Talk:clown world

citations poor quality

Please read the (original) sources to verify what I have written and amend the claims / citations accordingly.

Reference 1, book by Aikin and Talisse: The citation doesn't follow any existing citation standard. With the information provided it is not a trivial task to find what exactly is being cited (or where exactly). Citing an entire book and pointing the reader to a webpage that may or may not contain the source depending on the fickleness of the webpage is insufficient.

Reference 2, paper by Weimann & Ben Am, Page 18: This source is used to substantiate the claim "The meme is associated with the use of honk honk ("HH") as a coded reference to heil Hitler by white supremacists." as written in the article here. The paper however does not substantiate the claim itself, nor elaborate on how it came to their conclusions. While I appreciate the authors' credentials, their paper has not been peer reviewed, nor has it been published in any reputable journal or paper. The quality of a source is at least as important as the content of the source. The quality of the source is objectively (and quantifiably) low and the veracity of the claim questionable at the very best (we would essentially be required to take them at their word).

Reference 3, article by Ashley Peckford, page 73: This article is not the original source for the claims it is being used to substantiate here. Peckford cites "Holt, J. (2019, April 4). White Nationalists Adopt Clowns as Their Next Racist Symbol (Yes, Seriously). Right Wing Watch. https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/white-nationalists-adopt-clowns-as- their-next-racist-symbol-yes-seriously/" for those claims. Where and when possible the original source should be cited. Additionally the original source does not support the entirety of the claim made by Peck, nor by extension the claim made here ("The meme is associated with the use of honk honk ("HH") as a coded reference to heil Hitler by white supremacists.") which is based on exactly that part of Peck's article that can not be traced to any source. The source is not valid. Furthermore the article was not peer reviewed and the only publication found was the one in the link provided here, which is a publication by Ashley Peck themself.

For now I have not re-removed the content, to avoid silly back and forth editing. As it stands however the claim using reference 1 is questionable and the claim using reference 2 and 3 is baseless.

Usually I would find going this in depth to be a little overzealous for a wiktionairy article. Considering the highly political nature however, and the accompanying discourse that is usually rife with misinfo, I am of the opinion that we (that is to say every individual) should strive for qualities that stand above that. What is haloening here is definitely not that.

When you see people throwing dirt, you do not join them in throwing dirt, all that achieves is everything including yourself being covered in more dirt. — This unsigned comment was added by 2001:1c00:2405:2200:d161:cb3f:f7a6:47fe (talk) at 00:45, 23 December 2022.

Reference 1 contains the following text:

The third stage of the Pepe meme is the Honk! meme, or Pepe the Honkler. In this case, Pepe has a red clown nose and rainbow hair. He holds a small bicycle horn, and every time the NPCs or liberals say something, Pepe the clown honks his horn. The Honk! symbolizes the bemused astonishment at the absurdity of liberal politics. Pepe the Honkler typifies the troll's perspective on disagreement – arguing is pointless, as those with whom one disagrees are too far gone, they embody a “clown world.”

This would definitely support a claim that clown world and "The Honkler" are associated. It doesn't quite establish the claim made in the etymology section that the right-wing use of the phrase clown world "emerged from The Honkler" because it makes no specific claim about chronology/order of invention, as far as I can tell. But the association is definitely there.

Reference 2 was in fact published in an academic journal (ISSN 2470-9573). Based on the journal's editorial policies, it seems submissions have to be peer-reviewed. True, it doesn't seem to be a particularly well-known journal, but I'm not sure how much that matters. It's a publication of the University of North Georgia, which is one of six senior military schools in the US.

For Reference 3, you are right that they source the claim about "honk honk" meaning "Heil Hitler" to rightwingwatch, so we could change our reference to the more immediate source. But either way, the reference supports the claim. 70.172.194.25 04:10, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

RFV discussion: January 2022

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clown world

– Jberkel 00:17, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Added two. There's this but I don't think it should count:

2021 February 25, Dr Juan Lopez Jr, Dr Kalyan Perumalla, Dr Ambareen Siraj, ICCWS 2021 16th International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security‎^[1], Academic Conferences Limited, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 321:

a nod to the “clown world” meme [which] signals the idea that pluralistic, multicultural liberal democracies are both inherently ridiculous and doomed to failure.

— Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 00:45, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

I've added six cites now and added a new sense. Please have a look and change if necessary. Maybe sense 2 should be a subsense of sense 1 because the main distinguishing factor seems to be who uses the term and what they perceive to be the clown world, so not really something inherent to the term itself it seems. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 01:11, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Nothing about the text of the BTR1701 / Resident Evil cite jumps out at me as suggesting sense 2 rather than sense 1. I wonder if Nazis popularized the term (all but one of the cites are from the last four years); otherwise, yes, that sense does seem like just one take on the general sense (which I wasn't aware of except as a nonce construction), albeit perhaps common enough to keep the subsense. - -sche (discuss) 03:56, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Added more cites to the citations page. There are definitely two idiomatic senses. The first sense ("a crazy world or environment") can refer broadly to human society and narrowly to specific environments or situations. It also doesn't seem to carry inherent political connotations, although 2/3 recent citations appear to be from right-leaning commentators (Amiel & Heckenlively). The second sense doesn't appear to be used narrowly. It refers exclusively to the "absurd state of global society," not to environments or situations viewed as absurd. The alt-right context is a key component of both its meaning and use. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 11:18, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Not particularly a fan of this distinction. We also don't have different senses in moron depending on what some speakers may perceive to be morons. Such information is not an inherent quality of the word. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 12:22, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

We follow where citations lead. The alt-right usage is well-documented. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 20:00, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

You've just addressed absolutely nothing of what I brought up. Usage goes under "Usage notes", for more information refer to WT:ELE. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 02:43, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

It is difficult to know exactly where the line between "different connotation / context" and "different sense" is. (Compare pronoun's trans sense, which I'm on the fence about: people do use that word in ways that make no sense unless they think pronouns are something only trans people have, like google:"There are no pronouns in the Bible" or "I don't use pronouns! does that trigger you?", but...the current sense doesn't cover that, and the usex "My pronouns are she/her" seems no more separate from the usual sense than "My name is John Doe" is from the usual sense of "name". Ehh.) I will say that in this case the Nazi usage was the only one I was familiar with, and I think it's comparable to red pill, where we could consider the misogynistic use to be a subsense of "something that enables a person to overcome illusion and perceive reality", but we don't, the specific associations are so baked into it. (OTOH, at based we don't note the right-wing associations.) - -sche (discuss) 15:16, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

@-sche: I think pronoun deserves to have its own (sub)sense by the argument you just provided, but I don't quite see how the same argument is applicable to clown world: Aren't all the uses in the provided quotes explainable just fine using the first sense? Some are even explicitly qualified using predicated "ultra-liberal" or "left-wing" which, in my view, further bolsters this position. The fact that sense 1 predates sense 2 also serves as further evidence that sense 2 just is sense 1. I think we generally don't add a secondary (sub)sense only because a specific community uses a term more often than other communities (there must be a lot of good examples here but I can't think of any right now); we only (should) do so when the community adapts it to express something new. I don't have an opinion (at present) regarding the other two articles you've mentioned. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 14:21, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Fair point, I suppose the (small-c) conservative approach would be one sense with usage notes. - -sche (discuss) 03:49, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Examples from the other side of the aisle might be problematic, privilege, or inclusion. 70.175.192.217 04:11, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

RFV-passed. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 17:06, 24 January 2022 (UTC)