On Fri, 21 Sep 2018 at 13:26, Carol Willing <willingc@gmail.com> wrote:
Context is important. I wonder though if the author's intent was constructive comment...
I'm sure it wasn't. But in context, it was a statement made in a thread that had long previously become nothing more than non-constructive invective. Calling one person out (even though his comments were significantly more extreme than others') strikes me as looking for a culprit, rather than addressing the situation.
It's not likely to be a practical option on a mailing list, but in primary school (which the whole conversation felt like) a likely response would have been to put *everyone* involved in a time-out for a period of cooling off, to think about how their behaviour was unacceptable. Think for example of a group of kids taunting each other until one of them snaps and hits someone.
Paul