What does “virtual signaling” mean?

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Jibbers Cribbers

Jibbers Cribbers

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kiwifarms.net
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Sep 12, 2021
I’ve heard the term used more often now than ever but have no idea what it means by definition.
I feel like everytime something politically related comes up the term “virtual signal” comes into action.
Can anyone try to explain it or give me a concrete example of “virtual signaling”?
 
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When someone says or does something meant to cause people to think of said person as virtuous. Often that thing is something the person knows their audience would find good or noble. An example from people on the left would be making social media posts unprompted condemning transphobia. An example from people on the right would be the same thing, but replace transphobia with pedophilia. Basically it's meant to make you look good to others, and the good words and deeds are not actually done because you really care, at least not as much as you want people to give you ass pats.
 
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See a recipe online for steak, and in the comments you have some vegan faggot trying to preach at everyone for eating meat? Virtue signaling

Some dickweed at work trying to be passive-aggressive about you celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas because they see it as whitey celebrating genocide or worship of capitalism? Virtue signaling

Some random mouth-breather on social media bleating about trans rights/black rights/women's rights ect in a topic where it wasn't even brought up? Virtue signaling

You'll see it here in the farms sometimes as well. Not as obnoxious but its still here.
 
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You ever go into the comments/replies section on a social media post or video and see hundreds of people all saying the exact same thing? And it's always a 1-2 sentence platitude that adds nothing to the discussion other than to demonstrate what "side" they're on?
Virtue signalling is the thing that all of those people are doing.
 
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There's a branch of philosophy called virtue ethics - the philosopher Rosalind Hursthouse would formulate virtue as something like "A virtuous person does the right thing for the right reason and feels the right way about it. A virtuous action is a right action done for the right reasons and accompanied by the right kinds of feelings." This is posed as an alternative to deontology (Kantian ethics), and utilitarianism if you study normative ethics in college.

Virtue ethics is fucking retarded though, even in comparison to most philosophy. It's a bunch of a circular reasoning (I mean seriously, "a virtuous action is the right action?") and navel gazing and is just not intellectually rigorous. But alas, this virtue ethics bullshit was taught to a bunch of undergraduate philosophy majors, and now we have a bunch of assholes posting about "virtue signalling" - what if people do an action... but not for the right reasons, just to appear virtuous! Keep in mind that actually getting a virtue ethicist to pin down what a virtue even is and how it relates to an action is nearly impossible.
 
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1. Signalling in virtual reality.
2. 'virtually signalling' as in not quite signalling but making a motion to, such as going to flick on a car's indicator but not pushing it hard enough.
 
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Here I’ll give you a real world example.

Several years ago Martha’s Vineyard declared themselves a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants.

Late last year Gregg Abbott sent them a couple of bus loads of illegals.

They got shipped out of town less than 48 hours of arriving all the while the residents (who are all multi-millionaires) complained about not having the resources to care for them.

That is virtue signaling.
 
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