Torvalds' post to me looked to attack C++ programmers in general. I'm not ignoring that the initial comment was pretty useless, but even so there are better ways to handle those than the way he chose.
Doesn't mean he should insult them ... at some point in a person's life, they should be above that, but that's just my opinion.
Live is too short to justify not having a little chuckle at the expense of your detractors.
Very few programmers spring fully-formed into kernel-level hackers. The correct place to filter is at the code level, not the person level. The 'right' people have the ability to change their approach until the code passes the filter.