“Virtue signalling” is defined as, “To take a conspicuous but essentially useless action ostensibly to support a good cause but actually to show off how much more moral you are than everybody else”. Since first appearing some time in the early 2000s and edging out Patrick West’s closely-related phrase, “conspicuous compassion”, virtue-signalling has become a common epithet.
But, it is none the less accurate for being over-used. If anything, the furious reaction against the phrase from the left-media shows just how devastatingly on-point it really is.
Because, what else can you really call it, when the left furiously protest “because of the children”, yet avoid doing anything to actually help children who really need it? After all, the climate protesters regularly claim that “justice” demands they act for indigenous peoples.
But they just can’t be arsed doing anything to actually help the indigenous people in their own backyard.
In April this year, Alice Springs Deputy Mayor Jacinta Price (again) spoke out against “myths that are constantly peddled” in relation to high rates of violence in Indigenous communities. “Domestic violence in many Aboriginal communities far outstrips any other crime that is committed,” Price told Joe Hildebrand on 4BC. “And yet, there’s utter silence on it. For me, it’s complete and utter hypocrisy” […]
Where are the children marching for that cause? Where are the emotive posters calling attention to that terrible subject? Where is the groundswell of public opinion mobilised to renew those communities with family peace? Where is the media? Where are the ‘progressives’ urging policies to provide schooling and jobs for those communities, and urging those communities to take more responsibility, or agency, Price put it? To eradicate child sexual abuse?
Far easier to dress up like a complete fool and glue yourself to the road. After all, who’s going to get on the news for going to remote communities and doing a stint reading to Aboriginal children? Ask Tony Abbott, who takes several weeks out of every year to do just that — to complete indifference from the media.
As a delegation of Aboriginal women who travelled to Canberra to speak about domestic violence, not one Greens or Labor politician even bothered to show up. It was left to “racist” One Nation to hear their pleas.
It’s not just in Australia, either.
Why are those climate warriors who so loudly bemoan the future of today’s children, not marching and lecturing the world (yes you, Greta), about the millions of women and children whose daily lives – today — are tormented and shortened in the absence of affordable electric energy from coal? According to report by the World Health Organisation in September this year […] Household air pollution causes noncommunicable diseases including stroke, ischaemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer.
Close to half of deaths due to pneumonia among children under 5 years of age are caused by particulate matter (soot) inhaled from household air pollution.
As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, for a fraction of the trillions spent pointlessly trying to make a half-degree difference to global temperature, the world could eliminate malaria or famine, several times over.
Left to live medieval lives of a brutal, unimproved past, all these women and children of the third world, really do need a champion or two to campaign for a better life. Where are you Greta, Prince Charles and your brother Princes of Woke, David Attenborough and all you harrumphing celebrities? And where are you political leaders? […]
Contemptible climate activists revel in the political spotlight, warmed by their perceived virtue, blinded by their ignorance or propelled by their feverish desire to change the world.
Spectator Australia
Yeah, but poor people are so… icky. Who wants to get poo all over their expensive La Sportiva hiking boots, or $2600 Arc’teryx rain jacket? Where can a celebrity park their Gulfstream in some boondock African village? Do they even have Wi-Fi for making Instagram posts?
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