Lithuania evacuates its embassy in China

> cults are obviously more dangerous the larger they are.

And the biggest cult in the world is the CPP -- no, correction: Judging from some posters' claims here about how all of China fervently believes Taiwan must be "reunited" with the PRC, the biggest cult in the world is... the PRC.

Outmaneuver them. Let meme mean "jpeg screenshot from facebook" and choose a new, cooler word for meme. I'll even call it a "onrad" if you want.

It was foreign, but they sinicized and they claimed to be representatives of Chinese civilization, so in the course of history it was eventually accepted that they were legitimate successors. This is in contrast to imperial Japan, which explicitly did not claim to be a successor of Chinese civilization, which was one of the reasons why they continued to be viewed as foreign.

As someone who also has a close woman friend who suffered such assault, and as someone who has even discussed the Peng Shuai issue with multiple women, I find your willingness to take a pitchfork to go after imaginary enemies to be sickening.

Okay you know what, this time I'll tell you why I was reluctant to answer.

The first part is: because I don't trust you!

Here, just look at this sentence:

> It's you who support the CCP in almost all your commentary here and on Twitter.

This is a huge misrepresentation of my (much more nuanced and complex) position. If you do good research into my Twitter history will you find multiple points where I disagree with CCP. But the fact that you disregard such facts, and choose to misrepresent me as "supporting CCP in almost all commentary", is telling.

Right off the bat, your suspicious, paranoid behavior gives you away as someone who actively seeks to label people as a propagandist, shill, enemy, criminal, etc. merely for disagreeing with your world view on China. The fact that you continue to stalk and hunt me further confirms it.

The second part is because the Hacker News crowd loves to attack, or downvote without discussing, comments on China that they don't agree with. I have to be careful with not offending the crowd by giving too much wrong opinion. And here you are, zooming in on wrong opinions, which you call "apologist".

I've discussed the Peng Shuai situation in detail in private with multiple people, including women. The opinion among mainland Chinese is, for the most part, very different than the narrative painted in mainstream western media. But why should I say too many things which will potentially cause a flood of downvotes and shitstorm simply because that's not what people here like to hear?

Just think about how wrong this is. For a crowd that loves to preach freedom of speech, I have to fear giving my opinion, in no small part thanks to people like you who continue to harass me and continue to label imaginary enemies. For a crowd who wears the mantra of "we are only against the CCP, not the Chinese people", I have to be wary of giving opinions aligned with the Chinese people. No, having a different opinion on China is not "being an apologist", it's having a different opinion.

So my statement that you are engaging in 1984 thought policing, and actually also in McCarthyism 2.0, is not "irony", it is accurate. The biggest irony is that even though you are supposed to be a supporter of free speech, you attempt to deny others of their free speech by labeling them as enemies, merely because you disagree with them.

You know what, my relatives lives are indeed at stake, and they are indeed being threatened — by a potential US-led war for which its consent is manufactured by anti-China propaganda. So I'm pushing back at that. I can see that you have fully bought into the China threat theory, zooming into anybody who has a different opinion about China, like a drone, denying others of the opportunity to see a different perspective. This is entirely deplorable behavior.

I'd need to see specific links. It's difficult to answer that generically, because who people call a 'shill' varies so much, and it's unquestionably the case that people frequently apply such terms to other commenters who in fact are posting in good faith. On the internet, someone having a sufficiently different background from you, and someone posting in bad faith, are basically indistinguishable.

I can't resist saying a couple general things though. First, I think you need to assume a smart audience. If someone's throwing an endless sequence of distracting objections at you (which is how I understand 'gish gallop'), that doesn't have a lot of persuasive power for a smart audience. You should trust readers to see that those are distractions, and limit yourself (at most) to pointing out that they're not relevant.

Second, if you're truly dealing with someone posting in bad faith, the time-honored internet adage explains what do to: don't feed the trolls. I would never underestimate the wisdom of that advice. It may be the wisest thing the internet has ever said.