From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
Nazism is a form of fascism,[4][5][6][7] with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. Its beliefs include support for dictatorship,[3] fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism,[8] anti-Romani sentiment, scientific racism, white supremacy, Nordicism, social Darwinism, homophobia, ableism, and the use of eugenics.
Overall
I won't trade in this market.
The focus of these questions is object level endorsement or practice, not self identification.
e.g. "I am not a white supremacist but [... white supremacist stuff...]" resolves as yes for the 'white supremacist' subquestion.
All statements or actions must occur while the market is open
In the event of ambiguity judging any criterion, I reserve the right to rope in a quorum of judges from mods/the community/responsible neutral third parties to determine resolution.
I've tried to operationalise these as clearly and unambiguously as I can in terms of explicit action or endorsement in order to make resolution easier on my future self, even if in some cases the criteria are a bit more restrictive than the full intuitive meaning of the category.
I'm open to any reasonable widening of a category that lines up with consensus understanding of a term and which won't set me up for a horrible subjective argument in 3 months' time.
Otherwise, I will try to resolve precisely as worded - I'm looking for "explicit" endorsement/practice.
I've made the judgement call to eliminate some items from the original wiki list as less-relevant in modern American society (anti-slavism, anti-romani, nordicism) or just 'in the water supply' (anti-communism).
(a) Anti-democracy:
He says that any democracy (defined as any 'Full' or 'Flawed' democracy according to the Economist Democracy Index as of 2023) would be better off as a dictatorship or if a particular current dictator was in charge
He or his corporations take actions supporting a dictator (defined as any leader of an Authoritarian Regime in the Democracy Index as of 2023) in a way directly connected to them taking or maintaining power in their country
Saying something positive in isolation about an individual autocrat doesn't count
Supporting a dictator obliquely in an unrelated matter doesn't count, e.g. selling Starlink units to the king of Jordan would in general not count
e.g. selling Starlink units to a dictator to be used to crush a rebellion would count
e.g. censoring dissidents in a dictatorial regime on X would count
e.g. publicly endorsing Lukashenko in the context of the upcoming Belarussian 'election' would count
(b) Anti-semitism:
He engages in holocaust denial
E.g. explicit claims that deny it happened or minimise casualties below the widely-accepted numbers
E.g. tacitly endorses, by retweeting someone else's holocaust denial claim in a supportive way
Any of his statements are officially denounced as anti-semitic by the ADL, the Weisenthal center, or the World Jewish Congress
(c) Scientific Racism:
He claims that any racial or ethnic group is inherently inferior to another racial or ethnic group on a biological / genetic basis
Claims acceptable in general polite conversation don't count, e.g. observing that the fastest sprinters tend to be of African descent wouldn't be enough
Claims must state or clearly imply an inherent, not cultural/environmental, basis for superiority/inferiority
A claim must both include a judgement of 'inherentness' and state or imply an overall judgement of superiority/inferiority of a race or ethnic group.
Examples
A colloquial language claim of "group X is dumber than group Y" would count: the common-sense reading implies inherent-ness and a value judgement
Posting a table of national test or IQ scores without any other context or comment wouldn't count: it doesn't by itself imply a position on "inherent-ness" or a value judgement
Using the same data as an argument to justify a policy position would in most cases count, as it's enough to imply a view on 'inherent-ness' and a value judgement.
E.g. "the US shouldn't allow immigration from [country] because [IQ test scores]" would probably count.
A claim like Lynn of "we should be worried that abc group are reproducing faster than white people, because abc group are dumber" would count - it implies an inherent quality and an overall value judgement
(d) White Supremacy:
He claims that whites/caucasians/europeans are inherently superior to any one (or several) other race(s), or implies it with a more specific claim (e.g. people from white country A are inherently better than people from brown country B)
Claims of cultural superiority doesn't count here; it has to be explicitly race superiority.
(e) Social Darwinism:
He justifies or supports any policy change or proposed policy in the US by directly or indirectly referencing "survival of the fittest" or that the hardship resulting from it is justified because of the weakness of the people affected
A policy that primarily affects companies or organisations not individuals isn't sufficient here
(f) Homophobia:
He claims that homosexuality or bisexuality is morally wrong or disgusting, or bad for society at large, or directly endorses someone else's claim of the same
He uses a homophobic slur towards or about a homosexual/bisexual/lesbian person
(g) Ableism:
He uses an ableist slur towards or about a disabled person (e.g. calling a disabled person "retarded")
He mocks the movements or vocal patterns of a disabled person (e.g. the Trump incident with the reporter)
(h) Pro-Eugenics:
He endorses eugenics that are involuntary, population-level, or otherwise beyond the accepted norm
E.g. endorsing embryo selection to avoid serious genetic conditions would not count
E.g. forced sterilisation or forbidding reproduction for a particular population would count
(i) Transphobia:
He claims that being trans is morally wrong or disgusting, or bad for society at large, or directly endorses someone else's claim of the same
He uses a transphobic slur towards or about a trans person
He advocates for the forced detransition of transgender individuals (e.g. Paragraph 175)
He promotes legislation or executive action to eliminate transgender-related research
Endorsing Transmedicalism isn't enough to count by itself (I assume the Nazi position on the topic was much harsher)
1,000
3.00https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-germans-shouldnt-feel-guilt-over-countrys-past/ Apropos
Could we consider adding nationalism to the list?
@KJW_01294 ty for the suggestion!
I think I'll probably decline on the basis of effort: each of these options is taking a fair bit of time to define precisely and I don't want to be on the hook for more work 😅
It also strikes me as a particularly tricky one to operationalize objectively, in that IMO the 'gradient' between "nice accepted patriotism and national pride" and "bad extremist nationalism" seems to be fairly smooth, without a clear enough discontinuity to create a cut-off on that I'll be comfortable with come resolve time
Just to make this extra clear ahead of time: Eliminating government funding of trans research won't count as "He promotes legislation or executive action to eliminate transgender-related research", right?
@Shai thoughts on this one:
by itself, imo "eliminates federal funding" is not "eliminates" for the purpose of this question, in line with trying to focus on thresholds that are as explicit as possible. It has to actually be no longer allowed.
I will count 'soft' bans. E.g. "you lose funding for everything if you do trans research" is still a ban.
it would also count if it was only eliminating funding but he justifies the policy in terms of one of the other bullet points ("this policy is good because being trans is bad for society at large")
If defunding was explicitly the first step of a plan to fully eliminate trans research, I'd probably still resolve yes. e.g if trump said "we're going to stop trans research and our first step is to stop federal grants for it" and musk endorses that, that'd count.
Not directly related to your question but while I'm on (i), if Musk were to publicly endorse the Matt Walsh film "what is a woman" again during the question period, I'd resolve (i) yes (based on my reading of the Wikipedia synopsis vs the first bullet point in (i))
He mocks the movements or vocal patterns of a disabled person (e.g. the Trump incident with the reporter)
Like most media claims about Trump, (tear gassing protesters, killing a cop with a fire extinguisher, calling Nazis "very fine people", calling fallen soldiers "losers", "russian collusion" hoax, the pee tape, etc.), this never happened. Trump has been recorded mocking many others the same way, including Ted Cruz, who is certainly not disabled.
Priors should be set very low for believing any such claims.
@Lexer I don't understand how your sentence about Cruz, or your linked video, are supposed to support your idea here
@Lexer I understand your point to be:
Trump had a 'mocking motif' of doing that thing for several non-disabled people
Therefore doing it about the disabled reporter probably wasn't coming from a mental state of intentional ableism
I can see the point you're making, but I don't care to litigate it beyond what that kind of scenario means for evaluating this market. Which is:
For the purposes of this market, I'm aiming to resolve as literally as possible based on concrete object-level actions and statements and their direct contexts vs the criteria I've written in the question, not my interpretation of Musk's internal mental state / level of "true belief" in whichever thing.
I think this is the only way to have a market that is mostly about the world, rather than mostly about "What @draaglom Thinks About Current Events".
Some concrete examples / corollaries of this are:
Example: If Musk calls someone retarded
he needs to have reasonably known that the person was disabled when saying it, for it to count
I'll apply my common-sense judgement to what he said and how he said it (e.g. if he's posting it in /r/wallstreetbets where everyone calls each other retards all the time, I wouldn't count it)
But beyond that I'm not going to try to ascertain his mental state or to what degree he was or wasn't actively intending to be ableist
It doesn't matter if he often calls people 'retard' who are not disabled, that won't make it 'not count'.
Not assessing mental states may mean an option in this market eventually resolves 'yes' despite Musk not "really actually" being X-ist for some value of X. Hopefully it won't - but resolution criteria are hard.
On the flip side, there might turn out to be things where Musk acts in a way that is pretty clearly X-ist but in a way I didn't think to put in the criteria up front, so I have to resolve 'no'.
If and when that happens, in advance: I'm not endorsing/dismissing whatever thing it is he turns out to have done.
@CraigTalbert dude, it was in the 1930s that the Nazis literally opened their book-burning with books on transgender studies. This is not a new phenomenon.
For the benefit of those who were unaware:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_book_burnings#The_burnings_start
While I've bought some 'anti-semitism' I don't get the sense that Elon is genuinely anti-semitic, in the sense of having a negative feeling towards the Jewish people or wishing to see them eradicated.
I do think there's a good chance Elon sees people he wants to irritate being upset by (some flavours of) anti-semitism and then doing something anti-semitic to generate the predictable reaction from his 'opps' and/or demonstrate his disregard for the consequences.
Elon is deep in the Fuck Around phase, I 'worry' he's only a couple more Ritalin benders away from hitting Find out.
The Nazis weren't white supremacists, they were German supremacists. We know this because Hitler wrote a book, Mein Kampf, saying so. Hitler thought most white people were subhuman (e.g. Slavs) or degenerate (e.g. Americans).
@PontiMin sure! Is there a particular action or decision you're proposing in relation to that statement?
@draaglom well, you could always delete the reference to "Nazi ideology". Most of these things were not thing that Nazis thought about much -- I imagine the majority of NSDAP members never thought about trans people once in their lives -- and many thinks the nazis were very into, such as conquering Russia and gaining Lebensraum, are absent from this list.
@PontiMin thanks for the suggestion! I'm not convinced:
I stand by my editorialising of the initial Wikipedia list for relevance in the modern American cultural context:
e.g. probably most Americans could not define "who is a Slavic person?" so "anti-slav?" would have been a low-signal question
Similarly 'conquering russia' probably not very relevant
I don't claim that the questions as defined are a complete or perfect way to capture Nazi ideology, but I do stand by them as a reasonable and not substantially misleading way to capture [at least some of] it as it pertains to the current Discourse.
I might remove the word "core" from "core elements" in the title though, as I'm not particularly interested in being the arbiter of how relatively important different bits of Nazi ideology were vs each other (and maybe it also implies more of a complete coverage?)
@Shai I'm going to go with no:
someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I would assume the nazi position on the matter would be much stricter/harsher
overriding principle of focusing on quite explicit cases and trying not to make my own life difficult at resolve time
@jade Is a good point. While I expected to clarify terms a bit at first:
I'm open to any reasonable widening of a category that lines up with consensus understanding of a term and which won't set me up for a horrible subjective argument in 3 months' time.
I'm also leery of making changes that might materially affect the odds retrospectively for any bettors so far. The market was more popular more quickly than I expected!
Probably the best way to handle this would be to add it as a new option.
Do you have any suggestions re: how to operationalise that precisely? I'm not too familiar with how Nazis treated trans people.
@draaglom there's a few ways to go about it, I suppose
For the most part, the homophobia section could be adjusted with a simple word replacement from gays->trans, etc, as the nazis treated them the same way
If the condition should be one of the nazis' more extreme positions, something like
- He advocates for the forced detransition of transgender individuals (e.g. Paragraph 175)
- He promotes legislation or executive action to eliminate transgender-related research (analogous to the burning of Institut für Sexualwissenschaft)
would also work
Whether more basic forms of transphobia should be considered "a nazi position" is contentious, and I can't really say I don't have a bias myself, as a transgender individual.