Not to provoke any flamewars here, but let me share where I'm coming from, and it does relate to both the original story that this thread references (now moved to the Politics forum), and the claim that MacRumors is wrong to disallow comments on it.
About 30 years ago, I lost several classmates - all women - to a deranged shooter who blamed feminism for his rather sad and tragic life (parental abuse, inability to complete school). I mention this not as a trump card to stop conversation, but as a real-world example of what happens when misogyny takes root and is given terrible power.
I've been on the Internet since I could first switch on a 300-baud modem. I have seen every sort of forum, mailing list, USENET thread, you name it. I've seen raucous discussions, fun and funny threads, arguments, but today's echo chambers - and the playbooks that certain groups use to either trap people in gotcha arguments, or foreign powers use to create dissent - are very different.
I may have been slightly exaggerating in my earlier post, but not by much. There are some people who, disappointed in their lot in life, are quite literally radicalized online through videos, forums and other things which encourage them to see other groups as scapegoats, and suggest that these 'others' are obstacles to their success.
Thus we get everything from pick-up artists to abusive controlling boyfriends to those who choose to kill (for 'honour', or out of rage, or, stoked with hateful books and YouTube channels).
(Yes, not every man will behave like this, but; everyone who behaves like this is a man, so it is incumbent on us to examine why we have this strain of masculinity that has become toxic primarily to the men themselves, and those around them.)
It is arguing in bad faith to try to pretend like all of this isn't happening and we're just having an intellectual chat over brandies by the fireside.
To complain, with enormous entitlement, about not being allowed to weigh in on a relatively nice story, in order to somehow turn it around and proclaim it as evil. (Black is white, ignorance is strength, it's opposite day again).
To ignore the hundreds-of-years-long struggle for equality, the battles to get even modest gains in civil rights, the fact that the ERA still hasn't passed, that women didn't have the right to vote until VERY recently in some places, to pretend that we don't live in a society steeped in patriarchy (where do you think you're getting that sense of entitlement, dudes?)... is to argue in bad faith.
It isn't sexist to point out sexism. It isn't reverse racism to point out racism. The key difference is, who has the actual power in our society?
And are you perhaps tricked into siding with those with the power, to entrench that power further, rather than siding with those who do not?
The paradox of tolerance is that a tolerant society must (wait for it)... be intolerant to intolerance. There are legitimate debates to be had about many issues, but pretending to want legitimate debate when the real goal is to try to radicalize others is a strategy to try to make society intolerant, and it is entirely proper - I would argue, necessary - to deny such people a platform.
