Do you actually know what the guys said? They made a joke about the word "dong" sounding like the word "dongle".
If this is what you think a frat house sounds like, you are very mistaken. That this is considered a faux pas is more politically correct than any office I've ever heard of.
No, actually they don't have that right. They have the same rights as everyone else, which are to say as they please within acceptable limits and at acceptable volume and thus possibly hear other people exercising those same rights. That is the tricky thing with rights.
As far as anyone has commented everything he said was well within the acceptable rights people lazily call "freedom of speech" (I hesitate to even use the phrase in such contexts for fear of cheapening it). Possibly he was talking while a speaker was talking, which is rude but again does not infringe anyones rights and while that might result in an apology to the speaker or some staff that is pretty much as far as it should ever have gone, had people been mature.
Your understanding of rights appears naive at best I'm afraid.
If you had the empathy or personal context to understand what happened here, how these situations work, and how disempowering the behavior can feel, we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place. No amount of my arguing with you on Hacker News will change that.
It wasn't argument from authority – it was a response to a question as to whether I knew what these people said.
I do.
And it's not ad hominem to say there's no point to the conversation based on missing context. I'm reminded of when McCoy wanted to discuss death with Spock:
"It would be impossible to discuss the subject without a common frame of reference."
...
"You mean I have to die in order to discuss your insights on death?"
For reasons I won't speculate upon, OP seems to believe it's impossible Adria knows anything about github, for example. I don't think there's anything constructive to be said to that.
Talk is cheap. If you know exactly what was said then present it for people to form their own opinions. Arguing that you're right adn they're wrong because of something that you know (but won't reveal) is the definition of an argument from authority.
It would be as if I responded to you by saying 'You're wrong. I'm an expert in these matters.'
And it's not ad hominem to say there's no point to the conversation based on missing context.
Just because a person disagrees with you does not mean they lack empathy or are incapable of getting the context. On the contrary, I think that person has been at pains to explore the idea in an even-handed fashion, even if s/he has not come to the same conclusions as you. I don't fully agree with that person's viewpoint either, but I don't think it justifies launching personal attacks upon them.
For reasons I won't speculate upon, OP seems to believe it's impossible Adria knows anything about github
I am at a loss as to how you arrived at that interpretation. Clearly we are not going to agree about this.
> It wasn't argument from authority – it was a response to a question as to whether I knew what these people said.
For the third time in this thread:
What was said?
>And it's not ad hominem to say there's no point to the conversation based on missing context.
No, it's an argument from authority. You have the context, yet are not willing to share exactly what was said. The ad hominem came with the "If you had the empathy...".
If this is what you think a frat house sounds like, you are very mistaken. That this is considered a faux pas is more politically correct than any office I've ever heard of.