Replying to your comment as I can no longer reply to the dead GP comment.

Can someone explain to me why this would have been flagged to death? (As opposed to just being heavily downvoted)

I downvoted both of this user's comments as they were obviously utter nonsense, but I didn't really see anything in there that should be cause for the comment to be flagged to death and hidden altogether?

If a comment gets enough downvotes, is it automatically flagged? Or can it only be flagged to death via the actual Flag button?

I kind of think we should be able to debate alternative points of view, even if they (in my view) might be very wrong. But in this case we've just stopped this conversation dead by virtue of the GP's comments being hidden completely.

Curious what others think...