Virtue Signalling
4th May 2017
A house on the next block, half of a duplex, has two signs on its front porch, both identical. They read: “Hate Has No Home Here.” Not that I suspect his neighbors on either side of harboring sinister sentiments; but I also suspect that the resident may actually hate such things as racism, sexism, or even Donald Trump. The message is repeated in Arabic, just in case anyone misses the signal, and also in Hindi and perhaps Urdu, as well as a script I did not recognize, in Hebrew, and in Spanish. Perhaps, by omission the resident is signalling a dislike for Germans or Russians or French or of speakers of Tamil. The irony is that people using one of the scripts displayed have oft-time exhibited murderous hatred for users of another of the scripts. Oh, well. The purpose of the sign is to signal the resident’s moral smugness to members of his own tribe.