Give examples of virtue signaling

An example is an Indigenous Land Acknowledgment. Did any indigenous people ask for it? Does it actually help them in any way? All it does is make you feel like you're so high and mighty for "caring."

Have at it, OP:

Shit like R1's example really piss me off. Such an empty gesture.

Using the fake word 'Latinx', especially when you're not of Latin descent.

Example from Reddit: Braille names on baseball uniforms.

Ha! I was just going to look for that when your response popped up R4

Warren is the fucking queen of virtue signalers

It's basically anyone saying "I am clearly a better person than you are because I care about this oppressed group of people far more deeply than you do."

Some great examples from Urban DIctionary OP

[quote] Angela's sudden advocacy for the local pet shelter was mostly an exercise in public relations and virtue signalling. She had never much cared for dogs and cats before, but she instinctively understood teary-eyed public support for defenseless animals generally said something good about her as a person.

[quote] Fred: I see George has changed his profile picture to show his support for refugees. [quote] Barbara: Has he donated money or time? Is he giving English lessons? Is he making a room available? [quote] Fred: No, no, he's just virtue signalling.

R5 lmaooo

"I have a rescue dog."

"Raising awareness"

OP, thoughts and prayers for success to you in learning the meaning of this phrase!

I just heard a long audio clip of Benazir Bhutto, who was one of the queens of Virtue Signalling in her time. Extremely intelligent, elegant, arrogant, corrupt, powerful, aristo who was a master of combining the humble brag and virtue signalling about her duty to the poors.

"When I left for Harvard, my father (Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1973 to 1977) told me that the foreign exchange necessary to pay my studies was generated on the blood sweat and tears of the people, and I had an obligation to come back and dedicate my life to making their miserable lives better. Which is what I did, after I finished my graduate studies at Oxford..." something along those lines.

Typically, virtue signalling is done in lieu of actually doing anything meaningful. Indiana University, for example, is not actually going to give the deed to its campus to the Indians. The university just wants to show its solidarity with oppressed peoples.

The worst, and usually most worthless:

"I am a Christian."

Virtue signaling can be tricky. It's one of those terms that does describe a real thing (when people pretend to give a shit about a thing, person, issue etc. in order to look like a good person and not because they actually give a shit about said thing, person, issue etc.) but it also can be used to negate the fact of a person caring about anything. I got accused of virtue signaling by some Ayn Rand freak just for saying why I thought universal healthcare is a good thing. That wasn't virtue signaling, it was just what I actually believe.

So it can be used truthfully or it can be used in bad faith, to shut down differing opinions and conversation. It (virtue signaling) is also in no way the sole territory of the left. The hard right does a lot of it, although in their case it's often vice-signaling about just how very coldly heartless and without all human emotion they are (when nothing could be further from the self-pitying, hate-filled truth). Hate is an emotion, right?

Jameela Jamil’s social media footprint

Bernie Bro Adam Ellis’ Twitter

Making sure every library website index page, every non-right-wing political candidate mailer or website in North America, prominently includes a Muslim female who chooses to cover everything except her hands and face.

Anything a right-winger doesn't like you doing or saying.

Announcing in a book as a non sequitur, on a YouTube video unrelated to food or health or well-being, in the first sentence of your social media profile, your "way of eating" lifestyle. No reader is going to take you out to lunch, people halfway round the world watch your video, you use your Twitter or Facebook or Instagram account for general purpose, not in an official, corporate capacity: why should people you don't know and will never meet care about what you eat?

[quote]Making sure every library website index page, every non-right-wing political candidate mailer or website in North America, prominently includes a Muslim female who chooses to cover everything except her hands and face.

Yes, that's major virtue-signaling. You see commercial ads all over now including a woman with a hijab, but no one dressed as a Hasidic jew or Amish man or any of the other cultures that have different attire. It's so ridiculous.

R15 is actually a meta/trick example. A Christian is not the best example of this, and R15 probably doesn't actually think they are, but with this reply, R15 signals he is opposed to an outgroup in order to show himself as a virtuous member of the ingroup.

sex on set

Inserting 21st-century social values and mores in small-screen adaptations of 19th-century novels and short stories, rewriting most of the original and leaving out key characters if need be. "There will be a time when people will know our era's culture barbaric and needlessly patriarchal and classist. We now return to our story of 1870s' Furneux Pelham."

When it's Oscar season and a nominee suddenly comes on hard with a cause you have never heard them mention before.

Well, I guess the bitch paid the ultimate price, R12.

She's the most egregious example of this?

Announcing your "preferred pronouns"...xe, xer, xim, xey.. I went to a plenary at a conference and some clown on stage started their talk with this shit and the audience laughed.

R27 If you actually have preferred pronouns that aren't she/he, I wouldn't call that virtue signalling in and of itself. HOWEVER, if you feel the need to remind us of your pronouns when you're a woman who goes by she/her or a man who uses he/him THAT'S when it swerves into virtue signalling territory.

Also, straights using the word "partner" to refer to their significant other.🙄

R21 This makes me think, do the Amish even vote? Why would a candidate waste their time including a photo of an Amish man on a website for "diversity" when they don't even USE the internet?

R18, Trump had, prominently in the front row of one of his recent Nuremberg rallies, several black people.

Obvious troll thread is obvious.

But this is Datalounge so it'll be a hit. Everything is "woke" "virtue signaling" by "rabid SJWs" around here. Just like how anyone under 60 is a "Millennial."

[quote]Making sure every library website index page, every non-right-wing political candidate mailer or website in North America, prominently includes a Muslim female who chooses to cover everything except her hands and face.

This a 100X! Muslims are like 2% of the US population? 5% maybe???? Yet they are in every ad and poster now.

A FB friend of mine often posts what she and her husband eat. Always organic and veterinarian concoctions and how yummy it was. Oh, and her dogs are vegan. Then why is she, but not her husband, considerably overweight. You would think she would look like an organic twig. Me thinks she loves the sweets (organic of course).

This

Iconic is a perfectly acceptable word. It's all about context.

Going to extreme lengths to be offended by what 99% of people would consider innocuous.

For example, if on social media someone posts a video of their two-year old doing something most people would find cute on amusing, find some way to make it offensive.

You might accuse them of cruelty, emotional abuse, public shaming etc. Always start out with HOW DARE YOU. Relate it to some condition or abuse you have suffered for additional credibility.

Humorous videos are a good source of virtue signaling because you can almost always find some way to go full Karen Yogapants and turn something positive into a negative.

white people talking about their "white privilege"

Overreacting when someone says something that could be perceived as bigoted.

I think I’ve been blackballed at work.

—OMG that’s sooooo racist!!!!

Any woman on Fox News wearing a cross

There’s an old joke that predates the phrase “virtue signaling” but exemplifies the concept perfectly:

New York Times headline: “Asteroid to strike Earth tomorrow, eliminate all human life; women, minorities hardest hit.”

R15, that can be expanded to anyone who says, "I am religious."

As if that means anything and always said in a sanctimonious tone.

A lot of these are getting overly complicated and are not so much about virtue signalling.

The easiest example OP is all of those people who changed their Facebook profiles to have a French flag overlay a few years back when the terrorist attack in Paris happened, but that was the extent of it--they did not donate money to the victims, write to their Senator, take part in a protest rally.

But by superimposing a the tricolor over a photo themselves at the beach, they were letting you know that they cared about those French victims more than you did.

Straight folks wearing the diversity flag to show they are a gay ally. It used to have significance, but now they sell so much stuff with rainbows—and so many people wear things with it—it has lost its impact.

I hugged the woman in front of me at the Dollar Tree. Does that count?

The indulgence of carbon offsetting after flying in a private plane.

This author suggests we should point out “vice signaling” instead

It's a passive-aggressive way of indicating that you're more caring, intelligent, concerned, cultured, "woke", etc. than other people. It's often done in a subtle way where those "other people" might not even know they're being called out, but "those in the know" certainly pick up on it. It's like a secret handshake or password that says "We're in this exclusive club together."

One of the oldest examples: "I don't even own a television."

I don't watch RHONJ.

suspended from high school

It's when you have an intact hymen.

And NO you DID NOT fall off a horse.

These fucking signs, which mostly announce to the world that you don't know any latino or arab people personally but would just absolutely adore them if you did. You aren't racist like the bad white people!

Being a decent human being

Having consideration for other people’s feelings

R53 ...and shouting it for the world to know at any opportunity, genuine or self-manufactured. In case observers might think you aren't a decent human being.

[quote]Making sure every healthcare website index page, every hotel or destination mailer or website in the world, prominently includes a gay couple holding hands and being... well, gay.

Virtue signaling or normalizing marginalized groups?

I immediately thought of, “I don’t eat carbs...”

R15's apt observation followed by R18's injection of a not necessarily equal but just as sincerely felt quip, and then the tightly focused comparison at R21 reminded me of what is the perfect example of virtual signaling in a religious context.

When I was a kid, at the height of the 70s oil crisis, my father was given a temporary assignment in a small town in the middle of the Bible belt. Just as we arrived, some evangelicals completed a church built near a Jewish synagogue. Shortly after it opened and began weekly services, the Christians noticed that the Jews all walked to their services, and within a month the Christians announced that they too would walk to Church, attributing the Jews doing it to conserving gas.

Lol R56. I knew church ladies who would've done something like that back in the day.

R46 Wtf is vice signalling?? So if I call out a something really harmful, like pedophile who's trying to legalize pedophilia because it's his "sexuality", I'm vice signalling? GTFO. That idea is very dangerous because it would normalize bad behavior. Better yet, admit to yourself that you're a virture signaller and strive to be a more self aware person, instead of trying to one-up someone because of your damaged ego.

According to the author, it’s the opposite of virtue signaling. It’s what Trumpsters do. It’s like driving a highly polluting, or intentionally not recycling and being deliberately wasteful—and telling everyone as a way of sticking it to the libs.

*driving a highly polluting,car

Are reactive comments virtue signaling? For example, if someone asks "you're always quiet when we talk about our television shows, why?" and one answers "I don't watch TV," how is that virtue signaling? And "wow, you look great! I almost didn't recognize you! What's your secret?" and you tell them, is that virtue signaling? Answering a direct question doesn't seem as "woke" as parading about online declaring this and that in one's bio, and interjecting uninvited comments in others' conversations.

I reckon virtue signaling is an initiated action

Is posting every September 11 on social media memorial statements of the terrorist attack virtue signaling, or does it depend on the poster -- e.g. someone who's never left their town of Damascus, AR, as opposed to someone who lost a loved one or a few workmates and is "commemoratively" grieving?

R58 Your link doesn't work. I looked vice signalling and found an interesting article. It's asking liberals to soul search:

"Vice signaling is a defense mechanism, meant to displace liberal guilt. There was a moment, shortly after the 2016 election, when liberals realized that ordinary Americans had turned against them, and that they had reason to do so.

Allied to the teachers unions, the liberals had permitted our schools to descend to Third World standards. They supported an immigration system that imported economic immobility. They welcomed a regulatory morass that gave elites jobs but that placed a stumbling block in the path of those who sought to get ahead.

Liberals saw all that — and then they forgot it. Rather than blame themselves, it was much easier to transfer the guilt to conservatives. That’s how vice signaling became the language of liberal politics."

I was dismayed about the "no hate here" signs and their ilk. I welcome the intent, but the "we're not like the normal Americans" statement doesn't signal virtue to me as it does "our adult citizens have lost their minds and morals, our nation is waning, don't judge us by our electoral college." Most people didn't suddenly go xenophobic-authoritarian in 2016-17, they merely don't see the need to signal that they're not hateful people, especially if they're in liberal cities in blue states (where I've seen many 'hate has no home' type signs on lawns and in windows).

when you tell the peasent class to welcome refugess but don't invite them into your own mansion

Interesting article, R63.

[quote]Allied to the teachers unions, the liberals had permitted our schools to descend to Third World standards.

You're right! The fact that conservatives have spent 50+ years cutting the education budget — oh, excuse me, creating vouchers for "magnet schools" and diverting public funds to churches — had nothing to do with the decline of the American education system, once the envy of the world. But good job mashing two conservative bugaboos into one claim, because hate on unions never goes out of style.

And while we're on the topic of unions, let's not forget that unions fought for jobs to go to union members and American citizens first, but that was kyboshed by conservative's right-to-work statutes passed all across the nation.

[quote]They supported an immigration system that imported economic immobility.

Because there is nothing worse than a brown person willing to do the work that white people won't.

[quote]They welcomed a regulatory morass that gave elites jobs but that placed a stumbling block in the path of those who sought to get ahead.

Again, you're right! Putting up signs that demand the kitchen staff wash their hands after taking a shit is an incredible burden. Let's put up signs that say no one has to wash their hands, and let the free market decide the fate of a restaurant [italic]after[/italic] dozens, if not hundreds, of people get sick.

But yeah, let's blame the people who think we should treat all men as though we were created equally. The nerve!

[quote]Are reactive comments virtue signaling? For example, if someone asks "you're always quiet when we talk about our television shows, why?" and one answers "I don't watch TV," how is that virtue signaling?

It's all in the context, R61. That answer is perfectly acceptable in the context of that conversation. A question was asked and an answer was given. It would be virtue signaling if that person told you they don't watch television apropos of nothing. It's a substitute for saying what they really want to say, which is "I'm a better person."

This happens all the time here on the Data Lounge.

R63 If the premise wasn't completely insane I might slog through it.

Brie Larson. Annoying woke cunt.

R61, it depends. There’s “I don’t watch much TV these days. There’s so much competition for free time. It sounds like I’m missing some good shows.” And then there’s “I don’t watch [sneer] television. I’d much rather settle in with a good book, like something by James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon.”

The former is polite friendliness. The latter is snobbery and cultural signaling. I’m not sure I’d call it virtue signaling, which in practice is nearly always applied to political or politicized issues (which, granted, is most issues nowadays) and usually directly at behavior on the other side of political divide.

Portland, Oregon

"when you tell the peasent class"

Oh, dear, R65. I guess the peasant class can't spell, either.

Does this count?

Sometimes virtue-signaling occurs when entertainers feel like they have to make a statement on some issue because everyone else is and they don't want to be attacked for not doing it. It's like when Kramer refused to wear the ribbon on Seinfeld. A real-life example is Taylor Swift, who was forced to pretend that she's now interested in politics, in order to satisfy the mob.

My great-grandmother was an Iroquois Princess.