"Let a thousand flowers bloom" has an entirely clear and positive meaning for the vast majority of English speakers.
It's an blog post dude, not an insensitive advertising slogan for a new foreign market, get over yourself. Assume he didn't know any better and move on.
Oh yes, someone is callous unless she learns the sensitivities of every person and group in the world, and then avoids them all whenever posting anything on the web.
Or, you know, we could just be more forgiving and understanding of each other.
If memory of my history class serves, the quote of letting flowers bloom comes from Mao, who told people he wanted them to open up and share their political differences (ostensibly so that some kind of political dialog could follow), but with the ulterior motive of merely outing his political enemies in order to do terrible things to them.
It's a shame to be discussing this instead of the article, though, since I am a huge Peter Seibel fan!
It doesn't really make sense to me that a regular phrase like 'final solution', which has been used as a rather awkward translation of 'endlösung', would have gotten the same connotation as the word itself. I must have said "so we end up with a final solution of ..." countless times and I've never noticed a thing.
Language is basically a crappy form of telepathy. You're essentially implanting thoughts in other people's minds. It's crappy because it's really imprecise and error-prone and the minds you're attempting to influence might end up thinking things other than what you're trying to make them think, often because the specific words or phrasing you used brought up associations existing within the target mind.
Sometimes it's impossible to avoid because the association is a personal thing. But sometimes it's widespread. In that case, it's really useful to be aware of them.
I've certainly made my share of bad phrasing in languages I don't speak natively. No reasonable person is going to be offended if you did it because of ignorance, but once pointed out, it's ridiculous to get defensive. Make a note of it and use this knowledge to improve.
I wouldn't use it as part of any argument as it will likely lead you to miss important details and cannot lead you to valid conclusions.
Being upset about using this phrase is like an army of tumblr SJWs being annoyed when someone says gypped. Not everybody knows the complete cultural and racial history of every innocent common phrase used today, even if they come from questionable historical pasts.
Here's what I see: jordigh says he wishes people would learn about the hundred flowers campaign so they won't make such bad allusions by accident. coldtea counters this saying that it's not actually bad. seiji agrees with coldtea and attempts to offer further support by saying that people don't learn about this stuff anyway.
Not so?
Ain't that hard.
Having thought about it, it doesn't really make sense, since I'd apologize for hitting someone even if I didn't mean to, and even if I couldn't be reasonably expected to hit them.
But when the issue is offense, you don't want to apologize, because you think that they think that you meant to cause offense, and apologizing will reinforce in their mind the idea that you really did mean to do it, or at least in your mind it will reinforce that idea in their mind. And you don't want to reinforce that idea in their mind, partly because it makes you look bad, and partly because the idea is simply wrong. So you don't want to apologize.
(Note well: "you" here means "me, too, given the right circumstances".)
Worse: That may really be going on in the other person's mind. They may really think (or at least suspect) that you meant to cause offense, and therefore are determined that you must apologize as penance or proof of repentance or some such. "The good of society demands that I force this person to apologize!"
So maybe the best answer is to say something like: "I did not intend or wish to give offense. Apparently I did; I apologize for doing so." Because the fact is, the offense was real. Apologizing for it is just good manners. But apologize without agreeing that you had intent.
This presumes that you didn't have intent. If you intended to offend, that's a whole different situation. It's worthy of an apology, not just for the offense, but for the intent.
I haven't seen any "you're an asshole" type comments in here--more "aw, c'mon, man." (I frown more at whatever instructors the author had in 20th century history a lot more than the author himself. This is something that's not that obscure, but you gotta know it exists to know about it.)