Clown World Chronicles: What is the 'Boogaloo'?

Clown World Chronicles: What is the ‘Boogaloo’?

In the darker recesses of the Internet, people like to talk about something called the ‘Boogaloo’. People make references to some future event that goes by this name, and talk about what they would do if and when it happens. As this essay will explain, the Boogaloo is an essential part of the Clown World eschatology.

Most people can sense that something’s fucky about the way the world is. It’s not for nothing we call it Clown World. One study showed that young people today have less than 40% of the housebuying power that their parents had – and things are getting worse. We know that things that are so fucked that they can’t remain that way. Nothing so badly screwed up can also be durable.

It’s obvious to most of these people that the current order of the world is destined to collapse – and soon. There are too many inexorable forces that are pushing towards this. The rot has set in so deeply that it has already reached right into the heart of what holds our society together. The foundations are already giving way.

When the current order of the world does collapse, it’s likely to be ugly. Our economies already operate on the principle of “just in time” delivery, and that means when the shit does hit the fan, supermarkets and petrol stations will start going empty in short order. When they do, people will start to panic. This will result in a sharp increase in desperate, opportunistic behaviours.

This means violence. When basic necessities start becoming scarce, some people will start fighting over what little remains. Normal loyalties to nation, race, neighbourhood and even family will start to break down, and treachery will become commonplace. This state of all-on-all warfare is what people mean by the Boogaloo.

The Boogaloo is the chimpout at the end of this age of the world. It is Ragnarok. It is Armageddon. It is the great reconciliation of grudges and grievances. The Boogaloo is when all law and order collapses, and life becomes reduced to its fundamental principle of kill or be killed.

In the theology of Clown World, the Boogaloo is the great day of judgment. All the tribulations we currently face are merely preparations for this great climax. In much the same way that other religions claim that the order of the world is so inherently evil that it cannot maintain, so too does the Clown World pantheon tell a story of an inescapable final cataclysm of violence.

A common accompaniment to talk about the Boogaloo is weapons talk. A lot of people have been preparing specifically for the end of the world, by stocking food, water, medicine – and firearms. It’s assumed that the Boogaloo will involve a lot of violence, especially in the early days before the population thins out. Having the right weaponry for the Boogaloo is a preoccupation for many in Clown World.

Also related is discussion about social unrest. People like to talk about what might kick the Boogaloo off. Popular theories include an intensification of racial conflict, a spectacular terrorist attack such as the detonation of a nuke, or a sudden change in Government like a coup or impeachment trial. A sudden outbreak of war between Israel and Iran, leading to a nuclear exchange, is another favourite theory.

The classic Boogaloo discussion involves whether the U.S. Army would follow orders to fire on American citizens, should it come down to that. At some point, the reasoning goes, civil unrest would lead to the Army being sent in, and if disorder continued the soldiers might be given an order to fire upon the rioters.

Because Clown World is so shit, many people (especially young men) yearn for the Boogaloo. Many people feel that the structure of Clown World is preventing them from reaching their full potential, or is so egregiously corrupt that it would be a righteous thing to see it fall. They believe that the Boogaloo would release them from the bonds of this false order.

In The Republic, Plato wrote about how political systems inevitably degrade from an aristocracy down through oligarchy to democracy and tyranny (right now we are somewhere between democracy and tyranny). This degradation cannot be reversed – the only way to counteract it is to overthrow the system entirely and to institute a new aristocracy of philosopher-kings.

It may be that the West is fated to endure a Boogaloo as a punishment. This punishment would be for our failure to overthrow the system that we knew was corrupt. The Boogaloo would then serve as a cleansing fire. Alternatively, it could be that the Boogaloo is a necessary step in the process of overthrowing the old, corrupt order and replacing it with a new aristocracy.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund.

Who Are The Forces Of Evil In The Cannabis Referendum Debate?

Now that the cannabis referendum question has been announced, the real battlelines have finally been drawn. Every decent person understands that the forces of evil are lined up against the Cannabis Legalisation And Control Bill, but the question remains: who are they? Dan McGlashan, author of Understanding New Zealand, describes the opponents to cannabis law reform in New Zealand.

The easy way to tell who is for and who is against cannabis is by looking at the correlations between various demographics and their support for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in the 2017 General Election.

This can be done by importing the demographic data from the Electoral Profiles on the Parliamentary website into a statistics program such as Statistica, and then calculating a correlation matrix. Such an approach was the basis of my analysis in Understanding New Zealand, in which I calculated the correlations between all demographics and voting preferences and every other.

The strongest correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and being in any demographic is the one between voting ALCP in 2017 and being Maori. This was a gigantic 0.91, which suggests that the vast bulk of Maori people are in favour of cannabis law reform. The strength of this relationship can be seen from looking at the ALCP vote in the Maori electorates, which is around twice as high as the ALCP vote in general electorates.

Maoris are strong supporters of cannabis law reform for several reasons. The primary reason is because cannabis suits them better than alcohol, to which they have little genetic resistance. The fact that white people have thousands of years of genetic resistance to alcohol, and Maoris don’t, mean that the normalisation of alcohol culture is grossly unfair.

The other super-powerful correlation with voting ALCP in 2017 was with regular tobacco smokers. This was 0.89, suggesting that if a person is a regular tobacco smoker they are all but certain to be a supporter of cannabis law reform.

The reason for this correlation is that it’s mostly only people with mental problems who smoke tobacco, and these same people smoke cannabis for its medicinal effects. If a person has PTSD or anxiety, it’s often the case that tobacco and cannabis both have a similar medicinal effect.

One less strong, but still powerful, correlation was between supporting the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party and being New Zealand born – this was 0.73. It will come as a surprise to many, but cannabis use is an implicit part of the New Zealand identity. It’s as much a part of who we are as rugby, beaches, barbeques and ethnic confusion. Therefore, people who are born and raised in New Zealand are much more likely to support cannabis law reform than those born elsewhere.

These correlations suggest that the average cannabis user is the salt-of-the-earth working-class Kiwi. This is proven by the correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and being employed in working-class professions, such as community or personal service worker (0.77), labourer (0.71), machinery operators and drivers (0.70) or technicians and trades workers (0.43).

The pro-cannabis forces, then, are basically the people who are at the coal face of the tough jobs in New Zealand. People who work repetitive jobs or jobs with heavy social contact are the ones who tend to have the strongest need to destress at the end of the day, and it’s for them that cannabis law reform would be the most beneficial.

This gives us a good idea of who the forces of evil are.

Many of the opponents to cannabis law reform are old people. The correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and median age was -0.57. It’s necessary to note, however, that the correlation between voting ALCP and being on the pension was only -0.18, i.e. not statistically significant. This means that the relation to age and support for cannabis law reform is not linear – it rebounds among pensioners.

This replicates a pattern seen overseas. People tend to be anti-cannabis the older they are, up until the point where they are so old that their life starts to revolve around medicines and doctors. At this point it’s common for people to get exposed to cannabis and to come to appreciate its medicinal effects. So the brainwashing only lasts until there’s an element of personal interest in it, at which point it’s discarded.

Christians make up another strong anti-cannabis bloc. The correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and being Christian was -0.37. Christians have always hated cannabis users, in particular because cannabis is the natural spiritual sacrament of the Eurasian people. This is why Bob McCoskrie, funded by Church money, is taking the leading role in the anti-cannabis campaign.

Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are all significantly opposed to cannabis law reform as well. The correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and belonging to any of these religious groups was at least -0.30. As mentioned above, this is because cannabis is a spiritual sacrament, and therefore its use is directly against the interests of organised religion.

Predictably, then, there is a strong negative correlation between voting National and voting ALCP. Interestingly, the correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and voting National in 2017 (-0.70) is more strongly negative than the correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and voting Conservative in 2017 (-0.40). This underlines the degree to which National voters are not motivated by conservatism so much as actual malice.

The forces of evil, then, in the cannabis law reform debate are the same old, religious bigots who have opposed every other attempt at making society better. They’re essentially the same people who opposed homosexual, smacking and prostitution law reform, and they’ll oppose everything in the future too, because any change makes them piss their pants.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund.

VJMP Reads: Edward Bernays’s Propaganda XI

This reading continues from here.

Chapter Eleven in Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘The Mechanics of Propaganda.’ Here Bernays talks about how propaganda gets transmitted to the public.

Bernays defined propaganda here as “the establishing of reciprocal understanding between a person and a group.” Therefore, there is no practical limit to the number and type of media that may be employed to transmit propaganda (one wonders what Bernays would have made of the Internet).

He writes about how the public meeting was the best means of propaganda 50 years ago (i.e. in the 1870s), but people have become “sick of the ballyhoo of the rally,” and prefer to get information from the radio and newspapers. The propagandist must keep up with the shifting patterns of the popularity of various media, as well as anticipate future changes.

Bernays notes here that there is almost no item of news that, if published, would not benefit the interests of some people and harm the interests of others. He notes also that the newspaper does not care about the propaganda value of a piece of information, but only about its news value. Thus, propaganda that is also news is more likely to get propagated.

It’s important to tailor the message to the audience. The propagandist must create propaganda items with specific audiences in mind. To this end, magazines are different to newspapers because they’re not obliged to print news. This also means that magazines are kind of naturally like propaganda organs.

The propagandist might like to consider supplying a propaganda organ with a series of articles that puts the case to a particular audience. This is especially likely to succeed if that organ feels like they can derive prestige from the association with the company the propagandist works for.

Hilariously (with hindsight), Bernays is able to speak about the radio when it was a new invention and its development uncertain. He notes that many newspaper enterprises have moved into radio, correctly in his estimation. Anticipating the Internet, he predicts that various groups will have an ev ever-increasing interest in buying media space for the sake of propagandising.

Incredibly, Bernays was able to write 90 years ago that Hollywood films were major propaganda devices. He also predicts the rise of the cult of personality by noting that “the public instinctively demands a personality to typify a conspicuous corporation or enterprise.” This is acutely true in New Zealand, where our Prime Ministers have little to go on apart from the personality cults.

Bernays notes that the public has already become cynical to attempts at manipulating them through the media, but some interests are universal. People will always have a need for food, for amusement, for beauty and for leadership. For this reason, they will always seek out sources of propaganda.

He leaves us with the statement: “Intelligent men must realise that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help bring order out of chaos.” This statement must be read in the light of World War I, which was itself the result of the old methods of fighting. In this sense, Bernays and this book herald a shift from an Age of Iron to an Age of Silver.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund.

Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘Behavioural Sink’?

The story of Clown World is a story of collapse. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that all of the signs and symptoms of social collapse in other mammalian species can also be observed in our societies today. The concept of the ‘behavioural sink‘ is an ethological observation that applies just as well to human society.

In the 1950s and 1960s, ethologist John Calhoun ran a series of experiments with Norwegian rats. This involved creating a controlled environment where the rats could thrive – food and quality shelter were limitless. These are sometimes called the Mouse Utopia Experiments on account of that the environment was so conducive to life.

In one of these experiments, known as “Universe 25”, the easy nature of life led to a population explosion, as the natural birth rates of the r-selected rodents (mice in this instance) were not kept in check by the natural death rate that would have existed had they lived in the wild. The overpopulation eventually reached such an extreme degree that the inhabitants of Universe 25 began to exhibit some strange behaviours.

Beyond a certain degree of overpopulation, asocial and then antisocial behaviour became much more common.

First the rodents would start to become asocial. The typical expression of this was a passive form of withdrawal. Some rodents would avoid the others during the daytime, only becoming active at night when the others had settled down. Other rodents, dubbed the “beautiful ones”, came to devote all of their time to grooming, withdrawing from social interaction completely.

If overcrowding became worse than this, the rodents would become aggressive. They would start to randomly attack each other, sometimes fatally. The slightest irritation could trigger a murderous assault. At its worst, infant mortality came close to 100%, as the rodents came to completely neglect their parental duties. Eventually the population would collapse on account of all this homicidal and suicidal behaviour.

Calhoun coined the term ‘behavioural sink’ to describe this societal collapse. He described it as a kind of “spiritual death” that preceded physical death. Observing the disintegration of rodent society on account of this overpopulation gives us great insight into the nature of Clown World. The terrifying truth is that the human animal in Clown World is not so different from the rat and the mouse in the Mouse Utopia Experiments.

The human animal did not evolve in a state of overcrowding. For the vast majority of the 100,000 or so years that humans have existed on this planet, we did so in small bands like the other primates. These bands rarely exceeded 150 or so – if the population of one band would swell beyond this, part of it would split off and form a colony elsewhere.

Because living conditions were so harsh during this time, there was never a time when the birth rate was significantly higher than the death rate. Hunger, disease, natural disaster, tribal warfare and predation from larger animals all worked to keep the human population in check.

This all changed when sanitation and then modern medicine were invented. These two advances meant that the death rate dropped sharply. Because the birth rate initially stayed the same, the human population ballooned. The human population has quintupled since 1900, and most of that growth has been concentrated in urban areas close to the major international trading hubs.

By 2019, the human animal is presented with a set of living conditions very similar to the rats in Calhoun’s study. Perhaps inevitably, we have responded in a similar fashion. The essence of Clown World is the collapse in social behaviour that has come about from the massive overpopulation on our planet. We are exhibiting the same behaviours as the rodents of Universe 25.

In Clown World, many people have withdrawn from social contact completely. This phenomenon is one that we share with the Mouse Utopia. The overpopulation of Clown World has led to a sense that all possible social niches are filled, therefore striving for social success is futile. Many of these people have turned to cyberspace, which offers social contact without being forced into close physical proximity with extremely unpleasant people.

The phenomenon of the beautiful ones is replicated with the rise of the hipster. The 21st century hipster, with his grooming obsession, is simply the result of heavy overcrowding. This is why he is only seen in urban areas. As with the rodents, the modern hipster does not pursue females for reproduction and he does not fight for dominance with the alpha males. He simply withdraws.

Parental incompetence is another feature of overpopulation that the Mouse Utopia shares with Clown World. In the Calhoun experiments, rats in heavily overcrowded pens failed to look after their offspring properly. It was as if the rats became even more r-selected, and adopted attitudes to their offspring normally held by reptiles and amphibians.

This shift towards r-selected patterns of child rearing is also replicated in humans. There have never been a higher proportion of deadbeat dads than there is today. Never before have there been so many single mothers on welfare. Despite the protestations of many conservatives, this isn’t because the welfare system is too generous. It’s because people no longer give a shit.

Consequently, a number of children are growing up feral in Clown World. Their parents have all but given up on life, and so the children wander the streets of their neighbourhoods looking for entertainment. Many of these children end up joining the recluses on the Internet. Others, as in A Clockwork Orange, turn to mindless crime. This breakdown of social order is at the core of Clown World.

A third feature that the Mouse Utopias share with Clown World is this mindlessly random violence. Just this week there was a diversity incident in London where two passers-by were killed by a knife-wielding Muslim. These incidents are becoming so common that they are hardly news anymore. It’s just taken for granted that people are under so much stress nowadays that some will randomly flip out and start killing others.

It’s impossible to understand Clown World without understanding the concept of the behavioural sink. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia Experiments gave us the chance to observe the behaviour of social mammals in a state of extreme overcrowding. Now, with 8,000,000,000 people on the planet, we can see those same behaviour patterns arising in humans.

We’re going down the plughole of the behavioural sink.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund.