Why does protesting come off as a display of self righteousness? Look at Occupy or the trump protests. Once people had their couple of days or weeks of indignation, they just go back to their usual work of keeping capitalism running.
If you want to change the system, start an insurrection. How virtue signaling is supposed to change anything, I fail to comprehend.
i love """""leftists"""" that unironically use the verbiage of fascists
so what have you done in your life, other than post
We use it here too. Just how new are you?
I haven't betrayed anybody, for one.
Protests have toppled governments m8. Look at the collapse of socialism across Europe, Arab Spring, Velvet Revolution, etc.
Virtue signaling is a fucking retarded term the way the aut-right uses it, which is unfortunately how everybody uses it nowadays. It makes sense when you're saying "something to say to avoid having to demonstrate your actual values through action", but now it's come to mean "giving any indication of moral values whatsoever". Ironically, that means every aut-rightist who claims "virtue signaling" is basically virtue signaling that he doesn't like PC culture
All 3 of those things have been disasters.
And get used to it. If you want to see real change in society, you're going to have to see a ton of failures before you see any success. That doesn't mean the correct response is to say direct action does nothing.
Is everything virtue signaling?
Why even do anything, at risk you'll be deemed fake?
More high school shit at 11
Wait what? I'm calling for direct action. Knocking a trash can over at a protest and banging some drums isn't direct action.
Pretty much anything that produces actual results wouldn't be .
Actual results from protests are basically nothing.
maybe, but the point stands that they were effective.
t. totally not FBI 😂
The Arab spring, velvet revolution, etc. are definitely not "knocking over some trash cans". And the incessant focus on knocking over trash cans to stop police vehicles is extra autistic and disingenuous, and I wish people wouldn't try to use that in earnest.
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He's using a Reddit flag of course he's a redditor newgag😂
protests in s korea seem to have done something
This is virtue signalling. Protesting isn't.
Calling for direct action=="terrorism"
It raises class consciousness in the population in general. It demonstrates a mood in society and a willingness to get out of your house and organize for a cause. Even if the act of protesting itself is not equal to the act of revolution, it forms an important part of the wider social process required for revolution.
If the effect the protest will disseminate into the mass consciousness is deemed negative in regards to the established ruling order the protest will either be stopped or as in most cases purged from the news and majority memory.
You are imagining the state to have powers it does not. Take off the tin foil. The entirety of the mainstream press and majority of the political and social establishment backed Clinton, and Trump won. The media and the state has a huge power in society, but it is not absolute, and it will only get weaker as revolutionary, anti-establishment mood grows.
Hillary was colluding with Trump. Nobody is this stupid you government spook.
Look mate, clearly you're already quite far gone, but you're not looking at things clearly. Your paranoia is affecting your political level, or maybe your political level isn't good enough and it's created this paranoia for you.
The ruling class is divided. This is what happens when captialism goes into crisis. Economic crisis breeds polititcal crisis, and right now we are seeing cracks all across the once (relatively) homogenous political establishment. The ruling class is constantly fracturing at the present time, with smaller parties taking more and more votes, rifts in previous unions emerging, far-right and far-left movements confusing them, there are wars in both major parties in the UK, Trump has shattered the political establishment's illusions of control of its own system in the US - need I go on?
The state becomes weaker during this period, and this is necessary and expected. A revolutionary situation opens up as a possibility in this ferment. Study any and all previous revolutionary situations. The ruling class begins to lose control of its own system. We are seeing it begin today.
😂
No, its not just virtue signaling, it also has other components and considerations in addition to virtue signaling.
People genuinely want change, and are ready to sacrifice, if nothing else, at least their time. They also feel they are right, and like it that other people can see them being right. It feels good when people see you being right, its very rewarding being right in public.
So yes, it feels good, and thats a factor, but there are other more important factors. If you wanted to just virtue signal, you'd do it on Facebook. Less work, same feelgood.
So it's basically the difference between using your hand or getting an escort. Still just masturbation either way.
It's still a useful term in that context. People constantly do the above simply to signal they are in the "in group" and thus their argument must be taken seriously. Anyone with any interest in honest discussion should avoid this, all it does is perpetuate a weird kind of elitism, where you have to say the magic words learned at the elite university before your words count for anything. It perpetuates the myth of meritocracy, in discourse form.
not quite, protests have an important effect, even if miniscule.
Protesting is almost always what becomes insurrection. Look at Ukraine
Hh
Depends on the kind of protests. There's the kind to say "I'm mad and you should know about it", which has no explicit political goals except to signal that anger. The Trump protests, for example. They signalled that people weren't going to take it, and even if they had little direct impact they really kicked off the whole Indivisible thing, as well as a lot of other campaigns that actually do have an impact.
As for those that do, they're ones targeted at specific results. If you look at the protests of the Civil Rights Era, the marches were for specific and measurable goals - the desegregation of schools, for example, or support for voting rights. This is also what the Tea Party did when Obamacare was going through - they showed up and specifically made ruckuses to disrupt the bill, so what the US ended up getting was some watered-down trash that was easy to attack.
If you do an Occupy protest, camp out, and expect the system to just change, you're deluded. If you do a blanket "anti-war" protest without any specific demands and expect "war" to stop, you're deluded. But if you do a great big anticapitalist march with the purpose of showing that people are mad and then use it as a steppingstone for further organization, then you're going to actually get somewhere.
the J20 protests where I live turned two of my friends from liberals, into radical socialists reading anarchist literature
so yeah, the can do shit
That's precisely how OP used it.
You don't need to start an actual violent insurrection, but protests do need some edge to accomplish something. Basically you need to disrupt the function of the government/economy and force some kind of confrontation with the state.
Occupy the financial district, government buildings, factories, block roads etc. Even if all you accomplish is getting beaten and arrested this still radicalizes people and forces the bourgeois state to expose its inhuman and coercive nature.
I imagine this is what peebs is talking about. Protesting and confrontation leading to radicalization.
I wouldn't go so far to say protests meant to raise consciousness (like the anti-trump ones) are useless but they will never achieve any meaningful change in themselves.
Virtue signaling is often misused by right-wingers to refer to all activism but it is a real thing. Think of like the student idpol left in the US or call out culture, I have a hard time believing actions like these are coming from a place of genuine political passion.