Hammer of the fenqing

At the start of the month, my "China-bashing" blog-buddy Stuart put up this modest little post questioning whether Chinese schools really needed more 'patriotic education'.   Great oaks from little acorns, and so on.  That simple observation has now spawned a thread with nearly 120 comments (well, I suppose it helps that he's only been posting once or twice a month since he left China) - fully one third of them mine!   We've been having great sport teasing poor old Pffefer, Stuart's pet fenqing.  (Actually, I hesitate to use that term of him, because he's definitely at the more moderate end of fenqingdom and often has some quite pertinent things to say.  Unfortunately, on this occasion he's been behaving like a berserker, and has earned repeated slappings down.)   More recently a chap who calls himself 'in-ur-face fenqing' has joined in the fray too.  With a screen name like that, you know exactly what you're going to get!  (I banned him from Froogville a little while ago because he was like a dog that won't let go of a bone; indeed, he was like a dog that doesn't realise it's gnawing its own leg off, and I find that rather too pitiful a spectacle to endure.)  Stuart has had the brilliant idea of neutralizing his rabid hostility by giving him the more friendly nickname 'Cuddles'.   Do go and check this thread out.  I haven't had so much fun for ages.[Alas, Stuart allowed his domain registration to lapse after he left China. But that post can still be found here, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.]   But I really should get out more...