7/22/19

Virtue Signaling = Affirmative Action for Dems in Showbiz

Buzz words tend to be annoying. Virtue signaling is a contemporary pop phrase for show biz. People that ordinarily would be typical Democrat Party voters are portrayed in Hero of the Soviet Union kinds of roles in acting. They expropriate traditional Republican straight white male roles and replace them with women, LGBLTQs and non-white race actors and actresses.

That people besides Republicans that are straight and white males want to star in Hollywood is understandable. Even so it is wrong to describe the drive to make the change to Democrat party characters as virtue for-itself. Not being an archetypal Republican does not make an actor or actress virtuous by default.

I find the politicization of virtue annoying, for the Democrat Party isn't much for classical or Christian virtue. They redefine virtue as meaning something like beyond good and evil- annoying. Super-powers or excellence in killing do not signal the presence of virtue. Doing the wrong things for virtuous reasons reduces the virtue rating by at least 50%. Socrates might have pondered that sort of thing.

Classical Platonic virtue isn't obvious to others. Aretaic ethics are the essence of classical virtue and the contemporary Democrat Party isn't anything like that. Ordinary people probably are not specially virtuous for being prosperous, spending and consuming a lot while following contemporary trends, fashions and language use-conforming consumerism and conspicuous consumption. Aborting 60 million babies since Rowe vs Wade, watching television networks and mainstream media owned by the 1%, acquiessing in 22 trillion dollars of debt, a society that pays soldiers mercenary wages instead of fielding volunteers serving motivated with patriotic public service as guardians of the state, allowing the democracy to be transformed into corporatism and marriage to morph into the meaninglessness of multiple-divorce and homosexuality are not examples of virtue at all. It is Orwellian takeover signaling-not virtue signaling.

It is fine to signal political preferences yet wrong to couple that with the word virtue unless one intends to debase the meaning of virtue. I have no idea how politicians and Hollywood without good ideas that could actually make society work better, imagine they are virtuous or are capable of signaling virtue. A high court that reinforces  social standards of godless swinishness isn't a good source for social instruction for virtue- much less Hollywood types.

If Hollywood portrays characters that do not support democracy, the reform of capitalism within democratic parameters, Christian ethics, honesty, philosophical learning, faith, courage in adversity, individualism, sobriety, temperance, ecological economics, space exploration, efficiency in technology and the elimination of poverty and oppression by others in the state or simply in society, inventiveness, excellence and Aretaic ethics it just isn't virtue. Sorry Hollywood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

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