Why do right wingers come up with all the stupid concepts like "virtue signalling"?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

If I say all people should be treated with respect and have the right to feel safe regardless of their race, nationality, religion, or gender orientation , et cetera I am saying it because that's how I feel and not because I want you to think I'm virtuous.

[KansasKali]

1. I have not heard of this.

What is virtue signaling?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. Virtue signalling

Virtue signalling, spelled virtue signaling in the United States, is the conspicuous expression of moral values. The term was first used in signalling theory, to describe any behavior that could be used to signal virtue—especially piety among the religious. Wikipedia

[The Genealogist]

3. Conspicuous expression of moral values

Now why does this sound so familiar? Oh yes, because RWers do it all the time.

[backscatter712]

10. The word is projection.

[PatSeg]

8. Jesus called them hypocrites

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them."

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others."

[Loki Liesmith]

4. Virtue signaling is not a right wing concept

[DemocratSinceBirth]

5. I see them use it all the time. I never saw a liberal accuse someone of virtue signalling.

They also use its rhetorical cousin white knighting. They use the terms interchangeably to denigrate empathy.

[Voltaire2]

7. They might use it but it is not theirs.

[ck4829]

9. I have never seen anyone other than the Psycho Nazi side of the Far Right invoke "virtue signaling"

People who invoke "virtue signaling" are usually the same people who say "Good national security means sure there is a mass shooter, but hey, he's white and not Muslim... so win" and think Anders Breivik was some sort of visionary.

[gtar100]

6. One of the original stupid, right-wing concepts was "bleeding heart liberals".

A euphemism for caring about other people, the environment, social issues, etc. If you ask them, they would give you a more nasty definition. But it comes down to...what the hell is wrong with caring! Those people have some really messed up ideas. They can't conceive of someone actually being sincere about anything but selfish actions. Must mean that's all they can be sincere about. "Virtue signaling" falls right into that same mindset...they just can't imagine anyone sincerely doing anything good without some ulterior motives. A projection of their own mental state. Really does speak volumes about them.

[gratuitous]

13. And the same with "politically correct"

It's a shorthand designation for "I don't really have a substantive counterargument, so I'll just sneer at you with some bafflegab."

[ck4829]

11. Actually a fascinating trait as cults and cult-like movements often create new words...

To explain the world around them, to make the world fit into their narrow and fanatic ideology.

They will also take words and phrases already in use and remake them into their own usage.

Scientology - Suppressive persons and fair game

White supremacists - 14 words, 1488, RaHoWa

Ultra Right - Cultural marxism, virtue signaling, political correctness, and socialism (For everything they don't like)

[Hortensis]

14. Fascinating yes. I'd like to read more about this in cults.

But of course plenty has been written about redefining existing words and phrases to create separate more mainstream political vocabularies. This thread reminded me that some researchers actually used the growth of separate vocabularies as a measurement of partisanship. Went and found it. The graph's old now, but we're still riding the hyperpartisan rocket to the stars, or into the ground.

... In the paper, they have a simple but specific definition of partisanship: “the ease with which an observer could guess a speaker’s party based solely on the speaker’s choice of words.” This definition of partisanship scarcely changed between 1870 and 1990. For roughly 120 years, the probability of correctly guessing a speaker’s party by listening to a one-minute speech was about 52 to 55 percent, nearly random. But suddenly, in the early 1990s, rhetorical partisanship exploded.



“The 1994 inflection point in our series coincides precisely with the Republican takeover of Congress led by Newt Gingrich” and his Contract With America, they find. Gingrich’s revolution helped to introduce and/or popularize terms like “tax relief,” which at the time were seen as a distinctly conservative frame, as opposed to “tax cut” (or, more partisan, “tax giveaway”). ... This neologism burst—defined as words and phrases first popularized after 1980—continued through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century. ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/why-democrats-and-republicans-literally-speak-different-languages/492539/

It's not just Repub-Democrat either. A Rhetoric of Divisive Partisanship compares and contrasts the separate political vocabulary used by Trump and Sanders to differentiate and split voters from the mainstream, Sanders' simple catchphrases and Trump's lost-in-the-woods rambling both appealing to antipolitical resentment, described as capturing "zeitgeist in a bottle." The author predicts America will see more of this, which exists on a populist-to-fascist continuum and is part of a global phenomenon, in future before, hopefully, the anxiety generated by way too much change and uncertainty calms down.

[Kingofalldems]

15. And 'SJW'.

[JHan]

12. it's strange.

If you make a statement embedded in ethics or morality one can argue you are calling out for "virtue", so accusations of "virtue signaling" is virtue signaling itself and redundant/recursive.

[Baitball Blogger]

16. Is that like chugging white milk?

I failed their virtue signaling when I chugged some eggnog this holiday. Wish I could have sat on them for the four hours it took my neanderthal genes to get pure again.