Everything you said is stupid, but you're also a coward so shock, amazement. I didn't hear about it until it was happening, and I shouldn't have to ride herd on the devs to make sure they don't inexplicably waste a bunch of screen real estate and castrate the interface. It should be obvious that's a stupid idea.

And as a corollary, a civilization which spends too much time at any given stage is going to collapse again when it uses up its ready resources, and/or renders its biosphere uninhabitable. If we had used up all the trees, for example, on the planet. Many civilizations did deforest astoundingly large areas even before the invention of power equipment. If we had used up all the ready ores without inventing power equipment. If we use up all the fossil fuels without figuring out what to do about the CO2.

Indeed. Concentration camps soon to follow. Oh, wait...

You are doing this wrong. This is not about friends of the government that may have done the one or other evil thing. It is about all the people the government does not like.

You are naive. There are maybe something like 20-30 active terrorists in the world. They could not be a threat to the US if they tried really hard. This is about mechanisms to mark "undesirables" and make their life miserable in order to keep all the sheep in line.

It is the logic of totalitarianism and it has nothing to do with "protecting Americans" (not that that is somehow inherently more desirable than, say, protecting Europeans). It has everything to do with creating and maintaining a vast, diffuse threat from "the outside" to keep the population quiet and in fear and behind their leaders. This is a very old tactics, perfected in the 3rd Reich. The Nazis also documented this approach well, and what has been going on in the US for more than a decade now is straight from their playbooks.

I do not think it is "groupthink". IT showed up some years ago and it has (had) US business hours. A discussion would take off reasonably, moderations were reasonably, but then, at the start of the US work-day, suddenly everything changed with postings down-modded from 5 to -1 in a short time, trollish comments, sometimes straight out of a psyops manual, and the like. They have gotten more subtle, but my guess is this is commercial, paid-for "opinion" manipulation.

A woman's body, right, and choice are not a man's responsibility, so I hope you're happy with the progress in the world.

These complaints aren't of random griefing on forums. These complaints are of people who aren't content with just insulting people, but who track them down. Wu got insulting email and a threat backed by research on how to execute it. Nina had people track down her website and post hate mail on it. Nicole I don't know enough to judge. Elise writes about being physically restrained at a gaming event, and being sent chapters of pornographic fanfic anonymously. Carolyn seems to be dealing with the abuse.

This seems to me to be largely different from being insulted and threatened on a gaming channel.

Overall, in field X that discourages group Y, members of Y in field X got there because of determination, and are very likely better on the average than not-Ys. I'd expect a female programmer to be slightly better than a male programmer on the average, and a male nurse to be slightly better than a female nurse on the average.

There's lots of things I have a great deal of difficulty understanding. Prejudice against women. Prejudice against minorities. Prejudice against GLBT people. Prejudice against the poor. What my Ukrainian neighbor went through in the 1930s and 1940s. It may be that I lack empathy, but I just don't get much prejudice against me for belonging to a group.

Therefore, I try to take complaints from people in less favored social groups seriously. I don't understand. I'm not sure I really can.

We seem to live on different planets. I see men and women who think they deserve special treatment, and I haven't noticed a real numbers difference. I observe approximately no harassment, so I can't really tell how people would react to it.

There is a difference between "Your code is crappy. How did you ever get a job as a programmer?" and "Your code is crappy. I'm going to show up at your house sometime and commit a very serious violent felony on you.". Insult my code all you want. I'll either figure you're full of BS, or I'll improve my code. I'd rather not get threats of violence.

If you google for programming for windows, visual studio download is going to be one of your top hits. It's not like this is any different in Linuxland, but that's my point. It's still just a download away. On the other hand, it sounds to me like you're complaining that Windows package management is shit. Obviously, Microsoft should make it possible for you to install package from repos. Oh wait, that's what they're doing now.

You seem to be missing the point. The claim in TFA is that a sufficient number of real assholes exist to make women's lives miserable, and that most men don't take it seriously or do anything to help. That is entirely consistent.