#Virtue signalling

[myfandomrealitea]

so do antis ever have an actual argument for why writing noncon, incest, abuse, etc. is bad and condoning those behaviors IRL, but media glorifying graphic violence is fine? bc all the antis I’ve asked tend to deflect or treat it like a bad faith question.

Because that would then force them to acknowledge that they don't actually care about mainstream media and simply find it easier to target and harass individual people with moral flag waving and threats over massive corporations who would either outright ignore them or smash them with the legal hammer.

What's easier; hounding a teenager online with death threats because they write incest fanfic or forcing international censorship of Game of Thrones and prosecuting George R. R. Martin as an incestuous murdering rapist who creates child pornography?

What's easier; needing no argument other than; "I think its gross and immoral" as defence for your virtue signalling or needing very extensive knowledge of the law, sociology and psychology in order to accurately formulate and prove that creating and/or consuming content relative to specific subjects is more harmful than beneficial and has direct action consequences?

And thus, the answer. Option A is indefinitely easier and more manageable, and more outcome-effective. Antis then real like they're "empowering real change" because if they successfully bully someone off of a platform, they were Right All Along and their activism is Working.

(Whereas if they went after Universal Studios, for example, they would probably be sued into oblivion and laughed at for generations to come. Not very empowering or uplifting.)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Cliques that are based around moral purity inevitably have escalating puritanism, so you either have to adopt further tenets of faith to remain "good," or you become othered.

[sephirthoughts]

hey we in fandoms, and by 'we' i mean you american white people, need to stop equating 'sworn brotherhood' in asian cultures with blood kinship. you're not being virtuous you're ignorant and racist and completely blind to linguistic nuance. also saying two people are sworn brothers is Chinese censorship code for 'these two are fucking' so. shut up.

[sweetbearfan]

PD fa rima con radical chic

Quando penso al PD mi viene in mente il gruppo d'indigesti radical chic amici di Gambardella che discutono del niente da gente che vale nulla nella sua terrazza: quel "salotto buono" che ritroviamo in programmi come "Che Tempo Che Fa" adatti solo a soggetti piatti.

Lo sguardo sulla finta sinistra lo offre in pieno Jep Gambardella che incarna perfettamente il mio sguardo; e quando qualcuno mi replica "devi votare PD poiché unica alternativa", l'unica cosa che sento è odore di piscio e merda.

𝗩𝗶𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴: atteggiamento di artefatta, talvolta esasperata, ostentazione di aderenza a valori morali che riscuotono consenso nella società del tempo con il solo scopo di ottenere visibilità o facile approvazione dagli altri, senza però l'adozione di alcuna azione concreta per promuovere e attuare le istanze dichiarate.

Questo è il contesto che troviamo in programmi televisivi tossici come Che tempo che fa e in partiti politici come il PD.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Notice the way in which people show their gullibility and their herd instinct, and their wish - or perhaps their need - to be fooled. Credulity may be a form of innocence, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters.

Christopher Hitchens

Whose taking bets when the Woke fever will break and then try and find anyone who actually believed in it in the first place?

[poetrythreesixfive]

The Righteous

They still burn witches,

but not with fire;

those little bitches,

they still burn witches

to scratch their itches

and just feel higher,

they still burn witches,

but not with fire.

-GeorgeFilip

[realmoftheacornking]

Corporate Virtue-Signalling, 1901.

[sagegreenyaps]

Not all people with high empathy structure their lives around the validation of others, by the way. Not all highly empathic people are people-pleasers.

Some people really just want to do that super cheesy "treat others how you want to be treated." Some of the nicest people I know are those that are mistreated on the daily. They know they're probably not going to get much out of being pleasant to be around, but regardless of that, they are.

If you make fun of somebody who's saying something positive for reasons that aren't clearly discernible by you (i.e. immediately jumping to call them a virtue-signaller), I don't see you all that far removed from incels that make fun of feminist men by saying "bro she's not gonna fuck you."

[icedsodapop]

I think what's so ironic about accusing left-leaning/progressive pple of virtue signalling is that rightwingers/conservatives don't seem to realize that they do it as well? It's just the values that left-leaning pple and conservatives prioritize are completely different. Rightwingers are constantly extolling how much more patriotic they are, how much they value "free speech" or independent thought, how much they depise the welfare state becos they "pulled themselves up their bootstraps", how they cannot possibly be racist or sexist, their piety and confidence that they have God's approval, how they support wars for democracy etc., etc

[culturevulturette]

THIS!

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Brendan O'Neill

Published: Jun 16, 2025

Don’t you just hate it when brown people reject your white saviourism? So rude! Such mannerless ingratitude greeted the Global March to Gaza last week. These valiant few from the US, the UK, Ireland and elsewhere had planned to trek to Rafah in Gaza to save poor, hungry Palestinians from Evil Israel. But they came unstuck in Egypt, where instead of welcoming these fearless foreign liberators of the benighted Arabs, local folk ridiculed them, pelted them with plastic bottles and roundly told them to fuck off. Wait, you people don’t want to be saved by a plummy white lady from London in a keffyeh?

I know there’s a lot going on in the world right now, but can we please not overlook how unbelievably hilarious it is that the Global March to Gaza has been thwarted by angry Arabs. That this swarm of pompous gits who fantasised that they would shield the Arabs of Gaza from the ‘genocidal lunacy’ of the Jewish State were instead roughed up by the Arabs of Egypt who don’t want their nation used as a stage for moral masturbation by every puffed-up Palestine fetishist of the West. That instead of getting bottles of water to Gaza, these people had bottles of water lobbed at their own heads by pissed-off Egyptians. The mirth of it all might just get me through the rest of this year.

The Global March to Gaza consisted of 4,000 people from 54 countries. They had planned to walk to the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza where they would have ‘demand[ed] that Israel re-open the border [and] create a humanitarian corridor’. How the Jewish State would have trembled before this mighty delegation that included a gaggle of anoraks from Welsh CND, a British art curator called Tasmin and a bald politician from Ireland! Honestly, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the unworldly vanity of this dishevelled army of weak-chinned Westerners who really thought they could finger-wag a war out of existence.

Some of the marchers were from North Africa. Others were from the West. Like the self-styled ‘empathetic human’ from the UK who said ‘I endeavour to do what our governments have failed [to do]’ and ‘mobilise [my] passion and humanity’. Or the Brit who lamented her ‘privilege’ of being a ‘white, north European living in relative peace’ and promised to do something worthy for once, like ‘lend my presence to this cause’. Or the Canadian who said ‘I can’t ignore my conscience’. All I’m hearing is I, me, mine. Was it really Gaza they wanted to liberate or their own morbidly obese egos?

Sadly, by which I mean hilariously, their cloying pity for Arabs crashed against the reality of Arab self-respect. I am still not recovered from the sight of these self-loving midwits in their culturally appropriated keffiyehs being shouted down by Egyptians in real keffiyehs. On the road to Ismailia in northern Egypt, the marchers were stopped by security forces. So they gathered in a square by the mosque and chanted ‘Free, free Palestine!’. Locals weren’t best pleased. Well, would you be if a gang of pious pricks from afar rocked up in your town and started yelling political shit near your place of worship? The locals shouted at the ‘empathetic humans’. They threw plastic bottles at them. White Saviour card, declined!

The outsiders hollered ‘Shame on you’ at their Arab critics. Yes, in English. These are the kind of people who look down their noses at Brits who holiday in Spain and never utter a word of Spanish and yet here they were barking English-language insults at Egyptians in Egypt. There will never be a better representation of the phoney virtue and haughty self-regard of the ‘pro-Palestine’ set than this dystopic image of Westerners in Arab headgear screaming ‘shame’ at real Arabs who just want to go about their day without encountering some tit from Britain ‘manifesting passion and humanity’.

Some of the marchers were arrested. They were bundled on to buses and taken to the airport to be returned to the ‘privileged’ lives they hate. They were ‘shocked’ by their treatment. Why? Anyone with even a fleeting knowledge of Arab politics will know that Egyptian officialdom is iffy about the Palestine issue. They don’t want the Gaza tragedy leaking into their already troubled land – hence, Egypt’s border with Gaza is if anything more militarised than Israel’s. The childish moral fables that the West’s white-saviour classes tell themselves – where Israel is the source of every ill in the Middle East, if not the world – took one hell of a beating in Egypt.

The farcical state of ‘pro-Palestine’ activism is best summed up in that viral clip of a Welsh male nurse begging Egyptian cops to have a heart. He weeps as he pleads to be let through so that he might help the poor people of ‘Falasteen’. The children are starving, the women’s breasts are empty – prove to the world that Arabs have ‘white hearts’ and let me pass, he says. This is the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement’s Four Lions moment. Indeed, if I ever write a satire on these keffiyeh pricks, this is exactly what will happen: an emotionally incontinent white man in a keffiyeh will holler ‘Let me save Palestine!’ as bewildered Arabs raise a what-the-fuck eyebrow.

The hilarious collapse of the Global March to Gaza follows Israel’s thwarting of Greta Thunberg’s ship of fools. That watery clown show, where 12 moral preeners imagined they could land in Gaza and ‘save’ its people, was likewise motored by a toxic mix of political infantilism and moral self-importance. From grumpy Greta being flown home to that Welsh dude being memed and mocked across the internet, the cult of the keffiyeh is in trouble. Many can now see that the aim of this activism is not to feed people in Gaza but to feed the vanity of Westerners bored with their privileged lives. It’s an orgy of Orientalism in which the activist class cosplays as Arabs because they think it’s lame and shameful to be white.

That’s what ‘pro-Palestine’ activism is now, everywhere from the keffiyeh-fest on the lawns of Harvard to the ludicrous white-saviour theatrics in Egypt: a fairytale for self-hating, time-rich Westerners in which Arabs are always the victims and the Jewish State is evil incarnate. It has no basis in truth, of course, but then truth is not the aim: moral absolution is. Cry more, Israelophobes – your sanctimony is crashing against the shores of reality.

==

The rare occasions when intersectionality intersects with reality.

Everything they knew about the Middle East they learned from liars, lunatics and psychopaths in fake classes like "Gender Studies" and "Palestine Studies."

Literally everything they do is about themselves, signalling what good people they are, how empathetic they are.

[snapeysister]

[in-sightpublishing]

Conversation with Dr. Norman Finkelstein on "I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!": Independent Political Analyst (1)

                      Publisher: In-Sight Publishing Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014 Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com  Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal Journal Founding: August 2, 2012 Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed Access: Electronic/Digital & Open…

[ideasmithy]

Books are the new abs, apparently. Everyone wants to look like a reader. From dating apps to literary events, I’m drowning in ROI bros and virtue-signalling bibliophobes. So I turned to a fictional grump and his bookstore for sanity.

[psycheblog-uk]

Moral grandstanding in public discourse: Status-seeking motives as a potential explanatory mechanism in predicting conflict

Open Access Peer-reviewed Research Article Joshua B. Grubbs , Brandon Warmke, Justin Tosi, A. Shanti James, W. Keith Campbell Published: October 16, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223749 Abstract Public discourse is often caustic and conflict-filled. This trend seems to be particularly evident when the content of such discourse is around moral issues (broadly defined) and when the…