Left-Wing or Right-Wing? Which person/character/concept will Manifold think are "Right-Wing" this week?
94
1.3K
34K
May 5
20%
Robin Hood
30%
Coolfold self-immolation
41%
Guy Montag (from Fahrenheit 451)
6%
Karl Marx
37%
Bernard Marx (from Brave New World)
41%
Michael Scott (from The Office)
58%
O'Brien from 1984
41%
Aviation
66%
Ingsoc (1984)
91%
Elsevier
7%
Sci-Hub
33%
Frequentism
87%
Immanuel Kant
78%
House Corrino
50%
House Atreides
95%
House Harkonnen
93%
Europa Universalis IV
87%
Antisemitism
83%
Neo-Luddism
96%
Carl Jung

You can help us in resolving options by spending at least 1 mana on each person/character/concept you have an opinion on. Buy YES if you think it's a right-wing thing, and NO if you think it's a left-wing thing.

Heavily inspired from @Joshua's excellent market,

/Joshua/good-tweet-or-bad-tweet-which-contr

You can submit any person/character/concept (shortened to p/c/c for the rest of the description), as well as a link / short phrase to give traders some context. If other people trade on your submission, you'll get mana off of their transaction fees.

I may N/A options for quality control, or edit them to provide a more neutral summary.


As a trader, you should buy any amount of YES in p/c/c you think are Right-Wing, buy any amount of NO in p/c/c you think are Left-Wing. I will leave the definition of those terms up to you. The amount of shares doesn't matter for the resolution, one share of yes is one vote and one hundred shares of yes is also one vote.

If I think you are voting purely as a troll, such as buying no in every option, I may block you or disregard your votes. Please vote in good faith! But hey, I can't read your mind. Ultimately this market is on the honor system.

Note that market prices will be a bit strange here, because this is simultaneously a market and a poll. If you sell your shares, you are also removing your vote. I have unranked the market so it will not impact leagues.

The market will close every Sunday at Noon EST. I will then check the positions tab on options that have been submitted.

If there is a clear majority of YES holders, the option resolves YES. If there is a clear majority of NO holders, the option resolves NO. If it's very close and votes are still coming in, the option will remain un-resolved. The market will then re-open for new submissions, with a new close date the next week. This continues as long as I think the market is worth running. It does not matter what % the market is at, and bots holding a position are also counted. In a tie, the tweet will not resolve that week.

I may update these exact criteria to better match the spirit of the question if anyone has any good suggestions, so please leave a comment if you do.

See:

Get Ṁ200 play money
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House Atreides
bought Ṁ20 House Atreides YES

God Emperor obviously right-wing

bought Ṁ1 Elsevier YES

Antisemitism

@Magnus_ I don't think Nazis are pro-Palestine. They hate both Israelis and Palestinians.

Cryptocurrencies

Why do people think crypto is left-wing? At least in the U.S., left-wingers tend to hate cryptocurrency and right-wingers tend to like it.

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America
bought Ṁ10 The First Amendment ... NO

Why do people think this is right wing but freedom of speech is left wing? The first amendment protects freedom of speech which according to this market is a left-wing concept, and it prevents theocracy, which is a right-wing concept. So shouldn't this market judge it as left-wing?

Reopened for week 3!

Curious why Virtue Ethics is so right wing?

@Bayesian I think the right-wing tends to appeal to virtue more than the left wing, while the left wing appeals to helping people and to systemic factors more than the right wing. For example, in economic debates, the right usually talks about hard work and personal responsibility, and the left will usually focus more on how their policies will help people who are harmed by the economic system, or who are in need (and the left generally will not attribute these people being in need to a lack of virtue). The right prefers meritocracy, where rewards are distributed according to what they consider to be virtuous behavior, and the left leans more towards equity, where they are distributed according to needs and fairness. So it could be said that the right leans more towards virtue ethics, while the left leans more towards utilitarianism, at least on economic issues.

This is also backed up by the Five Foundations Theory, which says that the left and right wings differ in how much they value 5 core values: help/care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. The left values the first two, while the right values the latter three. And the loyalty and purity axes seem to be more in line with virtue ethics than any other system.

Also, virtue ethics is very popular among trad-Catholics.

Zootopia (2016)

Interesting that this one is roughly even. To me the underlying political allegory in Zootopia is clearly left-wing.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 Yeah, I was very surprised that anyone thought it was right-wing. The entire story is about how racism still exists, is bad, and is exploited by fearmongering politicians. Apparently people think that having the main character be a cop automatically makes it right wing?

@PlasmaBallin I'm also voting left, but one other argument for right might be that the people who were generally powerful at the start were generally the "good guys". There was something a bit like a revolution where people a bit like an underclass took power, and this was a Bad Thing. Vaguely gesturing in the direction of power being legitimate, status quo being good, and it being dangerous to change things.

Not a very convincing argument because my heart isn't in it, but I think there's something there.

@Fion Yeah, I'm generally not convinced by the argument that any story where the characters fight to preserve the status quo is right-wing. If you're fighting for the status quo against people who want to push things in a rightward direction, then you're left-wing, not right-wing. This would be kind of like arguing that people who criticize Trump for breaking democratic norms are right-wing because they're defending the status quo, and that Trump is left-wing because he opposes the status quo.

@PlasmaBallin I agree that if the change they're fighting against is clearly a rightward shift, then the status quo supporters could be left wing. But I think the idea of "preserve the status quo because drastic change is dangerous" is right wing.

By the way, I don't think I'd go so far as saying that "change" is left wing. I can imagine a situation where some radical right wingers are trying to fight for a radical rightward shift, and some other right wingers are trying to preserve the status quo because they believe for conservative reasons that radical change is dangerous. Not all conflicts are on a left/right axis.

bought Ṁ1 Hermione Granger YES

Hermione is a centrist

bought Ṁ40 Hydropower NO

Gryffindor – enlightened centrist energy

Racial Colorblindness

The left is generally critical of this concept, and a lot of left-wing policies like affirmative action are opposed to it. Right-wingers usually claim to support it and use it as a basis to attack those left-wing policies. Even if you want to argue that right-wingers don't actually support it and are just claiming to, it still seems like it should fall on the side that pays lip service to it, rather than the side that explicitly opposes it.

@PlasmaBallin It seems to me that the answer to this and a bunch of other questions depends a lot on whether one interprets left/right wing as referring to current US politics, or more broadly (i.e., taking into account other countries or periods of time). (Eg, my sense is that the european left is generally much more pro colourblindness.)

Warhammer 40K
bought Ṁ10 Warhammer 40K NO

As I understand it, the characters in the world of Warhammer are very right-wing, but the game itself is not, since it presents the right-wing world as a dystopia. the only people I know who are into WH 40K are left wing.

Racial Colorblindness
bought Ṁ10 Racial Colorblindness YES

Haven’t people heard Christopher Rufo and Coleman Hughes talk about this?

Zootopia (2016)

I think it's more anti-racist than pro-cop. Also, "try everything".

Stalin
bought Ṁ10 Stalin NO

What is the argument for Stalin being right wing?

One possible argument: he is bad. the right wing is bad. therefore he is right-wing (this may come off as a syllogism if you squint badly)
another possible argument: he pretended to be left wing but actually he is right wing bc he was a totalitarian dictator who took rights away from the people he governed.
I'm curious if others voted based on some other argument not mentioned here.

@PlasmaBallin On a vibes level I see him as a totalitarian Soviet nationalist (as opposed to Russian or Georgian nationalist or something). In this view the communist aesthetic is actually just a Soviet nationalist aesthetic, which is weird but right-wing.

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