Via, um, someone who I forget and a commenter at SDA, a doubleheader from City Journal.
George Orwell would have understood the attraction of privileged young people to the Peace Racket. "Turn-the-other-cheek pacifism," he observed in 1941, "only flourishes among the more prosperous classes, or among workers who have in some way escaped from their own class. The real working class . . . are never really pacifist, because their life teaches them something different. To abjure violence it is necessary to have no experience of it." If so many young Americans have grown up insulated from the realities that Vegetius and Sun Tzu elucidated centuries ago, and are therefore easy marks for the Peace Racket, it’s thanks to the success of the very things the Peace Racket despises above all -- American capitalism and American military preparedness.
At the University of Wisconsin, for example, a black student testified in defense of the faculty speech code, complaining bitterly that a professor had used the word "niggardly" while teaching Chaucer. "I was in tears," she said. "It’s not up to the rest of the class to decide whether my feelings are valid."
I'm just guessing here, but I imagine the phrase "illiterate twat" would surely provoke some major angst on her part. So don't, for God's sakes, use the expression while she's around.