Yes, absolutely. The whole episode is actually pretty sad and using it for laughs makes me uncomfortable.

...

As a tangent, you say:

> 2 ) Acknowledge that haxx.se sounds kind of shady. Explain why he chose the domain. Self deprecating humor would be great here.

I work in a big multicultural office --- I'm the only UK person in my team. We occasionally have these tedious courses on defusing disputes. One of the things they said that was actually helpful is that humour's generally not a good idea; it's way to culturally specific, doesn't translate well, and in particular doesn't come across in text.

Something which to a fellow UKer is obviously self-deprecating snark can look absolutely serious to someone from another culture, and can frequently make stuff worse.

I saw an interesting study the other day on punctuation in text messages. Even as simple a change as using a ! instead of a . at the end of a sentence can have a huge difference in the impact the message has...