Noisebridge Attempts to Teach Science To Juggalos

Working on the assumption that the Insane Clown Posse's song Miracles was indeed a tribute to the wonder of nature and not the cleverest troll ever, some folks from the hackerspace Noisebridge decided to try and educate ICP fans. Surprisingly, most of the fans seemed to enjoy the science lesson, but representatives of the band didn't seem to think it was funny.

Comments

Proverbs come to mind...

[Walter Wart]

Making a silk purse out of a sow's ear
Casting pearls before swine
Never wrassle with a hog. You get muddy and the hog enjoys it

But then I realize the comparisons are insulting to the pigs

Re:Proverbs come to mind...

[dAzED1]

hogs don't actually enjoy it. I know it's just a saying, but it's a saying based on the false belief that hogs and pigs like to be dirty. When the only time you see a hog is in an unnatural environment...don't presume to know what it likes ;)

Re:Proverbs come to mind...

[db32]

Actually pigs do like rolling in the mud. Though it has to do with staying cool and keeping the sun off rather than liking the dirt.

Re:Proverbs come to mind...

[dAzED1]

funny that someone thought to down rate me, someone who has raised hogs and has seen many of them in the wild, as "overrated" - and then uprate you for just repeating the same thing someone else said.

"X!"

"No, X isn't actually true" - overrate -1

"X!" - insightful +4!

Hogs don't like being in mud in the first place. The only reason they are, is because they were *put there*. They are naturally a fairly clean animal; if well kept in a humane way, they'll always poop in one place, as far away from their food as they can. What 99.9999% of the population has seen, or heard described, is instead a nasty pen that the hog finds extremely depressing. They get into a cycle where they try to clean themselves off, but instead get dirtier. Sometimes, in a large open area, they'll do what elephants do - they'll cover themselves in a light layer of dirt/mud as a sort of natural sunscreen. They don't do this because they enjoy the process, they do it because they're in the sun and have no shade.

Now, go find a feral hog and instead you'll find a relatively clean animal (sans the snout itself) that looks nothing like his hog-farm kept brothers. And that's the point - hog farms are un-natural, and hogs are known to be extremely depressed at hog farms. To presume that you know what someone "enjoys" because of their behavior when they're at a cruel place they obviously don't want to be at, is silly.

Even sillier is presuming that hogs like it when their fleeing in terror at a rodeo during some sort of pig wrestling event. I suppose the bulls enjoy the rodeo too, and that's why they're so happy and pleased to give the rider such a fun time?

Snarkified

[cosm]

I think the reason Miracles was so infamous is due to a couple factors, as follows,

A. Many people hate ICP.
B. Many people are on the internet.
C. ICP made a video metaphorically referring to some phenomenal (yet understandable) facts of nature (albeit explainable, to an extent) as miracles.
D. Said intertards took them literally, espousing their hate on a fantastical new platform.
E. Or it was an epic trolling, and 2,000,000+ got got.

Point to take away: people like to criticize, act snarky, and show disdain towards those they dislike. ICP is no different. The real miracle is that 2,000,000 cumulatively made fun of about an ICP video.

And as an aside, I highly doubt many of the critics of that video on the net could fully understand electromagnetism, such as the fact that relativistic transformations of transverse EM waves can swap the E & M field, for they are two sides of the same coin depending on the Lorenz transformation, or perhaps give a full analysis of Lenz's law and its implications.

Re:Snarkified

[Lord Ender]

Just because we have the vocabulary to describe something does not mean we "understand" it.

Re:Snarkified

[DJLuc1d]

And as an aside, I highly doubt many of the critics of that video on the net could fully understand electromagnetism, such as the fact that relativistic transformations of transverse EM waves can swap the E & M field, for they are two sides of the same coin depending on the Lorenz transformation, or perhaps give a full analysis of Lenz's law and its implications.

While that might be true there is this thing called 'google' and I'm told it can help you find information, rather than be content in releasing a song where you espouse idiocy and insult the very people who uncovered the answer to your query. I believe 'Violent murder-dick' or whatever his name is accused 'scientists' of some sort of deception, rather than 'googling magnets'

Re:Snarkified

[nametaken]

The noise over Miracles wasn't about internet trolls getting uppity just for fun (though it is fun). These guys didn't say, "hey these things are amazing" when they called them miracles. They suggested that these various natural things were no less than god's direct intervention in the physical world and implied that they couldn't be satisfactorily explained by science. Then they said they don't want to hear from any scientists about any of these subjects because, "[those] motherfuckers lyin'". Yeah, scientists of the world are part of a giant conspiracy to lie about where rainbows come from... fuckwits.

That's not simple awe for amazing things, that's straight-up mental retardation painted in makeup to match. Oh and I almost forgot... yes, they're some of the shittiest rappers in history.

But yes, this assumes it wasn't an intentional showboat of unbelievable stupidity on their part to get some attention for careers that went down the toilet over 10 years ago. If that's the case, then shame on them for misleading the young trash of America down the science-hater path so they can desperately try to make their next mortgage payment.

ICP

[IMightB]

Is a band for idiots, morons and the wilfully ignorant. I met Violent J at a Station promo back ~95/96 in the Toledo area. Just a complete dick. Their music is crap. Their fans are worse. They are the only band that would be known in an Idiocracy style world.

Ignorance.

[Xoltri]

How ignorant to you have to be to be proud of your ignorance?

I'm sorry but no

[JoshuaZ]

The original song has the lyrics:

Fucking magnets, how do they work? And I don't wanna talk to a scientist Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed

That's unambiguously anti-science. Any attempt to say they weren't being literal is simply stupid. Insane Clown Posse is stupid and supports willful ignorance. Pretending otherwise to try to get a small amount of science education done might help a tiny bit but at the end of the day, let's not kid ourselves about what this crap band stands for. The fact that when the band found out about this event they tried to actively prevent it shows what they really care about. These are the worst sort of ignorant fucktards possible, the sort of ignorant fucktards who not only take pride in their own ignorance but actively prevent other people from trying to educate. The fact that then had their security goons try to take away the camera is simply one more aspect of how absolutely despicable ICP is.

Further update

[JoshuaZ]

If there were any doubts about ICP's attitude on this matter, one of the ICP members brags about how they had their security get rid of the scientists on their twitter feed http://twitter.com/bigviolentj/status/15541954268

Corp, Dougie & Sugar Slam ran those scientist haters off and we had a fuckin' amazing ass concert. 2500 Los rocked the building's foundation

In almost any other context I would have thought that the phrase "scientist haters" would mean people who hate scientists, not scientists who are haters. Ah well.

Re:More Juggalo research is needed

[sumdumass]

Lol.. I think you are missing the entire point of the song. It's not about any religion or elitism, it's about appreciating the things in life without needing to boil it down to some boring explanation. A rainbow or the birth of your child is a special moment that should be enjoyed and cherished, not some technical bullshit that takes any subliminal meaning away from it. It's about events that are a power greater then you- like 75,000 people in a room acting as one. the miracle isn't something any god did or caused, it's about how something is greater then the individual or you and against the odds, it came about. It's about how we should be in awe over those things instead of having it dwindled away to light refracting in a certain way.

I can understand why they didn't take kindly to a bunch of nerds who couldn't get that after being explained to them attempting to defeat the entire purpose of the song.

Re:More Juggalo research is needed

[h4rr4r]

If you can't have both you are defective. If the explanation of a rainbow makes it less good then you are the problem, not the man explaining it.

Re:More Juggalo research is needed

[fbjon]

You can very well know how something is created or caused and still see the magic in it.

I think the point being made was that this song demonstrates all emotion and zero knowledge. A deficient song, in other words. Also, the example you gave is rather ridiculous.

Can't we all just get along

[Anonymous Coward]

When will people realize that religion and science are not mutually exclusive. Einstein had something famous to say about this. Seriously Religion was started to explain the 'unexplainable'. Just like science. Now that we have science does not mean we have to forsake religion. The more you learn about science, the more miraculous creation becomes. This is pretty much the point of the song I believe. I really do not know why there exists this animosity.

We should all be natural philosophers.

Re:More Juggalo research is needed

[thrawn_aj]

Obviously, a child's sense of wonder is different from a that of a scientist. We have not lost our sense of wonder. We have merely ... upgraded it. Interestingly, Nature (while being a sneaky bitch) is also quite bountiful in that for every puzzle solved by science, we are given many more that are much more fascinating than the last.

Besides, the person in your example is just an idiot who cannot recognize a rhetorical question or an idle musing when he sees one. You are equating semantically challenged douchenozzles (or at the worst, science fanboys) with scientists - a common strawman in such debates. Also (thankfully), in this day and age, it is relatively easy to find men or women (as mates) who are not so flaky that they need to live in willful ignorance (which is different, mind you, from indulging oneself in whimsy every now and then) just to feel a false sense of wonder.

Also amusing are the idiots who try to reverse this loss of pseudo-wonder with the common refrain, "Well, surely it can't be as mundane as all that. Surely, there's something more to life than just the physical world?" To them I can only say - the day you've exhausted the wonders of the physical world (aka "reality" - that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away*)

Disclaimer: Not all of this was in direct reply to you. Some of it was a response to related misconceptions.

_____________
*Philip Dick