Yes, new media has a quality problem. That quality problem is old media people and their followers. Both are high on sentiment illiteracy. People so conditioned to respond to and produce inauthentic emotion, they can’t recognize the real thing when it punches them in the face.
Conversation
Clueless types who respond strongly to theatrically elegant emotional expression, and to an affect of calm authority, preternatural poise, and gravitas, based on absolutely nothing, are unguided missiles set off by cheaply produced fake resonances. That’s what virtue signals do.
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Telltale signs:
Confusing intensity of real emotion for hysteria
Frequent calls for “calm civil discourse” and “reason”
Mistaking good grammar for goodtakes
Prioritizing norm following over effectiveness
Confusing “articulate” for “correct”
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Repeatedly I’m saddened by the sight of people I otherwise like, who are kind, thoughtful etc in their narrow domains, turn into unguided missiles uncritically doing the bidding of assholes because they are just too lazy to acquire a little sentiment literacy.
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I actually don’t mind virtue signaling by conservatives, libertarians, or classical liberals. I don’t really expect better from then, since they are defined by their holy cow virtues and institutions, and the behavior is kinda natural for them. Harmonizes with their institutions.
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Progressive virtue signaling though, grates in an unpleasant way. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because I expect more from them.
Ironically a virtue signal is an aliveness anti-signal to me. If you’re virtue signaling you’re not thinking and I generally expect prohressives to think.
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This may sound weird, but I don’t expect actual thinking from the rest because their value lies is faithfully reproducing old arguments, that were once progressive in their own time.
I expect high-quality reproduction. Classic greatest hits from Aristotle to Hayek.
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Virtue signaling is expected from believers in old ideas that have been distilled.
But “progressive” definitionally implies new ideas and fresh thinking. Stuff that hasn’t yet been compiled into “virtues” that can be signaled
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Most ideologies are almost by construction acting-dead ideologies (cf ). Progressive politics has historically been associated with subversive thought, good art that disturbs and challenges, etc. To virtue signal is to admit failure at the progressive acting-alive project.
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The subversive propagates, and becomes mainstream. Being provocative or subversive is itself just signalling a different virtue?
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