#virtue signalling

Because that would then force them to acknowledge that they don't actually care about mainstream media and simply find it easier to target and harass individual people with moral flag waving and threats over massive corporations who would either outright ignore them or smash them with the legal hammer.

What's easier; hounding a teenager online with death threats because they write incest fanfic or forcing international censorship of Game of Thrones and prosecuting George R. R. Martin as an incestuous murdering rapist who creates child pornography?

What's easier; needing no argument other than; "I think its gross and immoral" as defence for your virtue signalling or needing very extensive knowledge of the law, sociology and psychology in order to accurately formulate and prove that creating and/or consuming content relative to specific subjects is more harmful than beneficial and has direct action consequences?

And thus, the answer. Option A is indefinitely easier and more manageable, and more outcome-effective. Antis then real like they're "empowering real change" because if they successfully bully someone off of a platform, they were Right All Along and their activism is Working.

DISCLAIMER AT THE START OF THIS: If you have any disability that affects your mobility, energy levels, or general ability to engage in activism, I want to make it clear that none of what I'm about to say applies to you. A thought popped into my head and I want to talk about it. I'm sick of people who promote and engage in performative activism at universities while not promoting action that will actually help people.

What do I mean by that exactly?

I am the current leader of a university volunteering project that goes to a coffee shop on campus after closing, takes any leftover food, and brings it to homeless shelters near the city centre. It's about an hour commitment. Pick up the food, walk 15-20 minutes carrying it, drop it off, chat with the people at the shelter a bit, head home. It's about an hour commitment overall and there are new sign up sheets every week so you can literally sign up once a year if you want. But we have huge issues with recruitment and there is only one person outside of our three-person committee who regularly volunteers. This makes it very hard to cover all nights, and if we miss one night, up to 100 meals can be wasted. I do most nights at the moment, so basically this network is mostly relying on this one disabled guy (me) and if I'm unavailable for a while, a lot of food gets wasted.

I am also a former member of my campus's pro-Palestine organisation, and I was briefly part of an encampment they set up. I've spoken about this previously on my account but the reason I left was basically I had to leave for some time due to health issues. I returned when I was better and found them saying stuff like "intifada revolution is the only solution" and "from the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab (in Arabic)" which I consider to be extremist rhetoric invoking ethnic cleansing of Jews. I then left the group entirely and reported their behaviour to the university.

I wasn't an outspoken member of this group, but I went there enough that I know who the frequent attendees are. And isn't it funny that the people who went there the most and were the most outspoken about anti-capitalism, starting the revolution, and direct action... are never the ones who show up to actually engage in that direct action by spending one hour of their time to give free food to people in need?

All these people do is stand around at protests and chant extremist rhetoric. Or they go to their socialist book clubs and talk about how they're willing to risk going to jail for their cause. They don't even really do that anymore - all term I think I've seen them protest on campus once, and they barely post on their Instagram anymore. Do they actually want real change? I don't think so. I think they're on the level of Year 7 kids shouting swear words and running in the corridor because it's against the rules and they want to feel like they're being rebellious.

But when it comes to doing the real work, lifting heavy bags full of food and struggling through a yellow weather warning for wind and rain like I was doing tonight? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. None of these people ever show up to do the actual direct work that benefits real people. The people who show up are always ordinary uni students. People who might get criticised for having generational wealth or socioeconomic privilege or imperfect language or whatever. Imperfect people, who I nonetheless much prefer because they are actually putting in effort to help people. The protests are just full of lazy virtue signallers who want to stand around screaming about how great the intifada will be instead of actually helping people. They talk about how committed they are and how they're willing to commit crimes and go to jail in the name of their cause, but they can't be bothered to carry a couple of bags for 20 minutes.

They don't even have to walk there if they don't want to. They could take the bus. They could call a taxi. They could have a friend drive them to and from the shelter. They can't be bothered to even contact us to try and set up a proper mutual aid network despite them talking all the time about how much of a good thing it'd be. Instead it's just four people all December struggling to maintain a single network, and people wonder why we aren't able to start encouraging more campus shops to join the initiative.

I'm sure some people will be thinking something along the lines of "oh well this won't actually change the system! We should be focusing on the revolution!" No, this is not going to change the world, but it sure does make a difference for a lot of people at those shelters - they are always so happy when I show up and spend the whole time thanking me profusely. It always amazes me how one hour of my day can make such a difference to people.

And speaking of the revolution? I have real doubts that they'd end up doing that either. Like please. You're too uncommitted to this leftism of yours to even spend an hour of your time carrying a bag of food to a homeless shelter. You're never going to be part of any revolution, and if one were to be started, I'm sure you'd have all sorts of excuses as to why you're not joining.

TLDR, if you spend all your time talking, getting into arguments online, and going to protests, but don't actually do any of the work in your community like supporting food saving networks, volunteering, litter picking, etc, I'm not going to take you seriously. Stop virtue signalling and start actually helping people.

everyone is supposedly engaged in the project of creating a more just society, and yet so many conversations immediately devolve into an elaborate social ritual where the actual issue at hand becomes secondary to demonstrating that one possesses the most correct framework, the most refined vocabulary, the most up-to-date understanding of oppression, and therefore the highest claim to moral legitimacy.

and before anyone starts frothing at the mouth: yes, obviously people can be genuinely informed, and yes, some positions are better supported than others. i am not arguing that all ideas are equally valid. what i am saying is that there is a profound difference between believing something is right and turning that belief into a status hierarchy.

because at a certain point it stops being "how do we solve this problem?" and becomes "how do i prove that i am more ethically enlightened than everyone else in this room?"

you can see it in the way people will spend twenty minutes dissecting a single poorly phrased sentence while completely ignoring the broader point being made. you can see it in the tendency to treat ignorance as a sin rather than a condition. you can see it in the assumption that someone arriving at a conclusion later than you did is not merely uninformed but morally suspect.

there is this strange underlying belief that political understanding emerges fully formed from the heavens and that anyone who has not yet reached the correct position is actively choosing evil rather than operating from a different set of experiences, information, or assumptions.

which is particularly ironic because most people who now occupy the position of the enlightened educator were themselves wrong about a hundred things five years ago.

nobody is born with a complete understanding of structural inequality. nobody emerges from the womb knowing critical theory. nobody downloads an exhaustive catalogue of social analysis directly into their frontal lobe.

people learn.

they learn slowly. they learn imperfectly. they learn through mistakes and awkward questions and occasionally saying something stupid.

and yet so much online political culture seems actively hostile to the process of learning.

it is obsessed with the appearance of knowledge rather than the acquisition of it.

the result is a culture that often feels less like a political movement and more like an endless graduate seminar where everyone is competing for the title of Most Correct Person Alive.

which would perhaps be tolerable if it actually achieved anything.

but a movement cannot survive on moral self-congratulation. it cannot build coalitions by treating every disagreement as evidence of personal corruption. it cannot persuade people by approaching every conversation with the energy of a medieval inquisitor who has just detected heresy.

IDK who needs to hear this, but AI doesn't destroy water. Most of the water "used" for cooling is reused in loops. The water "lost" due to evaporation doesn't disappear. It becomes vapor, ends up in the clouds, and re-enters the water cycle as rain. Matter cannot be created or destroyed.

AI doesn't even crack the top ten list of global water uses:

1. Agriculture & Farming 2. Power generation (thermal cooling) 3. Manufacturing 4. Municipal use (households, lawns) 5. Mining & resource extraction 6. Oil & gas 7. Textiles & fast fashion 8. Food & beverage production 9. Landscaping, golf courses, recreation 10. Pulp & paper production 11. Tourism & hospitality (hotels, resorts, laundry, pools, cruise lines, golf courses) 12. Construction 13. Data centers (all workloads combined) 14. AI workloads specifically (LLMs, image generation, training, inference)

We use a LOT of water for a LOT of non-essential things: golf courses, lawns, luxury fountains and water features at hotels and casinos, theme parks, water parks, artificial snowmaking at ski resorts, fast fashion, denim and jeans, bottled water, soft drinks, and beer. ALL of these use more water than AI.

One golf course can use 300–500 million gallons of water per year. There are 16000 golf courses in the US. That's 4.8 - 8 trillion gallons a year. US data centers--and this is covering ALL work loads from Google to Netflix, not just AI but the entire data center industry--use less than 17 billion gallons per year, per the Dept of Energy.

Annual Water used by Golf Courses in the US: 8,000,000,000,000 Gal. (8 trillions)

Annual Water used by AI in the US: 17,000,000,000 Gal. (17 billion)

Just so you guys can get a real visual representation of exactly how much more a trillion is than a billion. It's three additional zeroes. Golf courses use 470 times more water than AI in the US alone. That isn't counting the water that golf courses contaminate.

When water evaporates, it leaves impurities behind. Evaporation is a natural distillation process. The water vapor that enters the atmosphere from a data center cooling tower is virtually pure H2O. It doesn’t take the scale, minerals, or cooling chemicals with it into the clouds. That's why it doesn't rain saltwater.

That stays in the tanks and eventually has to be flushed out. This blowdown water is treated before being sent to a sewer or kept in a closed-loop system where the contaminated water never touches outside air, meaning zero evaporation and zero chemical reactions that would induce acid rain. Water is recycled, not wasted.

Data centers filter water. Golf courses poison it, significantly more than a data center ever could. Golf courses pollute the dirt and groundwater with pesticides and nitrogen-heavy fertilizers. That is a leading cause of dead zones in lakes and ponds where there is no oxygen and fish die.

One cruise line alone does more environmental damage than the entire AI industry, all LLM models combined, and there are about 80 cruise lines on the planet, making the cruise line industry at least 80x more harmful.

So why do people complain so much about AI when golf courses and cruise lines are EXPONENTIALLY more environmentally damaging? Neither contributes anything to society beyond leisure, whereas AI improves productivity and quality of life with tangible results.

Most of the people bleating about how terrible AI is have NEVER beat their chest the same about cruise lines and golf courses. That's because they don't actually care about the environment, and if they did, they would take the time to educate themselves and devote their time to the most serious threats. It's all just a bunch of fearmongering, bandwagon-jumping, and virtue signalling. I've even heard people repeat the exact same things that were said decades ago when CGI came out. They sound like dumbasses, especially to old hat techies that have been online since the 80s and 90s.

Have your fun with AI generation, my friends. You're not actually hurting anyone. We hear crickets from these people over the waste trillions of gallons of water on golf courses and water parks. Don't let them shame you for generating a picture of yourself as a fairy.

Ah i see, I guess now its safer to say so, no zionist and racist voters that it would alienate

Quando penso al PD mi viene in mente il gruppo d'indigesti radical chic amici di Gambardella che discutono del niente da gente che vale nulla nella sua terrazza: quel "salotto buono" che ritroviamo in programmi come "Che Tempo Che Fa" adatti solo a soggetti piatti.

Lo sguardo sulla finta sinistra lo offre in pieno Jep Gambardella che incarna perfettamente il mio sguardo; e quando qualcuno mi replica "devi votare PD poiché unica alternativa", l'unica cosa che sento è odore di piscio e merda.

𝗩𝗶𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴: atteggiamento di artefatta, talvolta esasperata, ostentazione di aderenza a valori morali che riscuotono consenso nella società del tempo con il solo scopo di ottenere visibilità o facile approvazione dagli altri, senza però l'adozione di alcuna azione concreta per promuovere e attuare le istanze dichiarate.

Questo è il contesto che troviamo in programmi televisivi tossici come Che tempo che fa e in partiti politici come il PD.