My comment is not racist, either overtly, expressly, subtly, or implicitly. Acknowledging diversity of opinion and the existence of factions does not imply discriminating against any of those factions.
You can find an extensive list of recent comments I've made that are complimentary to China and Chinese people in the last three months in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398213.
I said that many HN users are Chinese and Chinese-American [immigrants]. There is nothing racist about that. The Chinese Communist Party, which is the government of [Mainland] China, is very popular among people from China. There is nothing racist about either of these ideas, nor about drawing the conclusion that if you publicly attack the Chinese Communist Party, you are going to offend a lot of Chinese people, including many HN users.
It's not a logically entailed consequence of the premises—it is theoretically possible that only Chinese people who are opposed to CCP rule, such as many of the students who died in Tiananmen Square, many Taiwanese people, and Falun Dafa members, are HN users—but it is overwhelmingly likely that this is not the case.
Pointing this out is not gross. Falsely accusing people of racism is gross.
The whole sentiment here is gross, but it is particularly fucked up how you keep going out of your way to pull Chinese-American people into it. Why not call me a Papist while you're at it?
If you post a story on HN with a list of historical atrocities attributable to the Roman Catholic Church or to Spanish colonialism, you can definitely expect a significant fraction of Latin American and Spanish people to take exception to it, and I've seen that happen on HN several times in the past. Recognizing and understanding that there are hot-button issues for particular political, national, and ethnic groups is not racism; it's a fundamental part of understanding human diversity, which is necessary in order to achieve peaceful coexistence.
Moreover, it is not necessary to claim that every member of a particular group belongs to a popular factions within that group to do this; it is sufficient to acknowledge a general tendency. For example, there are Latin Americans who are not Catholic, and there are Roman Catholics who deplore the Spanish Inquisition as fervently as any Anglican; nevertheless, if you go around denouncing the Spanish Inquisition as one of the worst things ever to have happened in history in front of a large number of Latin American people, a significant fraction of them are reliably going to object. On HN, they may flag your comment.
Me saying this is not the same as me calling you a "Papist".
What fraction of current Chinese-American immigrants grew up in China in families that were lifted out of poverty by Deng Xiaoping's economic policies? I'm guessing over 10%. How would you expect these people to react to demonization of Deng Xiaoping? Many of them will be offended, either because they regard Deng as a hero or because they see that demonization as being directly motivated by anti-Chinese racism, which in many cases it is: people do sometimes criticize the Chinese government because they hate Chinese people. In other cases, it's a more subtle form of racism, which doesn't directly consider Chinese people bad but considers their feelings unimportant.
And that racism is what I'm standing against, as consistently today as I have for years, as evidenced by my comment history linked above. I don't think a person either has to be racist or have to regard Deng or the CPC as above criticism in order to understand that many Chinese people will be offended by such criticism. Yes, including many Chinese-American people.
Withdraw your baseless attack and apologize.
Addendum: tptacek responded to this with a now-deleted comment saying something to the effect of "I apologize to any Chinese HN users who have to read comments like this."
For what it's worth Kragen, if you ever see this, I understand what you mean and I don't think that you're being racist. We can't even talk about the diversity of humans and what influences their intentions anymore without being called racist.
