British national treasure Stephen Fry once said that the best response to killjoys who cry, “I’m offended by that!” is to reply: “Well, so fucking what?”
To make a public spectacle of your offended feelings, to declare how rattled you feel by something you saw or heard, is “no more than a whine,” Fry said. And therefore, “it has no meaning.”
He’s right. Today’s battalions of offense-takers are just glorified crybabies. They simply do in public what those always-offended old ladies with blue rinses used to do in private.
In the pre-internet era, when tweeting was something only birds did, elderly offense-takers would post irate letters to some TV station or newspaper that pissed them off. Now, courtesy of the internet, everyone with a... Read More