In Defense (and Ridicule) of the Insane Clown Posse

[tongodeon]

Despite the video and its ridicule going viral, my initial reaction to the Insane Clown Posse "Miracles" video was actually quite positive. It may have helped that I found it right after my post about numinous experience, but I interpreted the song in the same spirit. If I was going to make a list of the things that bring me joy as a naturalist/

Comments

[scothen_krau]

httf filled me in on this business just last night. My initial thought was that, if they hadn't included the "f***ing scientists" line, there wouldn't be any uproar. But whatever the intent - and you are a more charitable person than I in your interpretation - it's difficult to separate the video from the current zeitgeist: climate change denial, conspiracies about autism and vaccination, perceived impotence in the face of the Gulf oil spill, and so on. Right or wrong, science finds itself in a defensive crouch these days,and more likely to lash out when an easy target presents itself... which isn't terribly rational, I suppose.

[tongodeon]

it's difficult to separate the video from the current zeitgeist: climate change denial, conspiracies about autism and vaccination, perceived impotence in the face of the Gulf oil spill, and so on

Apart from the general "motherfuckers who be lyin'" accusation was there anything in the video about any of that stuff, or anything similar? If ICP were global warming or vaccine deniers I would have expected to find something a little more specific.

[starchy]

I think it is reasonable to connect Miracles and climate change denial as part of a broad cultural trend, but not reasonable to claim that ICP themselves are climate change deniers, etc. based only on the lyrics and images in Miracles. I don't see how the former hinges on the latter in any way.

[mmcirvin]

I'm not even sure about the "these days". I remember the whole "Science Wars" panic in the late 1980s-mid 1990s, when defenders of rationality were convinced that lefty academic postmodernists were hell-bent on tearing the whole edifice down (and, before them, there was worry over antiscience hippies). And then movement conservatives took over everything in the US and we started to see what a real campaign against science might look like, and it made the Science Wars stuff just seem like a ridiculous tempest in a teapot. (It continues at the state level, of course, with Soviet-style crap like the Virginia Attorney General going after Mann.)

What we're seeing now is the aftereffect of and reaction to that, with scientific communities and their fans starting to hit back, sometimes indiscriminately. I doubt anyone would have made much of a fuss about Insane Clown Posse ragging on scientists in, say, 1985.

[tongodeon]

I think that the 80s "science wars" paved the way for the more widespread attacks today. The postmodernist 80s always seemed like they came with a wink and a nod, kinda like those "proofs" where 0=1 or 1+1=3 or whatever. But they seemed harmless, so the response was muted, and today's generation didn't get the joke and took it seriously and now a lot more people are talking about "different ways of knowing" and science being nothing more than a consensus of subjective personal opinion. We can attack popular misconceptions like the ICP video but the genie's out of the bottle already.

[mmcirvin]

I really doubt that whole episode had much of an effect on anything. I think the general attitude was always there in the culture; it just manifests in various ways at different times.

Modern major-league attacks on science are basically in three categories.

First, there's the anti-environmentalist stuff, whose methods and tactics basically come from two sources: the chemical industry's counterattack against Rachel Carson starting in the 1960s, and--to a really surprising degree--from the tobacco industry's attempts to confuse people about smoking and cancer (which extended to smearing the World Health Organization, and by extension other UN-affiliated research organizations). There's no weird philosophy of science needed here, it's all powered by money and about money, and much of it is masquerading as scientific rationalism. To some degree they even managed to infiltrate the skeptic community

[mmcirvin]

Creationism comes and goes and was almost dead in the industrialized West at mid-20th century

I should add, I doubt it was actually dead then as a belief in the general population--but it was dead in the sense that there weren't a lot of people going around brandishing supposed scientific credentials and trying to sell it as "creation science". Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies is interesting reading in this regard; the chapter on pseudoscientific creationism describes it as an extinct 19th- and early 20th-century curiosity.