Thank you Mr. Hanson

If going to high school teaches you anything it should teach you that the annoying kid gets bullycided. People think that when they grow up high school goes away, but grown people show all the behaviors of children who believe in make-believe, how else to explain magical thinking among adults? 

The annoying kid always gets bullycided, and always has. This is because no one can tell if the annoying kid is psychologically torturing you because he enjoys it or is just stupid. People with social skills assume that other people also have social skills—because that's what social skills are. Social skills constitutes putting on a performance and assuming that everyone else is also putting on a performance. If you are annoying it must mean that you want to annoy. The first rule of social skills is that all emotional affects must be intentional, and even if they aren't we are allowed to react as if they are because it's the obligation of the person doing the performance to produce a pleasant effect. Social skills are an implicit moral obligation—a moral agreement—to produce effects in the minds of others that they enjoy, or at least that are deliberate. 

Look at the history of genocide, look how the annoying always get killed. People pretend this isn't the case, like being an adult means we are more "objective" than that or something. Who even knows what the word objective means in this context. The point is that if you become too annoying you get killed. 

The left virtue signaled for ages. This is a puritanical and performative behavior designed to inflict humiliation on anyone who watches while giving the person who does it, the performer, an immense sense of superiority over others. Part of this performance was presenting oneself as a victim and therefore beyond the questioning of others. America has a very long history of tolerating Puritans. It's possible free speech was invented just so Puritans could get away with virtue signaling, but then it got out of hand as those damn racists also used it as a excuse to be annoying. Hence we need limitations to enforce the proper expression of free speech.

The right discovered this interesting trick; if people want to virtue signal on their feet you can make them virtue signal on their knees. The left is too dense to realize that their enemies figured out a way to turn the suffering that rightists experience at the hands of leftists into pleasure for the rightist. We now have a whole agency that does that called ICE. This agency says "Oh so you want to throw yourself in front of the cops huh? Here's a bullet for your trouble." The right figured out a way to convert the pain of dealing with Puritans into a pleasure. 

Leftists cannot not virtue signal about minorities. Rightists cannot stop enjoying punishing leftists by punishing their pets. Brown people are caught in the middle. The whole purpose of right wing authoritarianism is to make the spiritually Puritan suffer, because the spiritually Puritan make everyone else suffer with their virtue signaling. It is remarkable that it took 384 years to figure this trick out. I guess you have to name something before you can do something about it. We have Robin Hanson to thank for that since he invented the term virtue signaling. To name a thing is to create a world where changing it is possible, so thank you Mr Hanson.

Since putting the virtue signaler on their knees is a brand new trick for the West it is unlikely to end soon. There are too many hundreds of years of seething resentment against leftist Puritans—too much rage built up. Virtue signaling has the effect of destroying the values it ostensibly upholds. It does this by making those values a suffering to all who witness them. In real morality only the criminal pays. But in (old fashioned) virtue signaling both the criminal and the witness must pay. The criminal pays with justice, while the witness with degradation. Today modern Puritans don't even believe in justice anymore—they clearly don't want the criminal to pay. In fact the goal is that both the witness and victim pay. First the victim pays by being a victim of crime. Then both the victim and witness pay by being victims of virtue signaling where the Puritan leftist defends the criminal to the humiliation of both the victim and witness. This completely inverts justice, making virtue into evil and an evil out of virtue. Demon energy. 

People were content to let leftists make the witness pay as long as the criminal also paid. In the late 90s a TV show called The Practice came along and taught Puritan leftists that criminals were also victims so long as they were brown. This was the beginning of the end for virtue signaling. Although nobody talks about this TV show it's effects and all subsequent shows that borrow the motif reinforce the notion and it has been internalized by academia. Maybe the TV show got its ideas from academics, maybe academics got their idea from the TV show, whatever the case it corrupted the public notion of justice with the idea that "systems" can abuse people and that abuse will absolve them of not just sin, but crime with real victims involved.

Here's the thing about equality. If people are equal they're obviously equally accountable, and therefore equally punishable for the same crime. Justice can therefore not make exceptions. On the other hand, if people are not equal they are not equally deserving of Rights, and therefore the fate of the brown is even worse. In neither case does the brown colored person get to exempt themselves from any of the same moral standards as anyone else. If you are brown it is far preferable to be equally accountable, since the alternative is slavery. Thomas Sowell understood this which is why he was such a staunch defender of equal standards. To participate in the defense of exceptions to equal standards is to participate in undermining the whole notion of justice, since turning good into evil and evil into good was the whole point of humiliating the witness and victim with virtue signaling. Once equal standards are killed by virtue signaling there is nothing to stop the return of slavery. So anything other than equal standards attacks the brown man. If the brown man benefits from exceptions standards will be corrupted until nothing stops raw power against him, and if the racist wins he will be considered inferior and (again) nothing will stop raw power against him. His only chance to benefit from equal rights is to play the game on a playing field of equal standards. Sowell instinctively understood this.

Since a trick has now been learned to punish the liberal Puritan by punishing their pets, and since 300 years of resentment is now built up, and since virtue signaling corrupts all respect for justice, implicitly endorsing raw power, there is nothing to stop a few centuries of counter-punishment. I wonder if raw power was what originally lead to Puritan fanaticism. It's too bad I can't look into the past and see the attitudes of people back then, at least not without reading a large pile of ancient and obscure books.