Finding a way to virtue signal

From the satirical Babylon Bee:

U.S.—Leftists who support killing 3,000 babies a day were trying to virtue-signal but quickly ran into a problem: there's no one alive to whom they can feel morally superior. So, the movement was forced to look to people from 200 years ago to find someone they could somewhat credibly criticize for moral failings.

"We had a tough time finding people we could feel superior to that are currently living," said Leaf Rivers, a white BLM activist in Portland as he googled "how to tear down a statue if you don't have any muscles." "So, we were forced to turn to the archives. Sure enough, we feel a lot better about our own moral issues when we compare ourselves to the moral failings of people from centuries ago."

"It's the only way to keep any sense of self-righteousness."

"Look how much better we are than these people from hundreds of years ago!" the baby murder supporters shouted as a statue of Frederick Douglass came tumbling to the ground. Their virtue-signaling accomplished, they then returned to protesting for a woman's right to kill her unborn baby at any time for any reason.

Are you eager to become the next victim?

Losing customers, so let's try virtue signaling!

After I read a Facebook article about a number of businesses deciding to pull their advertising from the Tucker Carlson Show, I made a note to myself not to patronize those businesses. One of them is IHOP. MoneyWise includes IHOP in a list of restaurants that are struggling.

The chain that got its start as International House of Pancakes is getting battered.

IHOP has been losing customers to ethnic restaurants and places known for healthier foods. Its parent company wants to move toward those types of menus and away from the kind of comfort food that turns off today's consumers who pay attention to calorie counts.

So, owner Dine Brands said it would close as many as 40 IHOPs this year.

Read more here.

"It’s ironic that hate is seen as a path to virtue!".

At The American Spectator, Ron Ross writes,

A precondition to needing to virtue signal is guilt. Virtue signaling is one of the left’s package deals that typically involve two steps. Firstly, make people who have done nothing wrong feel guilty. Then, offer them ways to assuage that guilt. It’s little more than a con game but it has worked amazingly well for liberals.

...An irony is that the need to virtue signal is an insecurity about your own virtue.

Virtue signaling is, of course, closely related to political correctness. Being sensitive to PC and being quick to take offense demonstrates your virtue for all to see.

Donald Trump is the context for much of the virtue signaling we observe. It’s another two-step process. The first step is to decide that Donald Trump is a reprehensible human being. He is crude, unsophisticated, and his personality makes you cringe. The second step is making it crystal clear that you and he are polar opposites. You have absolutely nothing in common with him. You don’t need to provide details about what makes you virtuous, just the fact that you despise him is sufficient to prove you’re virtuous. He is crude, you are refined. Trump provides a backdrop for your identity. It’s ironic that hate is seen as a path to virtue.

Virtue signaling is a substitute for thinking, it is thinking avoidance. It is the latest variation of group think. When you latch on to group opinions you have no need to think for yourself.

A favorite demand of leftists on college campuses and endowment fund boards of directors is “divestment.” What is divestment? In the investment portfolios of endowment funds and retirement portfolios are stocks of companies involved in shunned activities such as producing and selling fossil fuels. In such situations activists demand that the colleges or foundations divest, i.e. sell, any stock of such despicable companies.

Divestment is possibly the most useless behavior anyone could ever imagine. How anyone thinks it will have any impact on anything real is a mystery. Because of the way capital markets work, divesting on anything but a massive scale will have no long-term impact on a company’s share price. If they manage to drive a stock’s price down, bargain hunters will drive it back up to its underlying value, relative to other stocks. Other than stoking sanctimony divestment accomplishes absolutely nothing.

...These are just a sampling of the ways virtue signaling is dictating behavior far and wide. Being aware of its many manifestations will reduce your confusion and increase your amusement. It’s a shame it’s doing so much damage.

Read more here.

When will His Holiness speak up? When will he attempt to arrest and reverse the closure of churches and their conversion to mosques?

Mark Steyn writes today about Pope Francis's virtue signaling as all over Europe churches close while Mosques open.

And his slur on the people of Bethlehem is perplexing to me - because they are not the villains here but the victims: Bethlehem is where Herod embarked on the slaughter of the innocents.

The Islamization of Christendom is the biggest story of our time - one that will resonate down the centuries when we are gone and forgotten. And this Pope is on the wrong side of this issue - unlike his predecessor, who understood its implications all too clearly. A decade ago, in America Alone, I noted "the future implicit in Cardinal Ratzinger's choice of name for his papacy: Benedict XVI":

Born in Umbria in 480, St Benedict was the man who ensured during the Dark Ages that the critical elements of Roman and Greek civilization were preserved and that, by infusing them with Christianity, they would emerge in a new and stronger form: the basis for Europe and western civilization. Referring to his namesake, Pope Benedict XVI once quoted a Benedictine motto: Succisa virescit – pruned, it grows again.

Pope Francis does not appear not much interested in pruning and re-growth. Imagine if Benedict had not resigned to become "Pope Emeritus". Imagine if we still had a vicar of Christ who understood the stakes, rather than one who sounds like any other run-of-the-mill social-justice EU prime minister. When will His Holiness speak up? When will he attempt to arrest and reverse the closure of churches and their conversion to mosques?

Pope Francis is

a foolish man taking refuge in modish fancies as Christianity is slaughtered in the lands of its birth and shrivels in the continent it made its home. Shame on him, and pity our children and grandchildren who will have to live in such a world.

Read more here.

Virtue signaling results

Sundance writes at The Last Refuge,

According to a report in the Seattle Times, Howard Schultz, the current CEO of Starbucks, will step down from his role at the coffee chain next month. This comes following the collapsing brand image as a direct result of Schultz’s political virtue signaling to hire 10,000 refugees and avoid hiring Americans.

Are people inherently cruel?

After reading a cruel obituary of Alan Colmes at Slate, Ace of Spades wrote,

1. People are inherently cruel. They enjoy inflicting cruelty on others. It makes them feel good to be cruel to others.

2. People are self-deluding and believe themselves good. It makes them feel good to think themselves good.

3. These two things are hard to reconcile, but not impossible, because people are also good at making up Reasons to justify doing bad things and even praise themselves for doing those bad things. As they say, you are the easiest person in the world for you to fool. You want to be fooled, after all. And why would you have reason to lie to yourself? As far as you know, you're the most reliable, honest person in the world, and you've never given yourself any reason to doubt your word before.

4. The Reason usually offered to reconcile points one and two and is that there is a Higher Obligation to Something or Other which justifies cruelty on a (self-serving) philosophical, quasi-religious or actually religious basis. People tell themselves they are doing good by doing evil, and then this lets them feel both good about being "good people" and also lets them feel good about being cruel to innocuous nobodies. Not only can you do tremendously cruel things which would normally be completely unjustifiable and cause you to feel slightly bad for not being as good of a good person as you previously deluded yourself, but you can actually feel even better about yourself being an even better person than you previously thought, because you have the Bravery and Integrity to say cruel things which need saying, which many of the fussy-pants polite people just are too cowardly or too stupid to say.

5. The better someone tells me he is, the more certain I become that he is a monster. (Also: The tougher someone attempts to present himself on social media, the more confident I am that he is a physical and emotional weakling.)

6. People frequently insist to me how good and noble they are. The entire purpose of Twitter sometimes seems to be to provide a forum in which committed sociopaths can tell the world about their enormous hearts and pure spirits and noble intentions and grand ideals.

7. People in general are monsters and I have very little use for them.

Actually... Just to extend this: I have long believed that people tell you exactly who they are, right up front, if you bother to listen. I noticed some time ago that all the people I'd had failed relationships with told me within the first hour why the relationship would fail -- but I of course wasn't listening. I'm not saying they were bad people. I'm just saying they were pretty upfront about the reasons we were a bad match. I just didn't pick up on it.

I noticed a long time ago that anyone who claims to be "witty" in their Twitter profile is never witty, and is usually pretty dull.

When people describe themselves, they are not describing themselves. They are describing the self they aspire to be, what they aspire to be generally points out what they are currently failing to be.

It does seem to me a general rule that whatever someone bangs on about the loudest as a putative reason to recommend him is almost certainly actually telling you about his deepest insecurities and darkest failings.

In the comments, Notsothoreau writes, "It's just virtue signaling, as in "I am virtuous because I vote for people with a D after their name". You are somehow virtuous these days if you go on Amazon and bad mouthed Ivanka's perfume (which you didn't buy and have never smelled).

There was a time when people were virtuous boycotting grapes. Now they are virtuous by supporting the illegals that put Cesar Chavez's unionized pickers out of business. And the worst is saved up when someone they don't like dies."

Virtue signaling?

Virtue signaling

Bookworm writes,

As my conversation with the Progressive in 2008 showed, a politician’s actual abilities or wisdom are beside the point. What matters is that the candidate is “one of us.” This is why the Progressive sheeple in my world support Hillary notwithstanding the corruption and failure that hang around her like flies around a sheep’s carcass. She does all the right virtue signaling, thereby ensuring those nervous, insecure “us” people that, by supporting her, they are proving again their bona fides. Trump, no matter his wealthy upbringing and Wharton degree, fails when it comes to that oh-so-comfortable virtue signaling. Put some pro-Hillary and anti-Trump posters on your Facebook page and you will be perennially popular at parties.

...My Leftist friends like strong conclusions, unbounded by facts. They basically say that he failed “virtue signaling 101.” Their current frenzy is the fact that decades ago he said that a beauty queen who had gained weight in violation of her contract had . . . well, gained weight in violation of her contract.

And you know what? Because Trump is vulgar (which he is), he made the point in a vulgar way. As far as the “us” people are concerned, it’s infinitely worse, and less virtuous, to be vulgar than it is for someone like Hillary to use every bit of power and influence at hand to destroy completely the women who came forward and honestly stated that Hillary’s husband had raped them, assaulted them just shy of rape, or slandered them by calling them liars for speaking honestly about their sexual affairs with him.

When you run with the “not one of us” snobs, you can overlook some vicious, dishonest behavior in the service of abortion rights, but God forbid someone should be vulgar.

...And here’s where we get to the shallow “us” people mind. They don’t want to know that the facts are different. They don’t want to know that Trump was castigating the Mexican government for using America as a dumping ground for its criminals or that Trump said that the US should put a moratorium on taking in Muslim refugees until there is a way to weed out the bombers. Nor do Progressives want to know that Trump demands only that the government abide by existing immigration laws or that St. Jimmy Carter himself put a moratorium on bombing Muslims back in 1979. Facts are irrelevant.

“He’s a misogynist!” women and their pet men shriek.

Trump likes the ladies and, because he is vulgar, speaks of them in public in ways more appropriate to a locker or smoking room. Hillary savagely attacks and tries to destroy the same ladies her husband savagely attacked. Doesn’t matter. The short version is that Trump is vulgar; Hillary is vicious. Vulgar loses every time.

“He’s a tax cheat!” the “us” people are now gloating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t even bother telling them that, thanks to the New York Times‘ grossly illegal conduct, there’s currently no evidence of cheating. The only thing the Times can do is surmise that, based on known losses Trump suffered in the 1990s, it’s possible that he could have taken advantage of tax code provisions to write those losses off in subsequent years. Nor does it matter that the New York Times, in 2014, despite having profits (that’s a surprise) actually — not speculatively, but actually — paid no taxes. And please, don’t waste your time sharing with them this marvelous Judge Learned Hand quotation from 1934:

Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.

You’ll also be wasting time if you point out to the “us” people that Hillary and Bill funneled hundreds of millions of dollars through a tax-free foundation that donates to charity only 6% of the money it collects. The rest is used — tax-free — to keep Hillary and her family in highrises.

Again, that’s all irrelevant. The sheeple understand what’s important, which is that Trump is vulgar. The New York Times is not vulgar. It’s “one of us.”

...A Hillary victory will not just be a victory for an unprincipled, corrupt, incompetent woman. It will also mark the ascendancy of an educated class that has abandoned substance in favor of the type of posturing last seen in the corrupt, unprincipled, and guillotine-bound court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Just as Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of middle- and working-class Americans ground down by decades of being taxed and sidelined, Hillary is a symptom (and, I think, a cause) of a self-styled American elite that rejoices in its ignorance so long as its positions and appearance signal its importance.

Read more here.