Are you wetting your pants over something Gary Lineker said on Twitter about something that isn’t to do with his job? Are you demanding the BBC give Gary his first ever straight red, because that’s the sort of thing we demand these days, presumably in the absence of being able to achieve anything actually meaningful? Are you pretty sure you didn’t fight in two world wars just so a football presenter could have a compassionate opinion you disagree with? Are you three years old?

Seriously, are you actually three years old? You’ve done precociously well to read this far, but you need to stop here because I’m probably going to swear later. Everyone else is invited to roll up for another week in toddler culture, where we scream about things we don’t like until a misguided grownup gives in and removes them from our presence.

In another saga of frenzied twattery, Lineker’s tweeted distaste for some people’s reaction to refugees arriving in the UK from the refugee camp in Calais has caused a ludicrously disproportionate outcry. According to an indeterminate number of internet users, and now the front page of the Sun, this renders Lineker unsuitable to anchor the Premier League highlights.

This is the kind of episode of outrage culture that makes me think I have some kind of essential lobe missing, physiologically preventing me from being able to “get it”. You see, tomorrow night, when I watch Match of the Day, I think I’m just about going to be able to separate something Lineker said about people’s callousness towards refugees from his thoughts on Loris Karius. Even if Karius has another wobbler in goal for Liverpool? OK, OK … I can see you’re testing me. But yes. Yes, even if Karius has such a wobbler that you could remotely diagnose not one but two broken hands, I’m probably going to be able to manage to find what Gary thinks about refugees irrelevant. But I take your point: a principle isn’t a principle until it’s tested.

Still, whatever happened to principles? The sole freedom that significant and powerful sections of the press now seem to care about is freedom of the press, or – but only up to a point – the freedom to be Jeremy Clarkson. Other freedoms don’t just not matter, they are actively to be suppressed. It’s like Voltaire didn’t say: I don’t agree with what you say, and I will fight to the death to get you sacked by the Beeb for it.

Philip Green. ‘Still, what you do go home with is a Commons debate about whether or not someone should lose their knighthood.’ Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images

“The Beeb must sack him!” is the clarion call of a culture that feels impotent to change much else. It’s almost too obvious to mention that the calls come mostly from papers that regard the BBC much as Hamas regards Israel. These days the biannual shaming and eventual sacking of a BBC presenter or comedian is regarded as a victory on a par with El Alamein (see also “Strip him of his knighthood!”).

The overriding message is to lower your expectations and get heavily involved in displacement activity. A country with a proper tax system, which doesn’t suck up to and ennoble those who nakedly avoid it much less make them government “efficiency tsars”, then act surprised when they tank a pension fund: that’s what you could have won. Still, what you do go home with is a Commons debate about whether or not someone should lose their knighthood. We are living in the consolation-prize era of post-imperial life.

Of course, there will be people who reflexively think I’m defending Lineker only because I agree with him. And, as it goes, I do. So let’s consider someone and something that absolutely doesn’t float my boat. And for extra special relevance, let’s keep it in the area of football. How about the time when the Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore was found to have exchanged various off-colour emails with a colleague, in which the colleague referred to women as “gash” and so on?

Countless people called for him to be sacked, many because their free-speech priorities are so far out of whack that they no longer even notice an assault on them unless it affects them personally. On that occasion I wrote not one but two columns on the subject (yes, yes – slow couple of weeks), both of which declared the outrage wildly out of proportion, and were of the firm opinion that he should not be sacked. And me a bird and everything.

As for why I didn’t demand Richard’s head on a plate … how to put this mildly? I do not warm to Scudamore, as much of my prior and subsequent output would attest. I do not warm to many aspects of the way in which he has run the Premier League, and I certainly do not warm to boring little inadequates who josh about “gash”.

Are we going to sack or fine everyone who dares to have a view – a nation of Violet Elizabeth Botts?

But so what? Because you know what really and truly and gets my goat? People who scream that those people should be sacked if they do it in their private emails. People who actually think the mere failure of Scudamore to tell his friend not to say gash, in a private email conversation, is something he should lose his entire job for. I can barely imagine anything more babyish than thinking he should – except perhaps the notion that Lineker can’t analyse Leicester-Crystal Palace tomorrow. (Did you know he supports Leicester? Just sayin’.) Yet the twits that think this stuff are inheriting the Earth.

Anyone who believes in a free press and other equally vital yet threatened freedoms should believe in Lineker’s right to commit relatively benign infractions of the self-interested tabloid code. Furthermore, there is no more absurd suspension of disbelief than the pretence that BBC presenters are Fritz Lang automatons devoid of opinions. We live in a social media age. Are we going to grow up about this, or are we going to proceed further down the road to cultural infantilisation, and sack or fine everyone who dares to have a view – a nation of Violet Elizabeth Botts thcweaming and thcweaming and thcweaming until we’re sick?

PS: If I ever end up writing about the BBC, in the interests of full disclosure I always mention that my husband works there, though I’m running out of ways to take the piss out of him in a way that causes him to put his head in his hands and groan NOOOOOOOOOO by about the fourth paragraph. Today is easy, though: you should definitely scream for him to be sacked on the basis I’ve written this.