Tucker Lieberman
2 min readFeb 17, 2023

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Hmm, I don't know! In a quick search, I found "vice-signalling," possibly coined by Robert Shrimsley in a Financial Times article in May 2019 to describe "well-heeled types keen to show how down-to-earth they are by taking hardline reactionary stances....vice-signallers loudly declare that they never give money to the homeless because 'it only encourages them'."

Although, because I couldn't cite anyone without checking for this... In March 2017, Shrimsley did share what he called an "excellent" article by Hadley Freeman, quoting part of the article's headline in his tweet body: "So why can’t we talk more honestly about trans women?" Freeman's article is phrased subtly, and so I can understand if most readers six years ago couldn't parse her agenda. However, the headline itself is vice-signalling, and Shrimsley is not an average reader. In October 2019, he went on to write his own article about how "trans activists," to address "years of appalling abuse and prejudice," were "hitting back" by successfully boycotting a UK margarine brand that had advertised on an online platform for transphobes, and that by targeting Big Margarine's pounds sterling, the trans activists were "aggressively trying to silence legitimate debate." Without examining a single comment or topic on the platform to evaluate whether it was actually bad, he implied that the users' discussion was probably not "pure prejudice" but more likely a simple "discussion of transgender issues" which fell into the hot-potato category of "anything over which a group takes offence." Three weeks later, another journalist tried to explain: "Mumsnet is to British transphobia...what 4Chan is to American fascism."

I mean, one could just not buy the margarine, because there comes a certain point at which the margarine is a vice-signal, and the company too might like the opportunity to backtrack. Which even a writer for the Financial Times could understand, but he chose not to.

Yet he does understand the concept of "vice-signalling" :-D So...there you have it? ...I'm not sure what we have, but there it is.

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Tucker Lieberman
Tucker Lieberman

Written by Tucker Lieberman

Cult classic. Author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time." Editor for Prism & Pen and Identity Current. tuckerlieberman.com

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