Obviously I'm not arguing that Richards behaved appropriately in publicly shaming them. I'm saying that they behaved inappropriately in making the joke in the f

Obviously I'm not arguing that Richards behaved appropriately in publicly shaming them. I'm saying that they behaved inappropriately in making the joke in the first place, and that there's nothing scary or totalitarian about a privately run conference having a code of conduct asking people to act professionally. Of course, the proper way to handle this would have been for Richards to talk to someone running the conference. They would have then gone to the people who were making the inappropriate jokes and asked them to remember that this was a professional environment, upon which apologies would have been given, and that would have been the end of it.