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.
I don't think your explanations are really in conflict. His point is that cowardice keeps third parties from intervening and then ego defense in the face of their own cowardice gets them to denigrate the victim. Yours is that it's just sociopathic indifference. But people do feel guilt at their inaction and they do blame the victims. And most likely David Graeber would have agreed that people are more likely to step in to defend people closer to them -- kin, friends, members of their religion or ethnic group. So apathy does have a role to play in his model as well. If you have a lot of apathy you need little cowardice + projection to preserve bullying. If you don't, you need more.
Another neglected factor is how convincingly one can tell oneself preventing the bullying is somebody else's responsibility. If the crowd of witnesses is large or there is someone else nominally in charge, you can have empathy and inaction without any recourse to victim blaming or other self-deceptions.
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
For many, ideas are a part of identity. I am a good person because I support good policies and vote for good party. I am smart because I have intelligent thoughts and ideas.
When the quality of these ideas is challenged, it therefore can be a challenge to the quality of the person holding them, if they base their identity on their thoughts. I find this is quite common.
Another effect of this mindset is that changing your mind becomes more difficult. It's a hard thing to get out of.
Are there people who have a [strong] sense of identity that's somehow not centred around their ideas? I'm trying to imagine what that looks like?
Maybe "it doesn't matter what I think, I'm $Nationality and that's who I am"? [But does anyone think like that? And isn't that just an idea that informs identity?]
In earlier times, identity was mostly a function of social relationships. This seemed to be a lot more concrete than abstract concept of identity that is popular in industrial societies.
Here are some other things that might inform/create identity besides political opinions shared on twitter: race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, occupation, consumption preferences, skills, activities, appearance.
All of these are ideas to some degree, but some are more concrete than others. But ultimately, identity itself is an idea and I don't think it can be fully separated from other constructs of the mind.
If you ask me about my identity the first thing that comes to my mind is the life I've lived. The things I got to experience, my failures, my accomplishments, the choices I made.
It is not the great taste of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches which you enjoy, it is the idea that 'pb&j tastes great' which informs your enjoyment of it.
I get sad and frustrated when I get downvoted, even though I'm (pseudo-)anonymous. It's completely irrational, and I'm a bit ashamed for it, yet it's gotten to a point where I basically just don't bother anymore with politics online.
It's strange because I don't have such issues in real life. And my friends confirm that I'm intellectually honest and nuanced, or at least not nuts. I just can't imagine people talking to me face to face in the way I'm so used to on the internet, all smug and doing their best to find the worst possible interpretation of a comment.
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”.
"Our basic contention is that one grandstands when one makes a contribution to public moral discourse that aims to convince others that one is “morally respectable.” By this we mean that grandstanding is a use of moral talk that attempts to get others to make certain desired judgments about oneself, namely, that one is worthy of respect or admiration because one has some particular moral quality—for example, an impressive commitment to justice, a highly tuned moral sensibility, or unparalleled powers of empathy. To grandstand is to turn one's contribution to public discourse into a vanity project."
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.