FWIW, if we are going to go down that road, it would be worth noting that there
are various kinds of rudeness that can occur on IETF mailing lists. To my
mind, the most harmful of these is not outright rudeness. Outright rudeness
is to be avoided, certainly.
But the most rude behavior that ever occurs on IETF mailing lists is not
listening. Not trying to understand what the person who is speaking to you
has said. Not trying to figure out if what they said meaningfully contradicts
your own position, and not making a sincere effort to determine if they might
be correct in contradicting your position.
We have seen some incredible rudeness of this type in the recent spfbis
discussion, with various supposedly smart people in our community utterly
ignoring what their opponents are saying, and simply re-asserting their own
position in a variety of ways.
I would expect the sergeant-at-arms to be reining in that sort of rudeness
before reining in the sort of supposed overt rudeness that we are discussing
here. The endless litany of repeats of already-addressed discussion points
raised on the spfbis mailing list has been incredibly harmful to discourse on
the ietf mailing list. This exchange between l.wood and Abdussalam Baryun
pales in comparison.
Furthermore, I would also point out that criticism of someone's behavior is not
rudeness, if that criticism is accurate. I don't think the IETF should be a
context in which people ought to feel safe in behaving badly, as long as they
behave badly in ways that are subtle enough not to be considered impolite. Nor
should it be a context in which failure to behave according to some
culturally-relative standard of politeness in itself invalidates an otherwise
valid statement.