PRIMARY SUBMITTER: Whats it worth
SWSISS FRANC TRADER: ive got some sushi rolls from yesterday?...
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: ok low 6m, just for u
Uh, what. Assuming this is a real transcript, and without some very compelling proof that PS actually fixed the price, I think that this is obviously, literally, a joke. That is, SFT and PS are bullshitting around, a bit of gallows humour about the possibility of price fixing.
while it's possible PS was going to submit `low 6m' regardless, all you'd have to do to verify this mostly likely was not a joke is check to see what PS submitted
Yeah, I'm sure he realized it was a joke. But it is funnier/sadder to use payment in day old sushi as a metaphor for "with impunity". That is, no payment necessary, because there is no fear of punishment. As it was obvious to us it was really a joke, perhaps Taibbi thought there was no need to spell it out for his readers.
However, it could also be seen as manufacturing outrage, as accepting as payment something of little to potentially negative value would cause more outrage for those who didn't get the farce. And perhaps that was/is Taibbi's goal, to try to elevate the level of outrage to what he feels are appropriate levels.
Whether this tactic is ethical and even pragmatically advantageous is not absolutely clear in my mind. I generally have an overriding value of intellectual truth, and abhor skewing that for the sake of an emotional response. However, if an unimportant intellectual truth is sacrificed to communicate a significant emotional truth, is that acceptable/virtuous? Of course, the danger is that this may be used to call into question the intellectual integrity of other claims which do involve important intellectual truths, as cynicalkane has done in this thread.
I think in the case of the day old sushi, the truth is outrageous enough without misrepresenting such an insignificant detail, even in jest, which could be used to undermine the author's credibility.
