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Comment by snicksnak | Hacker News Reader

It's the next step of corporate virtue signaling. Just repeating slogans on twitter or changing the bio and profile of a company account will not be enough anymore, instead pick a ridiculous hot topic from the news cycle and use this as an opportunity to implement an even more ridiculous policy change in your company to show that your company is down with the cause. I bet we will see even more of that.

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I love the term virtue signalling, but I'd much prefer the stronger word come back into the regular lexicon: "sanctimonious". It feels more impactful, as in "we didn't need a new word to describe your tendency to shout about your moral superiority"

In the 70s and 80s, a common complaint about American Republicans was that they were sanctimonious moralizers. Now another party has adopted that mantle, but a lot of people have yet to catch up with that fact.

Virtue signaling is such a great descriptive term for a lot of behavior. It's such a shame that it got politicized.

social grandstanding is another good one

“Oh we would never burn book... oh wait.”

It really was not that long ago... like 20 years we knew that all the things we’re seeing now are wrong and even had an idea why they were wrong.

There is going to be a kick back from all of this. I think we all know it, just not what form it will take.

I've occasionally observed parallels between the 4chan-esque mob and the woke mob.

It's the power of peer pressure combined with the apparently human tendancy to encourage others to do things we know are wrong for our own amusement. It's the playground mentality where a bunch of kids stand around goading another kid into doing something terrible chanting "do it, do it". With each success the groups find new levels of perversion to push their members to.

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