New York Times critic Amanda Hess was given a rare slot on her paper’s front page to opine sign above, which was apparently the beginning of the the viral “Announce to your neighbors that you’re a smug, simple-minded idiot” epidemic. I did not know that! Ethics Alarms has had several posts about similar signs, notably this one, but I did not realize that I had missed Patient Zero. I was, in fact, preparing to write another post on this topic, because one sign resembling the progenitor of obnoxious yard signs just turned up at a house across the street from me. Its only variation from the classic is “Water is Life” at the bottom: maybe Aquaman lives in that house. I have vowed, if I ever have an encounter with the resident there, to present a series of questions that I guarantee will only evoke “Huminahuminahumina...” in response.
Hess’s analysis by turns informs readers that the sign has “curious power” (to make me detest the homeowner?); that the mottoes are “progressive maxims” (so progressives really are that facile and shallow!), that “Donald Trump is out of office…But nevertheless, this sign has persisted” (Oh! It’s all Trump’s fault!), that the sign is “directed at the adults in the room, reminding them of their own mission” (Really? Open borders? Man-boy love? Anti-white discrimination? Marxism? Why is a sign aimed at adults so naive and childish? ), that it is “the epitome of virtue signaling: an actual sign enumerating the owner’s virtues. There is something refreshing, actually, about the straightforwardness of that.” (There is something refreshing about smug idiots placing signs on their laws that say, “I am a smug idiot”?).
I learned other things from the article:
Ethics Alarms 