Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you...

no, it means ostentatiously demonstrating that you are a "good one" for the appreciation of others. pretty much all callout culture is "virtue signaling" since yelling at someone on twitter has yet in history to produce any effect beyond self-aggrandizement.

Uh think you'll find Gandhi yelled at Britain on Twitter that time embarrassed 4u

as a phrase it can be used correctly and incorrectly but it should be useful for everyone. virtue signalling can noise and distraction to a the forwarding of cause. it may prompt a response from the other side that will be equally as aggressive. it can be counter productive to a real honest open dialog.

I've been seeing it recently as the newest version of calling someone a social justice warrior.

I'm kind of amazed "woke" hasn't been taken away by the alt-right and firmly associated with them yet.

It's so ridiculous and delicious that the right probably think it's best left where it is I'd say

lol I see "woke" more often used as a term of mockery than sincerity

'Woke' has lost all sincerity, if it had it to begin with, a long time ago

I've never seen "woke" used positively. Not even in the way people will call themselves a social justice warrior jokingly.

I've been seeing it recently as the newest version of calling someone a social justice warrior.

― Hilarity Winner (doo dah), Monday, 10 July 2017 23:50 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is of course what I was talking about but thanks for patronisingly explaining what it means like I'm some kind of fucking moron.

You noticed that too.

Well, sorry, that wasn't what I meant at all. Apparently I am stupid.

Sorry doo dah, that wasn't directed at you!

http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2016/07/woke-baes-bracket

the right has definitely seized on "virtue signalling" in the uk, to the point of it being almost unusable if you don't want to seem like someone aligned with them. do feel we need a phrase to describe some of the egotistical humblebrag attempts at progressive behaviour that twitter throws up. the amount of, for example, creepy male feminists patronisingly praising women all day or even retweeting posts that bemoan the behaviour of men - that's a pretty good example - someone acting as if talking a lot about other people's suffering means they aren't a member of a privileged group of society. which isn't to say don't talk about it but maybe don't assume you're part of the solution, imo.

to the point of it being almost unusable if you don't want to seem like someone aligned with them

― Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda), Tuesday, 11 July 2017 12:55

I hate how much of an issue this has become. People have become way too presumptuous. Just going back a few years ago I see people using all sorts of terms that they wouldn't touch today, not because they're horrible but because the shitty right uses them more.

"Cuck" is about the only recent term that makes me fairly confident the person using it is a total jerk if they're using it unironically.

Wokebraggery is the best I've come up with.

But really, it's probably best if all these standard insults are avoided.

Everything becomes tarnished so quickly and Donald Trump will be calling people "woke" eventually.

do feel we need a phrase to describe some of the egotistical humblebrag attempts at progressive behaviour

in fact, the left invented just such a phrase. it is "politically correct". good luck finding any gentle self-deprecation ever among left-ish political bedfellows that that will not be weaponized immediately by the whining entitled hordes of right-wing bullshittery

why doesn't this work the other way, you ask? why doesn't the left have this facility for turning the right's self-deprecation on itself? because they are not reflective enough to deprecate themselves in the first place!

There's "cuckservative" but that's complaining that some conservatives are too liberal and its completely disgusting.

because demonizing the right and their methods is too useful. it provides a boogeyman to market during election cycles. it helps avoid self-reflection on how the left is complicit in an oppressive system. it promotes the divide and conquer mentality. a bunch of other reasons too.

there are many factional disputes in conservatism, with lots of hilarious newly coined words used to described enemies, but since they all look like the same assholes to me (us) it's hard to discern.

"describe"

I hate how much of an issue this has become. People have become way too presumptuous. Just going back a few years ago I see people using all sorts of terms that they wouldn't touch today, not because they're horrible but because the shitty right uses them more.

"Cuck" is about the only recent term that makes me fairly confident the person using it is a total jerk if they're using it unironically.

Wokebraggery is the best I've come up with.

yeah i mean maybe it's different but in the uk recently i've seen people use "virtue-signalling" to denounce those highlighting the injustice of the grenfell tower fire, among other watershed uses. i feel the same way about "social justice warrior" - there are mild and frivolous instances of people behaving in a silly manner in the name of social justice but if ever i hear "social justice warrior" in person the discussion the user is instigating quickly starts to spiral into other faintly alt-right places, like shades of men's rights or whatever.

what scares me about this is i've noticed it in some ostensibly normal friends of friends types who come across as left-leaning, and it's like wherever they get their news and info all this damaging coded language is creeping in, and they themselves seem to have no idea that the person across the table this codes as alt-right, or on the spectrum towards it.

It seems a bit harsh to judge people as alt-right fellow travelers for using descriptive terms that have been co-opted by jerks in some cyberrealm they are probably unaware of.

That's part of why I think some are too presumptuous about people who use some of these terms. There's a lot of people who don't have all this context and don't spend much time online to get all these developments.

yeah fair enough, it's less judging them as that more just a sense that some of the views behind some of those who use those terms had sort of seeped into the person alongside the terms.

is virtue signalling just moralising?

It's a social climbing display of it

feel like there are a few difft things in play here - - - there have always been left bros who want to stroke their own egos by showing off how leftward and woke they are, and the internet has made this more visible/easy, and now there are new names for that. okay fine. but that's kind of different tho from saying that all "callout culture" is pointless BS. there are lots of legit reasons to call out bullshit and shitty behavior that are not reducible to "i want to stroke my own ego" or "i think this will lead directly to change of the thing i am calling out." to be clear, as with some of this other stuff, afaict very few published uses of "callout culture" are not pejorative strawman articles whose authors are contemptuous of the groups/communities/movements under discussion in the first place.

idk it seemed like a bit of a leap from topic A to topic B but i don't really want to devote myself full-time to defending recently-emergent social justice practices from the charge of political correctness gone mad.

iiuc, "virtue signaling" is changing your Facebook profile to pink or rainbow or tricoleur or whatever, but otherwise changing exactly nothing. It is a thing; not sure it needs to be called precisely that.

afaict very few published uses of "callout culture" are not pejorative strawman articles whose authors are contemptuous of the groups/communities/movements under discussion in the first place.

― ﴿→ ☺ (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, 11 July 2017 16:42

It's difficult to really gauge any of these things. There are thousands of online communities and it's hard to take anybody's word for how bad or how exaggerated a problem is.

Woke douches are a problem but I'm less worried about them than the really vicious bullies that use a good cause to excuse their actions. They're fewer and further between than alt-right trolls but they can have a chilling effect on communities.

Ye Mad Puffin- I wouldn't say putting on a rainbow profile counts for nothing but virtue signalling is supposed to be a more obnoxious display, like some person taking every opportunity to tell you how many black and gay friends they've got.

there are lots of legit reasons to call out bullshit and shitty behavior that are not reducible to "i want to stroke my own ego" or "i think this will lead directly to change of the thing i am calling out."

????

if you're not doing it to effect change and you're not doing it to stroke your ego why are you doing it???

I think Doctor Casino was describing those who act as if their criticisms will deal out a killing or penultimate blow to a problem.

in reviews: "one of the pleasures of..." this novel/movie/album/restaurant.

too lofty and grand-sounding, just get to the point

if you're not doing it to effect change and you're not doing it to stroke your ego why are you doing it???

― Mordy, Tuesday, July 11, 2017 9:53 AM (nine minutes ago)

getting laid, avoiding being called out as complicit/silent on a subject, looking busy at work

the first 2 are for sure virtue signaling!!!

Would be funny if someone's whole online persona was just the result of trying to look busy at work.

@ Mordy - your original statement was pretty much all callout culture is "virtue signaling" since yelling at someone on twitter has yet in history to produce any effect beyond self-aggrandizement. I did add "directly" to suggest that there might be indirect paths to change through verbalizing and articulating why something is not okay. because otherwise one might as well say "going to the anti-trump inaugural protests was only about ego since yelling at a president on park avenue has yet in history to produce any effect beyond self-aggrandizement." like obviously there are all kinds of "effects" going on there, like a group of people affirming to each other that they are not alone, building interpersonal connections (or phatic infrastructure, to borrow from julia elyachar) that lead to other kinds of organizing/resistance/whatever, or just conjuring up a very visible and strong symbol to others not in attendance that the trumpist narrative is not the only one, etc. etc. i could be wrong but i feel like you'd probably be with me on protest participation in this sense, so the emphasis on "producing any effect" seems odd to me.

but you've also sort of blurred together "callout culture" and "yelling at someone on twitter" which means we're already within an oddly delimited version of calling-shit-out - the only way to call shit out is to yell at someone on twitter? really? but even if we're just talking about virtual spaces though, calling shit out can do all kinds of practical work that's not directly related to making the person who's being bad stop doing what they're doing. for example, it might be a way of reaffirming the shared values of a community for the benefit of new arrivals. like if FlamePoster69 shows up here and starts swearing in all caps and flaming people, other people taking the time to post "hey that's not cool" or "i'm flagging FlamePoster69's post, this is not the kind of board where we do this kind of thing," rather than just letting it pass or trusting that the mods will delete anything really offensive... it may not cause FlamePoster69 to knock it off, but maybe a lurking 13-year-old, reading this exchange, is learning what's good and bad etiquette here. i might be biased by my own life experience here - i was talking about this on the gamergate thread a while ago i think, how helpful it was to me to read stuff like this as i was first getting online in 1992, 1993, oh okay there are these things called 'flames' and the respected members of this community are saying 'don't do this.' flash forward to the present day, post-gamergate, and yeah i do think it's very important that people don't sit by and let things go un-called-out in fan communities, it's an important way that new 13-year-olds learn that not only is harassment Not Okay, but also that behaviors X Y and Z which would not have occurred to them to be harassment, might be on that continuum.

those are just examples close to my experience, and virtual ones (to fit with your "twitter" thing), but there are other, real-world spaces where this is much more pressing and urgent, not just about campaigning for certain behavioral norms but about establishing real safety, e.g. in kink communities where establishing some standards around consent and safe practices, and calling out sketchy/creepy/assaulty behavior is a tool available to actually protect people from real harm, by giving them a heads up that a given event's moderators are really lax about safety and screening or whatever. that's a space where physical intimacy/vulnerability kind of ups the potential for people to be in danger but maybe that could be put on a continuum with lots of other kinds of spaces where it's good to have some guideposts for your own safety.

or maybe a much much more mild version is, you're at an organizing meeting and there is a cis dude there being just terrible, interrupting everybody, shutting down non-cis-dudes' ideas with sexist language or something. (note, i've probably been on the continuum of that-cis-dudeness at points in my life.) there are tons of ways of handling something like that that are going to depend on diplomacy, people's relationships, the vibe in the room, the overall mission of the organization, whatever, but i don't think it's inherently wrong or purposeless or ego-based to take the approach of calling it out, whether in that room or on the listserv later, for the same reasons as you call out the flaming newbie poster. because otherwise you let it slide and the bad shit becomes the norm for the group, shutting things down and pushing all kinds of people out of the picture. to critics this probably looks like "policing" but i mean if a group or community has any hard limits on its values ("no racist hate-mongering is permitted") then some degree of "policing," even through informal and voluntary action, is inevitable and not inherently problematic.

Calling out behavior in smaller communities can serve useful purposes but doing it on Twitter doesn't. Also I said "pretty much all" which I hope admits rare examples where it can be useful. But tbph 99% of the "call outs" I've seen over the last decade have been entirely about virtue signaling and had nothing to do with a) cleaning up the space or b) changing hearts + minds.

personally i am extremely skeptical of the effectiveness of more "helpful" or dialogic approaches to "calling out" online. sure irl in a face to face setting you may be able to have such conversations and they may be fruitful etc. but online is just not the medium (well social media, blogging etc. emails may be more useful i suppose if you're carrying on a personal correspondence with someone).

the political and online are both inherently agonistic basically, the only alternative to "virtue signaling" is quietism

(which is why people should realize that online isn't anything and if they want to be politically engaged they should do it irl)

but back to ronan's point - virtue signaling is used all the time on uk internet to decry any leftist saying anything remotely left-wing - recently saw someone complain about virtue signaling when someone was bemoaning the high rate of sexual violence in glasgow for instance.

fwiw, as my own contribution to the norms of this board, I think it might be a happier and more fun space if this thread remained the preserve of complaining about "yumsies" etc, and those folks who are recurrently annoyed by "political correctness" etc take it to one of the several crypto-conservative threads where these arguments have already been hashed out. but this is only my opinion.

but I'm glad Mordy concedes that when he says pretty much all callout culture, he actually only means stuff he's personally seen on twitter.

pretty sure when the person above complained about "virtue signaling" they were complaining about people who are "recurrently annoyed by 'political correctness'" but if u include them in yr critique then i don't disagree

i just want to add one thing re this idea that these neologisms criticizing the left are fouled by their prevalent use on the right: the left in 2017 engages in a lot of bad faith, destructive and shitty behavior. a lot of it is about ostracization, thought policing, social targeting, shibboleths, and virtue signaling. some of it is useful! but a lot of it is toxic and self-destructive. getting rid of the terminology used to describe it, bc u don't like some of the ppl who criticize the left, isn't going to fix the problems. just bc the right has found a handy club with which to blunt their historical political opponents doesn't mean the club is fake.