"You have no right" here means you have no moral right, not a legal right. Yes, you have every right to make fun of people. But it is a jerk move. It's the prototypical jerk move.
As for hypocrisy - if someone says, "you're acting like a jerk" and you say, "I have every right to make fun of you," you're not going to be able to convince me these are equivalent positions.
Ok, well I was talking about a moral right then, and not a legal right.
I actually think the jerks are the ones who are over reacting and not engaging with the substance of the disagreement, and the moral position is from the ones who don't take their overreaction seriously.
If you want to say that everyone should just chill out, and not take any of this seriously , then that would be agreeing with me completely as that's my entire point and motivation.
> if someone says, "you're acting like a jerk"
No actually. That's not what they are doing.
Instead what they are doing is dismissing well reasoned criticism off hand without addressing the argument.
Instead of making a counter argument, where they try to defend the silly overreaction with arguments, instead they do the equivalent of saying "well that's just our/your opinion, man! You have no (moral?) right to tell people otherwise.".
They are the ones hitting the eject button from any sort of discourse.
And if you flee and retreat from actually engaging, no that should not be taken seriously.
> you're not going to be able to convince me these are equivalent positions.
Correct they aren't equivalent. The other person is worse. Way worse. Because they are the ones who fled to not addressing the substance of the matter.
It is quite reasonable. And the other person had the jerk reaction, by instead of addressing it, they instead say that it is just that person's opinion, and they have "no right".
That is not engagement. That is the poor behavior.
Two wrongs don't make a right. When your position becomes "I have a right to mock you," you've lost the argument in my eyes. You've confessed that argument is insufficient and you need to rely on insult to articulate yourself in this instance. Maybe you're right, maybe you could have articulated a point that would sway me if you had given it some more thought, but that's not evident in what's in front of me.
That comment isn't my favorite, but it isn't an attack. It's still an assertion of the commenters position, with language that's stronger than I'd prescribe but within bounds in my estimation. Flag and/or downvote it if you disagree.
If you want to know what I personally believe, on a postage stamp, I wouldn't say people "have no right" to make such assertions (I don't think it's a productive or interesting line of conversation), but I think it's a bad call to make them (I think it's reductive and misses the forest), so I'm sympathetic to that perspective.
As for hypocrisy - if someone says, "you're acting like a jerk" and you say, "I have every right to make fun of you," you're not going to be able to convince me these are equivalent positions.