On the bright side, ‘climate change’ didn’t come in last or next to last place! Here’s Vox being Vox
Americans are more afraid of clowns than climate change, terrorism, and … death
We live in scary times.
In 2016, we’ve seen hundreds of mass shootings. We’ve watched the gap between rich and poor Americans widen. We’ve witnessed the fulminant rise of Donald Trump, whose nomination left Vox editor in chief Ezra Klein “truly afraid†for the first time in American politics.
But in the eyes of our citizens, there is a graver threat at hand: clowns.
In a poll we conducted with Morning Consult last week, 42 percent of Americans said they were, in some capacity, afraid of clowns. Among voters ages 18 to 29, nearly one in three admitted to at least a minor case of coulrophobia — fear of clowns.
The younger the group, the more afraid of clowns they become. Probably because those of us who are older understand that clowns aren’t really anything to be afraid of, and the jokes about them being scary and stuff on TV and in movies are jokes. Young people do not seem to have a sense of humor or reality nowadays.
Anyhow
We compared the results of our poll with a poll recently conducted by Chapman University, which asked 1,511 Americans to identify their greatest fears from a list of topics. Clowns outranked every single fear, save for “government corruption.†(Note that the Chapman poll only included “very afraid†and “afraid†as voting options, while our poll had “very afraid,†“somewhat afraid,†and “a little afraid.â€)
42% were afraid of clowns. Just 32% were afraid of ‘climate change’. After 25+ years of spreading awareness and controlling what kids are taught in school, what people see on television and in the news, one would think there would be more concern. Alas, no. So sad.
We are not very good at evaluating long-term risks. Smokers are more afraid of terrorist attacks than disease, yet more than 480,000 smokers* die from tobacco each year in the US: 150,000 from lung cancer alone. Rush Limbaugh famously claimed that smoking saves us Social Security costs each year.
In the internal algorithm for evaluating risk/reward or assessing threats “imminence” of the perceived danger and “immediacy of the reward” bias the internal calculations.
The Earth is warming from CO2 added to the atmosphere from humans burning fossil fuels. Many conservatives deny these simple facts because they don’t favor the potential solutions, i.e., emitting less CO2. Conservatives also denied that tobacco harmed people.
* Actually, according to the CDC 40,000 Americans die each year from second hand smoke.
The difference being that scary clowns are real…viz. little g.i. jeffy.
puppy man likes to insult men from the safety of his keyboard.
It makes him feel like a “big man” not some insignificant “little guy”
Super Bummer Americans don’t seem to like that climate truther candidate
Can we make an assumption showing that the higher the fear of clowns is the higher the rate of gun ownership?
Are guns an effective way to deal with the fear of clowns? Is that one of the reasons people own guns?
But yet sadly, the climate circus continues. It causes everything while doing nothing.
Retard thinks that he and fake little g.i. jeffy are real men…