34:63 presents “Greta Thunberg.”

The best kind of virtue signalling is, of course, the kind that has minimal adverse consequences for you, but a multitude of positive ones. The most audaciously successful example of this is Greta Thunberg’s ‘school strike’, which somehow transformed her bunking off into some sort of noble act of protest. Quite why no-one called ‘bullshit’ on her little stunt, I can’t explain, but fair play to her, by her constantly banging on about how something has been exacerbated by political inertia, and that because of that, the action needed to combat it is as drastic as it is urgent, she has managed to get away with it.

Because if I’d have tried to get justify me bunking off school as something other than a test of how far I could push my luck with my parents, I’d have gotten more than a stern talking to. If I’d then constantly been on at them to change their lifestyles, to the extent that my mother had to give up on her career as an international opera singer because I’d been incessantly haranguing her about her flying to concerts, I doubt if I’d be eventually invited to address the United Nations or nominated three times for the Nobel peace prize, 

But because of the world we now live, one that places a disturbingly worrying amount of importance on positive media coverage, her bunking off has been rewarded with her being lauded as a something about that something. And because of this, she is given platforms upon which to berate pretty much everyone for not doing what she wants. And in an almost masochistic way, one that seems to have the bizarrely religious need for flagellation to it, the more she lambasts people, the more they seem to want it, She’s like a virtue signalling dominatrix.

And no virtue is more worthy to be signalled these days than support for the Palestinian people. Despite their plight being having as many complicated causes as the something she gained ‘celebrity for, that is the only similarity. Yes, people are starving, but so too are people in Yemen and the Sudan caught up in the middle of civil wars fought between disparate factions as only civil wars can be, but then again, their humanitarian crisis’ don’t lend themselves the kind of performative display of virtue that is so beloved by the media. She is on a boat, sailing towards Gaza, in an attempt to bring food and medical supplies to the people of Gaza, as I write this. She is also live-streaming the whole thing. Of course she is. After all, what’s the point of virtue signalling something, if no-one knows that your virtue signalling something?