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I was skeptical about the GP's alleged etymology about clown world but... [1] > The alt-right sense emerged from The Honkler, a version of Pepe the Frog meme f
by akiselev 4y ago
I was skeptical about the GP's alleged etymology about clown world but... [1]
> The alt-right sense emerged from The Honkler, a version of Pepe the Frog meme featuring a red clown nose and rainbow wig, characterized as honking a bicycle horn whenever liberals speak. That meme is associated with the use of honk honk ("HH") as a dog whistle for heil Hitler.
It is worse than I thought. At least "woke" has to be used "ironically" to be coopted. There's literally no where to go with "heil hitler" - it's written right on the tin. Why is our discourse polluted with these dog whistles?
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clown_world https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clown_world
- braingenious 4y ago> Why is our discourse polluted with these dog whistles? Because neo-nazis have essentially perfected coopting “respectability” politics in public online discourse. Calling out dogwhistles can have a nasty blowback effect because they’ve manufactured cover (eg “I’m just quoting what [a party with unknown intentions] wrote on wikipedia!”) that gives them footing to claim misinterpretation at the mildest, or outright persecution in other cases. HN is actually a really interesting case for this stuff, because the Primary Sin here is “violating decorum”. If I wanted to A/B test hateful dogwhistles, this site would be the perfect place. Nobody is allowed to post “Fuck off nazi/tankie/[insert other toxic group]” Respectability and Decorum are how we open the door to obvious but just-subtle-enough crap like that.
- braingenious 4y agoI have a follow up post to this downthread. You can find it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423773