving advice very often, so I’m not overly worried about criticism on that point coming from your direction. Now if it were Eric Cressey, or Tampa-Terry, then I’d think about it. But you? Nah.
To US=GG: Think about going to a gym, any gym, and having them play the Star Spangled Banner over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and …
That’s what reading your posts on this forum is like.
People, no one - least of all me - is trying to limit anyone’s freedom of speech. What I’m talking about is excessive repetition of that freedom. If you can’t see the difference, I ask you to imagine a forum in which I post the results of each and every chess game that I play. That would be about one or two every other day. Then the same group of people come on and start to tell me about how I made bad moves. Another person or two comes on and defends my moves. This goes on interminably, for months. Every time you look at the front page of the forum, there’s another damn chess game. No, you don’t have to read it. No, you’re not going to PM the T-Mag staff and ask them to remove the damn things.
But you might end up, after months of this, asking me to show a little restraint.
As I’m asking you.
