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

[xiphias]

I saw a video of Richard Feynman being asked how magnets work, and his answer basically boiled down to, "I can show you all the math, I can predict how they work, I can tell you how much force a magnet exerts in what ways, but I can't explain it in any way that puts it in any context other than that of magnets."

[mmcirvin]

There are really two separate questions in there

[xiphias]

For me, the farthest I've gotten is, "If you spin a magnet around, you get electricity, and if you spin electricity around, you get a magnet."

I haven't the foggiest idea WHY, though. I think it's probably that a wizard did it.

[mmcirvin]

There's an explanation for magnetism that shows up in a lot of introductory texts that uses the relativistic Lorentz contraction of a line of charges, and shows that this results in a residual force between electric conductors that is the magnetic force. It looks really neat, but as Feynman and others have said, the argument hides a bunch of extra assumptions about how relativity affects the field being smuggled in under cover. It *seems* to demonstrate that any Coulomb static force with opposed charges in a relativistic world would result in something like magnetism, but things are really more contingent than that

[loic]

I love acoustic Miracles!

[ikkyu2]

Man, I would so totally go to watch you school promulgate to a bunch of Juggalos. It will be epic.

[tongodeon]

Everyone's going to want to do the poster on fucking magnets, so I was thinking of doing one on the evolutionary history of the long-necked giraffe with emphasis on the vagus nerve.

[hwrnmnbsol]

Please place an emphasis on personal safety during this event.

[matrushkaka]

I only recently became aware of the ICP and Juggalos and I'll just say, sometimes it's good to be deaf. Regarding the Noisebridge event, I think it's totally awesome and I support it.

[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.