Yes, really. There was a specifc reference to that comment but also the thread in general, which didn't mention shills, and a reply which didn't reference that

Yes, really. There was a specifc reference to that comment but also the thread in general, which didn't mention shills, and a reply which didn't reference that comment, but the thread in general. The way stories critical of some, uhm, vaguely important developments in China regularly get flagged off the front page, while utter fluff about China winning some "race" or other being on the front page every second day is quite something. I don't know what the karma threshold is for flagging stories, but it sure isn't 17000. Of course, as that article notes: > David Wertime of Foreign Policy argued that the narrative where a large army of paid Internet commentators are behind China's poor public dialogue with its critics is "Orwellian, yet strangely comforting". Rather, many of the Chinese netizens spreading nationalist sentiment online are not paid, but often mean what they say. Either way, shill or useful idiot [1] or just independent nonthinker; it's still poor dialogue, as a result of poor reasoning and/or underdeveloped empathy, in defense of abominable practices -- and if someone can shrug off people being put into camps, they can shrug off being called names. Again, this didn't even happen here, but even if it had happened.. not that I find that constructive, of course it's also destructive and poor, talking about how "the shills are out" is totally useless and more toxic than shitty arguments I can at least disagree with -- but I still reject your claim that that'd be "offensive". Maybe for you, my priorities are vastly different. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot