First, I have some corrections and expansions to yesterday’s post.

WPXI in Pittsburgh, who have good sources in Pennsylvania law enforcement, are now clarifying that no counter-sniper teams were staged in the building that Crooks shot from at all. They were rather on the second floor of an adjacent building, which I have circled here in red:

This should clarify why nobody heard Crooks moving on the roof before he opened fire. WPXI also note that law enforcement first took notice of the would-be assassin not thirty minutes, but a full hour, before Trump began speaking. This is when Crooks was seen fiddling with a range-finder, as Beaver County journalists reported, and it was the occasion for law enforcement to take their first photo of the assailant.

Reclaiming the America... Justin Raimondo Best Price: $3.59 Buy New $14.00 (as of 10:35 UTC - Details) An important secondary mystery is who actually killed our shooter. This helpful New York Times analysis concludes, on the basis of audio recordings, that the shot came from the southernmost Secret Service counter-sniper team, which would make sense, as unlike their counterparts to the north, they had an unobstructed view of Crooks’s position. WPXI, however, are reporting that “a local police sniper” has been placed on administrative leave for firing his weapon at Crooks. The Butler County District Attorney nevertheless confirms “that it’s his understanding the shot that killed Crooks was fired by the Secret Service.” The Secret Service have also separately claimed responsibility for the kill. The problem is this: After Crooks concludes his eight-shot volley, I can find only one further shot in all the audio that is available to us. It’s possible, I guess, that I’ve missed something, or that our recordings simply failed to pick up all of the counter-sniper fire, but it’s equally possible that valued reader Bootsorourke was right, and that local law enforcement were responsible for the kill shot. Perhaps the Secret Service are claiming otherwise only to save themselves further embarrassment, and with the investigation in the hands of the FBI, local police have no means of establishing for themselves what really happened.

My last post generated a wealth of impatient comments. A great many valued readers find my “malicious indifference” theory of the failed assassination less than satisfying; they propose that there were two shooters, that it was not Crooks but Maxwell Yearick whom police killed on the roof of the AGR International building, and other things as well. Here, I want to explain how I think about these events in general, and why I default towards systemic, distributed explanations unless I’m given extremely good reasons not to.

I was a professor for a very long time. In all of my years of teaching and research, I came to regret the tiresome banalisation to which all academic theories are subjected. Academics tend to regard their past and present social subjects with a benign eye; they don’t like to speculate about conspiracies, ulterior motives or hidden plots unless they’re forced to, and they default wherever possible to the most boring and colourless hypotheses imaginable. Their problem, as I’ve suggested many times, is that anybody can do things like history and philology. The less technical academic fields are therefore protected by a great deal of gate-keeping, both formal and informal. Without a Ph.D. and the approval of editorial boards and peer reviewers, it is nearly impossible to have your findings recognised. For much the same reason, there is a pervasive interest in keeping the discourse so uninteresting that only those whose salaries depend on it will bother participating.

With internet culture, it’s the opposite. Everybody here wants maximum engagement, maximum participation, and this strategy favours not banalisation but a relentless, unending sensationalism. We are forever on the verge of political collapse; utter defeat and total victory are always around the corner, and above all reality is not as it seems. There are important formulae at work here: The first line of commentary on important events will often posit that they are in some fundamental sense not real, or at least mere pretences towards darker, hidden ends. As stories develop, there is an effort to bend them into conformity with one’s political preconceptions, often by positing hidden actors and secret motives. The right takes a lot of heat for this kind of conspiracising, but the tendencies exist across the political spectrum. It was left-wingers, in the wake of Trump’s failed assassination, who first proposed that the entire event was staged, while others nearer to my own politics have hypothesised about patsies, multiple shooters, and the like – in this case borrowing elements from well-known theories of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The establishment press like to tut-tut at conspiratorial thought, but they engage in plenty of it themselves, especially when it comes time to analyse the actions and motivations of their enemies and the political opposition. “Russian disinformation” is merely one of many possible examples here.

Before you get angry with me, note that I’m not saying any of this means that the theories emerging from these incentives are necessarily wrong, OK? Sometimes the most defensible explanation really is boring, and sometimes the world turns out to be a truly crazy place. Nor can we reject formulae for their formulaic nature alone. Perhaps secret actors within our politics really do employ the same tactics over and over again, and perhaps these tactics really are only apparent to alternative analysts on the internet. Nevertheless, general tendencies that exist for reasons systemic to our own discourse – the desire to enforce a careerist monopoly on historical analysis, or the desire to gather the largest readership possible – should put us on guard. It is unlikely that the past unfolded in ways maximally convenient to the present-day professoriate, and it is equally unlikely that politics work always and everywhere for the advantage of pseudonymous online writers like me.

Breaking Away: The Cas... McMaken, Ryan Best Price: $24.57 Buy New $12.00 (as of 11:21 UTC - Details) The problem is that humans are not very good at thinking, and here I am no exception. We must nevertheless do our best to formulate theories that use concrete evidence efficiently to explain the phenomena before us. Over time, thinkers have developed various rules of thumb to assist us in this endeavour. One such rule is that tedious maxim known as Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” or, more succinctly: “cock-up before conspiracy.” I try never to cite Hanlon’s Razor explicitly, because I think it’s imprecise, and also because it deeply irritates some people.

What we should really be thinking about, is a much older and more respectable Razor that is commonly ascribed to William of Occam, but that in fact predates our Franciscan friar by a full 1600 years. Aristotle, in his Posterior Analytics, argued that “We may assume the superiority, all else being equal, of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses.” The medieval scholastics were deeply influenced by Aristotle and they rehearsed their own versions of this maxim in their writings, until it came time for William to offer his own rather more enigmatic formulation: “A plurality must never be posited without necessity.” It was then left to the equally Franciscan scholastic thinker John Punch, in the seventeenth century, to provide the pithiest statement: “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” This is the law of parsimony, and it is what I mean when I say that our theories must be not only explanatory but maximally efficient. Among equally explanatory theories, we must always choose the most parsimonious possibility, however disappointing that might be.

Here is what that means practically: A substantial part of the world is hidden from us, and so our theories must inevitably posit some number of unseen causes to explain observed phenomena. We should, however, regard this positing of the unseen as extremely expensive and intellectually burdensome, and aim to explain the events before us, as much as possible, on the basis of observed reality. Those things that we see are the necessary parts of any theory, and they are free for the taking. Unseen, possible, posited things may not be necessary, and we should strive to avoid invoking them whenever we can. This is what it means to avoid multiplying entities beyond necessity.

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