I was wondering what all this recent clown stuff is about. Someone explains:
Clown Pepe: What Does the Honk Honk Meme Really Mean? Honkler EXPLAINED | Peak Clown World
The clown symbolizes a world that has gone insane.
From Reddit:
What is going on with this “clown world” thing?
Answer: a variation of the pepe meme which embodies the ethos of “cheerful nihilism”. Clown world is the idea that the world is becoming more and more like a grotesque freakshow, with degeneration on various fronts becoming worse (social, political, racial, etc.). Instead of bearing the emotional burden of what some believe is the multi-faceted downturn of society, honk honk represents the option of cheerful nihilism, where one acknowledges the world’s absurdity but decides to laugh and make fun of it. “Why get riled up when none of it matters anyways?”
Relatesd to the “alt-right” idea, this is not an alt right symbol, just as pepe is not an alt right symbol. This meme, like many others, has been effectively used to show that small communities online can trick mainstream media into reporting the idea that benign things (milk, the OK hand sign) are actually a secret racial symbol.
I agree that there is nothing racist about the symbol, but disagree that the world is more insane than it was in the past. In some respects it is, but on other respects, it isn’t. Rather than the world getting worse, due to the pervasiveness of news and media such as on Twitter and TV, we are bombarded with more bad news than ever, that decades ago would have gone unreported. A campus protest becomes plastered all over Twitter, but decades ago such protests either went ignored or were reported later in only the local papers, but nowadays even the smallest disruption or outrage becomes national news almost instantly all over CNN and Fox.
From Why There Isn’t More Civil Unrest in America, and Why I’m Not Worried:
From Wikipedia, List of incidents of civil unrest in the United States, there were more incidents in the 60′s than this decade, but America–as measured by a wide variety of metric such as GDP, profits & earnings growth, technological research and development, medical advances, intellectual output, stock market gains, global influence, military might, etc.– is stronger than ever. Had someone interpreted the tumultuous events of the 60′s as a harbinger for the decline and demise of America decades later, they would have been wrong. Maybe America has declined socially and culturally, but the cold, hard economic data tells another story, sorry.
Going back to the Wikipedia article, when adjusting for populations and absence of social media, it’s actually kinda remarkable there isn’t more unrest now. Had social media and smart phones existed in the 60′s and 70′s, and had the US population been as large then as it is now (200 million vs. 330 million today), there would have been possibly hundreds more incidents than listed.
Consider that:
-A riot in California killed 63 people and injured 2,383…this was in 1992. By comparison, the 2017 Unite the Right rally resulted in just single indirect death and no property damage.
-A performance art exhibition in New York featured a guy masturbating beneath the floorboards…this was in 1972.
-As many as 100 people died in coal workers riot in West Virginia…this was in 1921.
-A US senator was nearly beaten to death with a cane on the floor of the House…this was in 1856.
There has always been depravity and civil unrest. The difference now is we’re increasingly made aware of it due to the media, and compared to the rest of the world, as bad and dysfunctional and clownish as America may seem, it is worse.
But one can readily cite examples recent clownishness:
-A ‘culture of outage’ exacerbated by social media
-Professors and speakers getting de-platformed and protested for expressing certain views
-A human feces and dirty needle epidemic in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, San Francisco
-So-called gender fluidity, gender neutral parenting, postmodern discourse, and so on.
The major difference between the past and present is, social dysfunction was much more violent, whereas nowadays it’s more cultural, interpersonal, and digital.
If America seems bad and dysfunctional, overseas, especially in low IQ countries, things are even worse. Brazil, Spain, Venezuela, Italy, Turkey, Canada, etc…are much less competent than America, and or have more social justice and liberalism, and are worse in many other respects.
Just recently, the Indian navy almost destroyed its $3 billion nuclear-missile submarine by forgetting to close one of the hatches. India’s IQ? 76.
Somewhat remarkably, America’s national IQ is 97, and this is in spite of having large populations of low-scoring groups. Many HBD and alt-right people hold up these small, homogeneous Northern European countries such Norway and Sweden as being exemplars of high intelligence, yet such countries don’t score higher than the US. Also Northern Europe is much more socially liberal than the US and has much higher rates of atheism and out-of-wedlock births.
America still has large pockets of conservatism and traditionalism (which is how Trump won despite not winning the popular vote), but some some of these Latin American and Southern European countries seem hopeless. Gay marriage and homosexuality is more popular and accepted in Spain, Brazil, and the Philippines (as well as in Northern Europe) than in America. Seven Crowder in 2009 famously made a video in which he was unable to get a simple blood test in Canada, owing to the sclerotic nature of Canada’s socialized healthcare system (but at least it’s “free” even if it’s useless). That’s a clown world if I ever saw one.
In conclusion, clownishness has existed for a long time (probably for all of recorded history) and is not just limited to the US, but is probably worse in many parts of the world.