samizdat 19

    1. Actual Ethics and Hyper-Morality.  Without belabouring culture war phrases which are invariably over-used, it's worth considering the expression “virtue signal.” Though it's usage has been dated back to 2004, it's generally thought that a 2015 Spectator article by James Bartholomew brought the expression into popular usage. It means basically a very public expression of virtuous sentiment which is largely self-serving or self-congratulatory – a show of moral commitment which lacks real conviction or investment. “Virtue signalling” was generally a conservative or right wing taunt aimed at establishment liberals, and yet rather than dying a death as the Guardian hoped it would in 2016, it has slowly crept into general usage. Beginning to become a pejorative term roughly around 2011, “social justice warrior” had essentially the same meaning as “virtue signalling.” “Social justice warrior” is used infrequently today, having largely been replaced by “Woke”...

The “Covid Crisis” is a peculiar situation insofar as the greater degree of the crisis is constituted by our response to the Covid-19 virus, rather than the virus itself. Never in history has a problem itself been so dramatically eclipsed by the solution to that problem, to the point that it feels as though we have amputated an arm to “solve” a paper-cut. The world doubtless would have recovered from Covid 19, just as it has recovered from innumerable respiratory outbreaks in the past; but will it ever recover from the sustained assault on democracy, freedom, small independent business, children, mental health, logic, happiness, art, spontaneity, etc., encapsulated in our “response” to Covid? Will medicine and public health ever recover from the Orwellian anti-public health practised in the Covid era? Will the scientific method ever recover from the absurdities of “the Science”? Will the human spirit ever recover from the corrosive spiritual poison of the “New Normal”?  ...