The sort of language policing taking place in TFA is a club: a blunt-force social weapon that (predominantly white) leftists use to keep each other down, by emphasizing the recipient's lack of ideological purity, manifested in this context by being insufficiently sensitive to the possibility of hurting someone's feelings. It's also a great way to make oneself look like one supports causes like anti-racism or decolonialism without having to actually do anything that would require effort or material change to one's lifestyle.
For example: "spook" was allegedly used at some point as a slur against black people, so if you have ever used the term "spooky" in a Hallowe'en context you have committed the immortal sin of doing a structural racism.
To the underemployed university administrative staff who have never experienced real hardships, this sort of thing is a Big Deal(tm), except we can't call it that because it's insensitive to short people. Correction: people experiencing heightlessness.
> The sort of language policing taking place in TFA is a club: a blunt-force social weapon that (predominantly white) leftists use to keep each other down, by emphasizing the recipient's lack of ideological purity, manifested in this context by being insufficiently sensitive to the possibility of hurting someone's feelings.
To this, I call out the case of the words Spanish speakers have been using to refer to disabled persons.
The word for "disabled person" was at a point in time deemed too insensitive and an outright insult, so around the 1970s the word "subnormal" started showing up even in government acts to appease the virtue signaling crowd.
Except that after a few years the word "subnormal" also managed to find itself as a prime example of a gross PC violation, and therefore they coined the term "minusválido" (i.e., "less than valid", a milder form of "invalid") to appease the PC gods.
But lo and behold, "minusválido" is now also looked poorly by the PC crowd as being offensive.
"Differently-abled" feels '90s corpo to me. The disability rights people I know pretty much all favor "disabled" or "with disability" and have for many years.
Ironically that feels kinda rude to me. Like if I wasn't able to walk, I would want people to aknowledge that... instead of pretending that I just move differently.
Well.......if you weren't able to walk, you would be moving differently, not exactly pretending would it be?
I mean hell it's not even a less accurate description, you're not able to walk but you're able to move around using crutches or a wheelchair or other mobility device. A person who isn't able to walk may still be able to do almost everything day to day (well aside from walking) that a non-disabled (or non-differently abled person, ok that sounds kinda weird) person would be able to, albeit in a different way.
Of course not, but the language police don't care about disabled people.
These are the same people who publish "inclusive language guides" with garbage like "don't use the term Brainwave because it's dehumanizing to people with intellectual disabilities".
It's an entire R&D field dedicated to finding new and creative ways to be offended.
Ah, so when you said "they" your pronoun didn't match your antecedent. Makes sense considering no one on this site seems to know what a pronoun even is anymore.
It's interesting that so much of this comes from academia but they exempt themselves from so much of it. The moral panic over the use of the word "master" in any context somehow turned a blind eye to master's degrees. Academics felt their usage was ok by their own ever shifting relative criteria that everyone else is expected to constantly contort themselves to follow. Very convenient how that works for them.
People (mistakenly, I believe) thought that "master branch" was derived from the disk and database "master"/"slave" metaphor, which had started being eliminated years earlier. "Master branch" was also a fairly recent coinage (within my career) limited to a few specific tools, so changing it wasn't moving mountains.
The two parties in the US are each half a human, twisted and dying... driven by the effectiveness of negative campaigning and the destruction of competition over reaching consensus, unable to reconcile the merits of self-interest with the understanding of collective responsibility, bringing on the doom that lurks in the wasteland of destroyed trust and mutual respect.
It's politics. It doesn't have to make any sense. These people have grievances and they want everyone else to hear them. They're pissed off they're being asked to have empathy for others, and much like children they're incapable of it.
Virtue signaling doesn’t have to be done with something that’s actually a virtue, you just have to think that what you’re signaling is perceived as a virtue by your target demographic.
It’s certainly sometimes used that way. But the real meaning is something like „making sure everyone knows how moral you are without making a lot of effort to actually be moral, just by telling everyone“.
By that definition the linked article doesn't fit, then. The author has put a lot of effort into research and writing about this subject. The "morality" part is a relatively small part of it, just a single paragraph in the conclusion.
What perceived virtue do you think the author is trying to signal? How do you separate it from a true belief? It seems like you'ld have to have access to their mental state, no?
Policing the language to avoid harming oppressed people. This is not a real virtue though as there's no actual harming and the only thing it does is creating animosity, annoyance and pointless arguments and causing people to hate each other needlessly, without helping any oppressed people in any way.
> It seems like you'ld have to have access to their mental state, no
Of course, absent communication, that would be the only way. Fortunately, communication - such as written text - allows us to let others to witness certain aspects of our mental state, this is one of the points of communication. So, present the communication, we can make certain conclusions about the mental state of the communicator.
Virtue signaling isn’t necessarily lying about your belief, it’s overtly making everyone aware of how virtuous you think you are, and that you’re morally superior.
The signaling is just pointing it out to make yourself look better, it doesn’t mean you’re lying.
It sounds really weird that critics cannot place themselves in the shoes of the virtue signaler and describe where the virtues or morals are being communicated. I'm repeatedly trying to abide by the site guidelines by getting curious rather than disagreeing. It's like some sort of ideological opposition is causing a mental barrier to empathy. I still don't understand it, but some day I hope to. Thank you.
Yes, I think we’re in Sealioning territory now. Most of these questions would have been answered with a quick skim of the Wikipedia article on virtue signaling.
