Closing the thread to new accounts seems kind of sad, controversial topics like this lend themselves to throwaway accounts from active members of the community. Maybe the solution is some feature for anonymization from active accounts only, but it feels like we ought to find something better than forcing people to comment under an account that's generally linkable to a name.
Given the facts of this incident, the only reasonable explanation of banning throwaways on this discussion is to suppress those who are sympathetic to the fired point of view. Using your real name in this discussion, even with substantive comment (like the offending 3,300 word post), is a career limiting move.
