Inviting a debate about what it was or wasn't only leads to a complete distractions over interpretation of a gesture when the dude already digs his own hole more deeply and more clearly in his feed anyways.
My comment was in response to the debate already starting so it's quite bold to claim no debate will be had (i.e. "debate" does not mean "something I personally am on the fence about", it's something other people will hold in response to your views). Whether there will or won't be debate about something is (thankfully) not something you or I get to declare. It just happens or doesn't, and it had already - and so it remains.
I'm sure "The only people who say it's not are <x>" is an abominable thought pattern Nazis and similar types would love everyone to have. It makes for a great excuse to never weigh things on their merits, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to invoke it when the merits are already in your court. I can't look at these numbers https://i.imgur.com/hwm2bI5.png and conclude most Americans are Nazi's instead of being willing to accept perhaps not everyone sees it the same way I do even if they don't like Nazis either.
To any actual Nazi supporters out there: To hell with you
To anybody who thinks either everyone agrees with what they see 100% of the time or they are a literal Nazi: To hell with you as well
The majority of people who had an opinion (32%) said it was either a Roman salute or a Nazi salute (which are the same thing). Lots of people had no idea (probably cuz they didn't pay attention). Only 19% said it was a "gesture from the heart", which is just parroting what Elon claimed, and I discount those folks as they are almost certainly crypto-Nazis.
So yeah, I believe there are a LOT of Nazi-adjacent folks in this country: they're the ones who voted for Trump 3 times even after they knew he was a fascist piece of garbage.
A few minor cleanups - I personally don't think they change anything (really, it's these stats themselves that lack the ability to do that anyways) but want to note because this is the exact kind of Pandora's box opened with focusing on this specific incident:
- Even assuming all who weren't sure (13%) should just be discounted as not having an opinion, like those who had not heard about it (22%), 32% is still not a majority of the remaining (100%-13%-22%) = 65%. 32% could have been a plurality of those with an opinion, but since you insisted on lumping things into 3 buckets of 32%, 35%, and remaining %, the remaining % of 33% would actually get the plurality of those who responded with opinions by this definition.
N.b. If just read straight from the sheet, "A Nazi salute" would have already had a plurality. Though grouping like this is probably the more correct thing to do, it actually ends up significantly weakening the overall position of "more people agree than not" rather than strengthening it.
- But, thankfully, "A Nazi Salute" + "A Roman Salute" would actually have been 32+2=34%, so plurality is at least restored by more than one whole percentage point (if you excluded the unsure or unknowing)!
- However, a "Roman salute" (which is a bit of a farce of a name really) can't really be assumed to be fungible with the first option in this poll. If it were fully fungible, it could have been combined into that option. I.e. there's no way to tell which adults responding "A Roman salute" meant to be counted as "a general fascist salute, as the Nazis later adopted" or meant to be counted as "a non-fascist meaning of the salute, like the Bellamy salute was before WWII". So whichever wins this game of eeking out percentage points comes down to how each person wants to group these 2 percentage points. Shucks!
- In reality, between error margins and bogus responses, this is about as close as one could expect to get for an equal 3 way split between "it was", "it wasn't", and "dunno/don't care", and pulling ahead a percentage point or two is really quite irrelevant beyond that it is, blatantly, not actually a majority that agree it was a Nazi-style salute.
Even though I'm one who agrees with you Elon exhibits neo-nazi tendencies, the above just shows how we go from "Elon replies directly supporting someone in a thread about Hitler being right about the Jewish community" and similar things constantly for years to debating individual percentage points to try to claim our favorite sub-majority says he likely made a one off hand gesture 3 years ago. Now imagine I was actually a Nazi supporter walking into the thread - suddenly we've gone from talking about direct pro-Nazi statements and retweets constantly in his feed to a chance for me to debate with you whether the majority think he made a one off hand gesture 3 years ago? Anyone concerned with Musk's behavior should want to avoid this topic with a 20 foot pole so they can get straight to the real stuff.
Also... I've run across a fair share of crypto lovers who turn out to be neo-nazish, but I'm not sure how you're piecing together that such a large portion of the population is a "crypto-Nazi" when something like only 28% of the population has crypto at all, let alone is a Nazi too. At least we're past "anyone who disagrees with my interpretations can only be doing so as a Nazi" though.
Ah, you're almost certainly correct here! Akin to crypto-fascist, perhaps I'd seen too many articles talking about the negatives of crypto to see the obvious there.
None of these kind of examples hold up under scrutiny when observed in video. There's a reason they're all shared as still photos or tiny blips of video which never shows the full motion salute that's being claimed.
