I see this is by David Graeber who recently died. My respects to him, his family and his work.
However I disagree with the article. I am also someone who has been on the receiving end of bullying and (rarely) on the dispensing end, but I feel that the premise of this article is wrong. The reason why people did not care about the highway of death is because 1) it happened a long way away 2) people like us, from our side, did it 3) very few popular faces said it was wrong and 4) it happened to people we don't care about very much. These views can be summed up as parochialism, and they are usually the reason that we allow evil to be perpetrated against the innocent.
It's also the reason we allow the poor of the world to starve (c.f. Living High and Letting Die, Peter Unger) which I don't feel can be construed as bullying. A similar example is the behavior of the allies immediately after the second world war, who apparently did little to acknowledge the Holocaust.
My view differs from David's in that I don't think we seek to justify bullies because we think they are better than their victims - I think we seek to justify bullies because we don't care very much about other people, due to lack of time and energy. I find it difficult to parse his whole argument but David appears to be suggesting that it is much more complicated and to do with our participation in bullying and our institutions. Fair dos, but I feel my explanation is simpler and better.
You are correct, it's redundant. Down and to the right sounds like the sort of thing a sell side analyst or salesperson would say. It could be that you are assuming your audience are unfamiliar with stock graphs, but more likely you are using redundancy for rhetorical effect.
In another section the author describes the performance of IBM against a benchmark as 18,736 basis points, which he calculates by taking the arithmetic difference of a positive return and a negative return (ugh). This just means underperformance of 187.36%. I suspect though once again the use of a 5 digit basis points figure is a rhetorical flourish.
These are just rhetorical nits though. I did enjoy the article, and the numbers and their sources are very clear.
What I find odd about this is that I am effectively (I hope) anonymous online, even on twitter, but I still get totally mad when people trash my ideas. It's like my ideas are a part of my extended self.
This I think is why moral grandstanding is a more valuable concept than Virtue Signalling - VS wouldn't make sense in an anonymous context, and apparently signalling means something different anyway according to this:
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/stop-saying-virtue-signalling
The authors address this in the paper. They claim that MG is different to VS as VS is a colloquial term used to criticise people on social media, whereas MG “has been extensively explored and defined in philosophical literature”.
However I disagree with the article. I am also someone who has been on the receiving end of bullying and (rarely) on the dispensing end, but I feel that the premise of this article is wrong. The reason why people did not care about the highway of death is because 1) it happened a long way away 2) people like us, from our side, did it 3) very few popular faces said it was wrong and 4) it happened to people we don't care about very much. These views can be summed up as parochialism, and they are usually the reason that we allow evil to be perpetrated against the innocent.
It's also the reason we allow the poor of the world to starve (c.f. Living High and Letting Die, Peter Unger) which I don't feel can be construed as bullying. A similar example is the behavior of the allies immediately after the second world war, who apparently did little to acknowledge the Holocaust.
My view differs from David's in that I don't think we seek to justify bullies because we think they are better than their victims - I think we seek to justify bullies because we don't care very much about other people, due to lack of time and energy. I find it difficult to parse his whole argument but David appears to be suggesting that it is much more complicated and to do with our participation in bullying and our institutions. Fair dos, but I feel my explanation is simpler and better.