"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.
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.
"The left's hucksterism doesn't work in a watchful and moral society"
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.
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.