Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
This is a phrase that never had a terribly good use anyway but regardless has become entirely useless aside from signalling that the person using it does not care about whatever issue is being discussed.
I don't think you don't care, so maybe it's not the best word choice.
Voting for women and taking a step back sometimes seem like pretty concrete ideas of what's to be done.
|
The word "virtue-signaling" has many excellent uses. It defines a certain type of self-righteous behavior in which one professes beliefs, judges others for disagreement with those beliefs, but never takes any useful action to help the aggrieved or persecuted people who are the subject of those beliefs. And as Ty noted, usually those beliefs are extreme, which is intentional. If you accuse the signaling person of talking and not actually doing anything, they have the built in excuse that their aims are so radical they cannot be achieved in the current system.
I could be accused of virtue signalling by voting third party. Except that I did intend to contribute to the third party voting numbers. And I didn't judge Hillary or Trump voters for voting as they did. (I suspect the most ardent virtue signalers voted for Jill Stein and told everyone they did so, endlessly... on Facebook.)
Voting for anyone based on anything other than platform and skill is unwise.
