Scapegoats and Virtue Signaling

RANDOM DISCLAIMERRRRR: this post is not intending to defend harmful and concerning behaviors. any attempt to insinuate such within the comments will be met with either being ignored, deleted, or the commenter being blocked. read critically, or not at all. thank you for understanding 

maybe it's not a necessarily recent phenomenon, but im sure many of you have seen people making all kinds of assumptions or claims about those they dont like to justify directly harassing them, because they forget they dont have to make disliking someone an entire moral stance. however, ive also noticed an interesting angle to it: these people tend to claim they want to hold people accountable, yet dont seem to care when the subject actually holds themselves accountable and apologizes for their actions.

there is a lot of nuance to this (especially within the realm of bigotry and predatory behavior), and i believe that in these cases it's reasonable to still be vocally upset with the person. while these types of actions can be apologized for, whether or not they can be forgiven is up to those affected by them, not the quality and sincerity of the apology. however, i do think that behaviors that fall outside of being predatory or bigoted are best moved on from if properly addressed and accounted for- which is what a lot of people arent willing to do. 

a lot of people dont seem to really care about holding people accountable for their faults, as they may claim. in reality, they want to have someone they can treat as a scapegoat to make themselves look better- often times when some statement and/or apology is made, it's either ignored entirely or the goalpost is shifted, putting the person on (socially) thin ice and leading to people reading too much into their actions ("i like pancakes" "well you didnt specify korean pancakes, that means youre racist against korean people.".

alternatively, people may also start to intentionally attempt to upset the person into giving an angered response, only to use it against them as "proof" theyre the problem- which is known as "reactive abuse." the reason for this is simple: a lot of people dont actually care about whether or not someone makes the choice to genuinely improve upon their behavior, because if they improve, they can no longer look "better" for hating the person. thus, they create obstacles and challenges in hopes to hinder their improvement- if the person keeps messing up, they can keep looking good through hating them.

for those of you who are struggling with self improvement, especially within the field of mental health, im going to offer some advice: its better to stay away from online communities for coping mechanisms, because a lot of them (self harm, EDs, pro/darkship, etc.) are similar in that sense. they do not seek to imrpove as people, rather they hope to find people with similar struggles and ways of coping to "validate" themselves with, and when people do lose the need to rely on those coping mechanisms, they attempt to drag those people back in. 

to summarize, a lot of people will say they want people to adress and change their behaviors, but in reality they dont. they know that when people actually do so, they lose the opportunity to use those peoples' actions as a means to virtue signal, and thus begin to nitpick someones behavior, bait them into giving an angered response, or push them towards communities that enable said behavior under the guise of "coping with mental health." its better to focus on imrpoving oneself regardless of the response to it, because some people can never be satisfied.