I hate that phrase "virtue signaling", much as I hate the use of "political correctness", because too often they're used as contemptuous pejoratives about attempts merely to do the right thing.
What I hate as much, though, is when those who'd happily belittle people or organisations just trying to look out for others are given so much ammunition for parody that you find yourself silently nodding along with their cynicism.
Which is sort of how I feel about AFL football's application of justice for an array of offences on and off the field of late.
Yes, we're talking about a wide range of indiscretions here, from raised elbows by players during a game to stupid attempts at humour by fans sitting in grandstands, to grotesque homophobic slurs.
But it's not trying to compare apples to oranges simply to have some vaguely comparable relativity at work whatever the crime, is it? And too many of these penalties delivered by the same football code are badly out of synch.
Nor do the differences alter the fact that the huge contrast in the severity of penalties applied to some incidents versus others is not only illogical, but more damagingly, makes much of it look like performative nonsense informed far more by optics than reality.
The latest example? The Collingwood fan banned from attending AFL games and events at the MCG for five years for a stupid and ill-thought attempt at humour.
Not for the first time, it was AFL legend Leigh Matthews who was brave enough to call the league and the MCG's bluff on the sentence, a response to the supporter using the MCG's anti-social hotline service to text during the Magpies' big win over Carlton: "I'd like to report 23 missing persons and pre-emptively report the murder of Michael Voss."
Yes, it was silly and immature. But what person in their right mind would have taken that comment seriously? Particularly once it was established it didn't even come from a Carlton fan aggrieved at their own team's poor performance?
"This was only a misplaced joke. To be honest, you think to yourself: 'How did this get beat up out of proportion'?" Matthews said on 3AW.
"It was nowhere near a threat to Michael Voss, yet the word 'murder' was in the sentence, so that was the mistake. He's copped a five-year ban for all these other terrible things that pop up on social media, but five years for that set of words is way, way over the top."
The more I think about it, the more I agree with Matthews. Particularly as there was enough backlash earlier this season to the SCG handing a teenage boy a two-year ban for throwing a bit of cardboard at Port Adelaide's Aliir Aliir.
If those two incidents involving spectators are at least apples and apples, the Collingwood fan with the bad sense of humour has been handed a rotten one. A five-year ban for a bad joke that couldn't possibly have been misinterpreted? That's a worse joke, to be honest.
Now place that penalty besides the four-game ban Richmond dealt key defender Noah Balta at the start of this year for an actual act of off-field physical violence which saw his victim hospitalised with head injuries, an assault to which Balta pled guilty and for which he was sentenced in court to an 18-month community corrections order, a $3000 fine, and a three-month nightly curfew.
Can't accept comparing an incident involving a player to one involving a spectator? OK, well how about comparing the Balta penalty to West Coast's Jack Graham's suspension for four games last weekend after he admitted to using a "highly offensive" anti-gay slur against a GWS opponent?
Or Giants' player Josh Fahey's four-game suspension last October for dressing up as former NRL player Jarryd Hayne and simulating sex with an inflatable doll at an end-of-season function with a theme of "controversial couples"?
Please don't think for a moment I'm minimising the hurt and distress which can be caused by anti-gay discrimination or misogyny. But verbal taunts and insensitivity surely aren't as obviously damaging as actual physical violence, are they?
So doesn't any "sniff test", "pub test", whatever label you want to apply, dictate that if Graham and Fahey's offences were worthy of four-game suspensions, Balta's should have been at least double that?
And how does the contrast between AFL penalties applied to off-field actions and those dealt out by the MRO and Tribunal for incidents during a game look? Often even more jarring, to be frank. Especially when there's so much weight attached (wrongly, in my view) to the consequences of an action without enough emphasis placed on the intent.
How on earth does North Melbourne's Paul Curtis get suspended for three games for a legitimate tackling attempt during an actual game, nearly as many weeks as an inebriated Balta gets for decking a bloke who's not even looking at him in a hotel car park in late December?
I'm not buying the "apples and oranges" furphy anymore. Because disciplinary measures meted out by the same code should fit at least some sort of rudimentary scale, regardless of whether they're concerning incidents on or off the field, in the grandstands, or performed by men wearing stupid costumes.
If you don't line them up alongside each other, and instead only treat them in isolation, what you end up with is a doctrine applied without nearly enough regard for circumstance. That's the rough deal I reckon that Magpie supporter copped. And sorry, but yes, that really was a bit of virtue signaling.
You can read more of Rohan Connolly's work at FOOTYOLOGY.