Lieutenant Harry of Wales Wins Poll by Massive Margin:
"Leave Dude Alone" (An Officer and a Gentleman): 73%Note that the poll is written in the rough idiom of the times, so for our Gentlemen Scribes who do not understand today's vernacular, I took the liberty of translating it.
"Racist Douchebag" (An Officer but not a Gentleman): 27%
POLL SAMPLE: More than 40,000
This non-story is nicely put to bed here, here and here.
Polls be damned. The weight of Newspaper op-ed pieces and hyperlinks drown out the view of the people.
ReplyDelete"Don't even ignore it", my recommenadtion would have been. But reactions here and elsewhere show that people outside the grievance industry can put things into perspective.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to such terms, the tone and context matters - nickname culture is part of schools, the forces, many other walks of life - and media indignation about it shouldn't be taken too seriously.
I remember a fellow pupil of Kurdish extraction who was known to all and referreed to himself ironically as a "Mountain Turk" (a derogatory phrase used by generations of Turkish governments denying that any such ethnic group as Kurds ever existed and that Kurds were just watered-down Turkish hillbillies not capable of grasping where they belonged). When doing military service, a fellow soldier in my platoon was of Polish background with an impressive enough Slavic name and in no time was known as "Germany". No-one ever complained.
I don't excuse the term used, and I abhor the appalling judgement on the part of Prince Harry (how was he supposed to live down the Afrika Corps costume he chose to wear?!) but I'm glad the military is trying to track down the treasonous cretin who exposed what was never intended to be public. Maybe the context of the remark will show that the 'victim' had simply retorted "Bugger off, you ginger-haired ponce."
ReplyDeleteI'm rather amused by Harry's remarks. Fairly innocuous, but they send the Politically Correct crowd howling.
ReplyDeleteNice to see him taking after his grandfather ("Do you people still throw spears at each other?").