I am a bit worried I might be a massive racist because last week at a preview screening* I laughed like a hallucinating pig several times during Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, a preposterous cartoon romp through the laugh-a-minute world of slavery.

It's insanely violent. In one shootout, so much blood gets sloshed across the screen it's a miracle a scab didn't form over the lens. Despite, or perhaps because of this, it also contains some of the funniest moments I've seen in ages. What it does, brilliantly, is to gradually heighten the tension until you forget you're watching a dumb exploitation flick and start to take it all terribly seriously, before suddenly exploding into the kind of wilful silliness you'd expect to see in a Python movie. It's three hours long, but feels far shorter, with the final 60 seconds being particularly good.

Every single frame of Django Unchained could be considered offensive: the subject matter, the metronomic use of racial insults, the violence – and occasionally the outfits – are all wildly provocative. It could have been a career-ender for absolutely everyone involved. Instead, the film gets away with murder for reasons that are hard to put your finger on. And somehow, it gets away with it at a time when "taking offence" is all the rage.

Of course, today, simply "taking offence" isn't enough. Instead, you have to immediately run around honking on about how offended you are, as though this is some kind of devastating eureka moment that absolutely must be shared with the rest of humankind. It isn't. Go home. And next time wrap a towel around your waist before running outside.

There has been much pointing-and-chortling of late at the Daily Mail's embarrassing failure to stoke national outrage over a mildly irreverent comment about the Queen's sex life blurted out by Jack Whitehall on a festive panel show. This is fusty, old-school outrage, spluttered in your mind's eye by a swivel-eyed ex-colonel with dangerously high blood pressure. But because it flopped, it's actually sort of poignant, like watching an old man ineffectually waving his fist as they concrete the duckpond and put up a Nando's. Whitehall's offensive joke was scarcely offensive, and scarcely a joke. In fact it only worked as a joke if you imagined someone being offended by it. Enter the Daily Mail. Q: Who has won here? A: Jack Whitehall.

Of course the Daily Mail holds one of these outrage-drives roughly every six months. This is because it is a bastion of creaky old media. In the hyperspeed world of social media, there's a similar whipround every five minutes, often over far shakier stuff. Twitter and Facebook are seemingly full of people actively seeking out statements to be offended by, parsing every word as it scrolls upscreen, panning for turds. And the moment they find one, they launch into a performance of such deranged, self-assured haughtiness, the Daily Mail seems hopelessly amateur by comparison.

What's the psychology here? Is it a narcissistic compulsion to demonstrate how much more thoughtful and sensitive you are than the ignorant clod who offended you? An earnest belief that a better world will only be reached after several thousand hours of angry dissent over absolutely every linguistic transgression ever made? A cathartic howl of vague personal unhappiness disguised as a campaign of improvement? Or just something to do between bowel movements?

All human endeavour falls under that last category, come to think of it. The world's most beautiful sonnet was composed by someone who had shit hanging out of their bum shortly afterwards. That's just the way of the world, Virginia. It's all a waste of time. But I digress.

The most depressing thing about the climate of endless, instant outrage isn't just the sheer futility of it all – because nothing actually changes apart from a few keys being bashed on the head by angry fingers – but that this very futility allows strange and frightening new creatures to thrive: weird specimens such as the "James Delingpole", which as far as I can tell is a sort of stick insect whose sole function is to irritate passing liberals. Their cries of dismay are his oxygen. Without them he will die. Consequently, there isn't a week that goes by without Delingpole causing some sort of kerfuffle, then running away laughing like a naughty boy who has just blown off through the headmaster's letterbox.

This is every day on Twitter, for ever. 9am: James Delingpole says trees are lesbians so we should saw their flat ugly tits off and fire them at Muslims using a petrol-powered catapult. 9.03am: An enraged section of Twitter spends nine hours ceaselessly promoting James Delingpole, to the delight of James Delingpole. 6pm: James Delingpole triumphantly closes his laptop and strolls away whistling, clicking his heels as a cartoon vignette closes around him.

Q: Who has won here? A: James Delingpole. Q: What's more offensive than that? A: Nothing.

* Yes, like a media twat, and the fact that I have seen it makes me equal with Americans and the 15% of you who are probably illegally torrenting it right now.