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Why do tanaim and amoraim use disparaging terms (bavlai tipshai, for instance) or insults when talking with one another. If there is something positive to be learned from this behavior why is it no longer employed?
I have heard many attempts to explain this away, none that are satisfactory.
Chavos Yair (152) discusses a number of these cases.
In some of them, he says, the person delivering the insulting remark is the other one's teacher; the halachah is indeed that if a teacher sees that his students aren't applying themselves properly to their studies, he should "get angry at them and insult them verbally" to spur them to correct behavior (Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De'ah 246:11).
In others, an apparent insult is in fact a complimentary statement. As an example, in several places where Rav Sheshes says of Rav, "He must have been falling asleep when he said this," Chavos Yair says that it means just that: it would be impossible for a great Torah scholar like Rav to have made a mistaken statement except under such conditions.
And then there are various other types that he lists. (One that I don't understand is his treatment of the expression תרדא\תדורא in a few places: he says that the people who made these statements were "their colleagues and greater than them, so that they didn't mind at all" - yet in one of his examples, in Bava Metzia 20b, the person so addressed does seem to have minded, and there were consequences.)
The Chafetz Chaim in the B'er Mayim Chaim (8:23) wrote that they were not trying to disparage their colleague in a personal way. Their intent was to undermine the authority of one making a ruling that was still subject to debate. The accuser was concerned for the negative consequences of those who followed the statement as law.
While there are many ways to justify their behavior post factum as brought in the other answers, it seems that their behavior wasn't Halachic at all.
The simplest proof to that is that none of those behaviors was brought to Halacha by the later Poskim as an Asmachta (see Meforshim on Rambam's original T"T 4,5), in other words Rambam didn't say "one must reprimand and shame his students just as R' X did it in the Gemmorah".
Note: It is important to stress that those acts are not just light misbehaviors but a clear transgression of the Deorayso Mitzvah of אונאת דברים - Rambam 251, Chinuch 338, Tur 228. Even if we say that they held some lenient opinions, Sofek Deorayso should be more stringent, and there's also a Mar'is Ayn - the fact that the question was asked shows that it is perceived as a transgression.
