The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Right Was WRONG About Virtue-Signaling | 3/7/24 - Listen on Fountain
People will always virtue-signal; it is a key aspect of human nature that will never go away. The question is never “will we virtue-signal?” but “whose virtues will be elevated?”Follow on:Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-auron-macintyre-sho...
Most communist tactics are good things if you use them in the service of good instead of evil. If right wingers kept blacklists and had organized efforts to make communists unemployable without dignity guys undermining it, things would be a lot better.
Not even tactics. Ruthlessness. That's all.
Communism in theory makes a lot of sense
Too bad we live in reality where someone will ALWAYS abuse power and people will ALWAYS take a bigger slice of the pie if they can
I don't see how. Manipulating market forces always results in unforeseen second-order effects that you then have to figure out how to manage. If a small group of hippies want to start a commune and test the labor theory of value, good luck to them, but I wouldn't want to live there.
Honestly pretty much all communist regimes have been leaders realizing that it doesn't work and taking advantage of the suckers who fell for it.
Communism only makes sense in theory if you don't know that the foundational principle of communism, the labor theory of value, was debunked a century before Marx was born.
So in addition to being a genocidal madman he was also a plagiarist and a shitty scholar.
No, it doesn't. Communism proposes that the state will have unique knowledge that one side of the supply-demand equation lacks, and will correct the invisible hand and "balance" the weaker side.
Instead, we see that it takes an inordinate amount of resources, usually guesses wrong, and opens up the state to massive corruption. You might as well propose that a theocracy works in theory because the leader will be empowered with divine ability.
Virtue Signaling isn't the same thing as evangelizing the values you already live by, this is a dumb comment.
Virtue Signaling is an act of cowardice to appease a baying mob by reflecting it's values, or by otherwise hoping to weaponize said mob.
Living by your values and espousing them is not virtue signaling.
Please, for the love of God and all that is holy, do not try to adopt a slur we are wielding against our enemies.
"Hello fellow reactionaries! Let me explain to you how being a triggered snowflake is totally a good thing, and why we should adopt and embrace this language. Do you not have disgust sensitivity? That's being triggered. Are you not sensitive to your values being attacked? Well that's being a snowflake. So just remember: the next time a Leftist calls you a triggered snowflake, you look him dead in the eye and say: 'Yes I am!'. That's all for today, tune in tomorrow on how we can embrace the term: cuckservative."
Its becoming increasingly common for people on "our side" to not only have no idea what words mean, but have warped them so wildly from their actual history and meaning that its almost comical.
Which, ironically, is them falling for the Left game of constantly redefining words and getting lost in definitions to win arguments, something that only benefits them at this stage.
In fairness to a lot of people on this side of things, a lot of this terminology has a long enough history that frankly a lot of people are just plain too young to remember the original meaning of things.
Online right-wing culture would probably do well to develop its own version of the Jargon File, honestly.
I remember when I was a young lad wading my way into cultures for the first time. We had a meme for this exact scenario and defense for it.
As in, spend time to learn what is being talked about and immerse yourself in it before you start talking. You might realize that you aren't breaking new ground or don't know things if you spend the time listening instead of trying to shove your opinion in.
But I recognize that would get in the way of the grift for guys like this, and the virtue signal for the people commenting how much they hate the Wokes like soooooo much you guys.
When I was a young lad, you would be sent a link to the Jargon File so that you didn't sound like a total newb and/or annoy others by misusing existing terminology.
The concept of "learn the culture before you speak" was essentially the same, but there was a greater degree of formalism behind said culture.
Fair enough, concept is the same. One simply puts more onus on the newfags to actually put effort in before making a fool of themselves, thereby gatekeeping out those who lack the brain or patience to be worth allowing in, while the other requires some top tier person putting in constant effort to maintain such a document.
One big issue there is that there is almost no consensus or "unbiased, trustable source" that we can all agree on to maintain such a thing. It was probably easier back then for you with the smaller group and more aligned interests that brought people there.
I'm surprised this premise isn't already common knowledge. From what I'm aware it was always a tongue in cheek term used to sarcastically accuse leftists of acting like their beliefs were virtuous.
I don't think that's really been the implication most of the time.
Mainstream "Conservatives" tend to be in favor of leftist causes. Lets use a generic example of a CEO who donates to some Feminist NGO. If a mainstream Republican is ridiculing a Leftist target, they aren't going to say, "We shouldn't donate to Feminist causes because we don't want women in the workplace. We want them raising families, not raising corporate profits at the expense of workers wages."
A mainstream critique would say, "This donation isn't significant," or, "They aren't doing this because they're sincere," but the fundamental value of the Feminist cause is not really critiqued.
While a fair point, I'd offer the rebuttal that people who are one step shy of normies really don't get to dictate a definition like that.
"Normies" always dictate the definition. And that's why crafting rhetoric is important. Whatever nuance your rhetoric has needs to be clear when it's boiled down to the mass of low IQ supporters.
The rhetoric about "virtue signaling" to normies is just an indicator of hypocrisy. But it never challenges the fundamental premise. And Leftists are immune to accusations of hypocrisy (as demonstrated over ~a century) because they don't care about consistency, principles, or much of anything except gaining power & hurting their enemies.
I disagree entirely, normies mean nothing.
For the simple reason that numbers do not equate to truth. If I take a screwdriver, reverse it and use the plastic handle to pound in a nail, does that make it a hammer? Of course not.
Even if I get a million people to do it, all it means is that there are lots of people using it wrong.
Second reason. Normies hold absolutely zero genuine convictions. If you speak authoritatively enough you can get most proles to agree that one equals two. They're sheep at heart and half or more of them are essentially retarded. The left's hucksterism doesn't work in a watchful and moral society, but those don't grow on trees.
Disagree because if that were true we wouldn't be in this mess. The Roman republic would be the world government if that were true. Maybe we would even be speaking Sumarian because the first people who could handle logistical scaling would have won the world forever.
The forces of Chaos are always with us, either due to our fallen state, our animal nature, a universal constant, or whatever you want to attribute that to. The weak men >>> hard times cycle appears to be inevitable. Hegel then marx at least, circuitously, addressed that but their solution of acceleration until extinction (with some awful stuff on the road there) is obviously suboptimal.
Chaos waxes and wanes. The only way that at least a few innocents get to experience some peace is for heroes to rise up and willingly sacrifice themselves beating back the waxing chaos. Their spilled blood and spent spirit becomes the mortar which fills the cracks in the dam that holds back Chaos from overwhelming civilization.
It's exactly because it's true, that the left focuses so much on infiltration tactics and rabblerousing.
The Romans stopped being a moral and watchful society by degrees, bit by bit and more and more with each small step towards iniquity.
And in each instance, the proles not only behave, but will help enforce morality, if they know that the consequences for not doing it is that we'll kill them.
I agree with you on all of that, but seems like we're talking about different levels of influence. At the general level it's precisely the wrong lesson for the Right to intuit that "virtue signaling" is bad -- Authentic displays of virtue are good. It's just that the virtues have to actually be good.
No, it was always meant to be a mockery of people who feel the need to announce basic fuck morality as if it offers value to their position, and those who list off all their positive virtues before an opinion to grant it more power.
So if they open with "I'm against rape" or "I'm a feminist and" that's virtue signalling. Its something that offers nothing but making the person sound more virtuous to try and influence your opinion on what they say.
It was never tongue in check, it was a legitimate mockery of a behavior.
There's teaching virtue, and there's virtue signalling. They are separated by real principles and self-aggrandizing.
So no, virtue signalling is not a good thing. It means empty platitudes for self promotion. Do good. If you have to crow about it, you're inauthentic.
Got to agree with this. Virtue signaling is by definition lip service and empty platitudes. A society that exhibits a gulf between its words and actions is ripe for subversion and HEY look at that! That's what happened in the 60s.
You can promote lies with mountains of hypocrisy and empty BS, but promoting truth is a little harder. Virtue signaling will never go away, but it should be kept at a minimum.
Exactly Jesus teaches us to be virtuous but actually warns us not to virtue signal:
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Is it because it's basically reinforced messaging and repetition is basically how brainwashing works and that doing it on an industrial scale and making a societal norm is how you normalize desired behaviors?
More or less. I'm not nearly the smarty wordmaking guy Auron is so I'm probably butchering it but my understanding is there is a feedback loop where people want to show they are both a part of the group but also display their personal elevated status. They do this by displaying high status behaviors that they know are socially conformist and in-line with other, known, high-status individuals.
An example he gives is an average-to-upper middle class White woman* mentioning* on social media about her "trans kids". She does this not because she really cares about trannies but because that is what all of the celebrities she sees on TV and reads about all the time are talking about. Of course she will pretend sincerity to her grave because in her social environment the loss of "authenticity" is reputational death.