I saw Notorious the other night, and since the movie was kind of boring, I found myself wondering if there was a Tupac conspiracy movie out there somewhere. I was right!
The whole movie is available here. It's kind of boring. I don't recommend watching the whole thing. It goes into excruciating detail to set up the incident of Tupac's shooting, using extensive interviews with Tupac's body guards and police officers who were involved. Although there are some neat 3d models of Tupac's, the assassin's and the other cars at the scene, and some trippy water backgrounds, it lacks the graphics of other low budget conspiracy movies like Zeitgeist and Loose Change, but to be fair, it attempts to tackle a much smaller scale conspiracy.
The set up is reminiscent of the JFK assassination, but instead of the government loosening JFK's security and planting shooters, it was Tupac's label, Death Row, and it's owner, Suge Knight.
Basically, the idea is that Suge Knight, the owner of Tupac's label, Death Row, paid their security team to back off Tupac on the night of his murder. Tupac's altercations with Orlando Anderson and the East Coast/West Coast thing, which Notorious depicts, but never in depth, are used to obscure the real motivation behind the murder. Suge Knight obviously had cause for wanting to get rid of Tupac, who wanted to get out of Death Row and start his own label, Makaveli. Apparently Knight had kept the master tapes of Tupac's sessions for Death Row, which were worth a ton of money. I don't think it's much of a stretch that Suge Knight, who is obviously kind of a crazy thug, would arrange for Tupac's assassination. The one assumption that I can't really believe is that Tupac's security team could be bought. I mean, I know everyone has a price, but I just don't think those dudes would want to do that. The main piece of evidence in the film is a radio communication overheard by one of the body guards, Michael Moore who was taken off Tupac because he wasn't going along with the orders of the owner, Reggie Wright, in which the shooter tells Wright that the job is done or something.
The second half of the movie is about the ensuing coverup orchestrated by Knight and other to keep the police investigation from getting to them. There's really very little evidence, or even decent conjecture, in the movie, that clears anything up, especially since Tupac was also a pretty crazy guy, as you see in Notorious when he suspects Biggie of trying to set him up. Tupac's wikipedia is worth checking out, if you haven't. Apparently his dad was a Black Panther and his mom was on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted list for four years.
I did like the rules of a conspiracy that the film tried to use as a structure for the interviews and buildup of their case, because they're kinda dumb, but maybe I'll start applying them to other conspiracies:
1. Take out communication
2. Take away security
3. Set up escape and patsy
4. Give a false sense of security
5. Make it look like a random act
I knew pretty much from the opening monologue that this movie was going to suck, because the narration was so terrible, with lines like: "What's also interesting about Tupac is the way he died" and "One of the most notorious unsolved murders of the past twenty years." Obviously Tupac's murder is interesting. Duh. And what? The past twenty years? Were their a string of high profile murders in the late eighties that I don't know about?
But it did reference Occam's Razor, which I appreciated, though they used the simplistic definition, "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." If the film makers had read my blog, they would understand that that is an oversimplification, and maybe they would have made a better movie. I think they make it decently clear that there was some foul play involved in Tupac's murder, and that Suge Knight was possibly involved, but they don't make any of it seem urgent or particularly interesting. There's no sense of fear that good conspiracy films are able to instill in viewers.
Showing posts with label occam's razor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label occam's razor. Show all posts
09 February 2009
16 December 2008
Ockham's Razor
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate."
I found this the other night, which attempts to define the concept behind "Occam's Razor." It's a fairly good description of the concept, if glorified. ("And yet it is, of course, probably the most important principle ever introduced into human logic.") But it made me realize that I have never explained Occam's Razor or it's relationship to this blog. I did some research which is actually pretty interesting.
Occam's Razor (you could probably just read the blog entry or this to understand it but whatever) is basically the premise that given a theory or set of theories, human logic will lead one to trust the theory which requires the fewest assumptions. An easy, but inaccurate, way to say this is that the simplest theory is always true. The simplest theory may usually true because it makes the fewest assumptions, but if one of those assumptions is outrageous, one would have to trust a more complex theory. The weird thing about Occam's Razor is that it's pure philosophy; it will never prove anything concretely.
For example (one that's a bit more specific to my blog than the examples in the link), I'll use the JFK conspiracy. There are basically two theories, though the conspiracy theory popularized by Oliver Stone's movie etc. can have a lot of different nuances. One is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating JFK. The other is that Oswald was a patsy (as he referred to himself in a press conference) for a massive conspiracy that went all the way up to Lyndon Johnson. So if you apply Occam's razor, you have to look at the assumptions that each theory takes to determine which is more probable. One assumption you have to accept for the lone gunman theory is that Oswald was a capable enough marksman to hit Kennedy from the sixth floor of the book depository with 6.5 millimeter Italian carbine rifle and four-power scope. This is hard to believe, but impossible to finitely falsify. For the conspiracy theory, you have to assume that Jack Ruby was hired by the conspirators to kill Oswald in order to keep him quiet. As a possiblity, this is sort of easy to believe, especially considering that the motive Ruby gave was that he wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy from having to testify. But it's difficult to prove. It's also difficult to falsify. But both are just one of many assumptions that both theories require, though the conspiracy theory would probably have many more assumptions.
Okay, long-winded example.
After the jump I want to do a quick summary of the history of the principle, and then I'll explain wtf it has to do with this blog.
The principle is attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th century logician. Some people claim that a bunch of other people invented it, including Thomas Aquinus (my bff) and even Plato (or was it Aristotle). He was a controversial figure with the Catholic church because he basically denied the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. Both require a lot of assumptions. He was an important contributor to the philosophy of Nominalism, to which he contributed his theory of universals, which was that they don't exist. Basically the original skeptic. In some cases he was a little to skeptical, like he denied the comlexity of human biology. But in other cases he was pretty awesome, ie he was one of the first people to advocate the seperation of Church and State.
What's also funny is that there's writing on the "Myth of Ockham's Razor" which denies that he came up with the concept of that it has attributed to him by later scholars. And that it's not really important. That paper is actually really dense, so I don't reccomend reading it, I didn't get very far.
Applying Occam's Razor to conspiracy theories in the literal sense is not really what I'm interested in doing with this blog, so the title is a bit inaccurate. What I'm interested is the narrative form that conspiracy thoeries use. But the principle is important, because it gets to the heart of what is fascinating about conspiracies, which is that they can't be proved, but present a set of assumptions which can be more believable that the theory accepted as status quo. Granted, conspiracies are exploitative, they take advantage of people's natural fears and insecurities to convince us that there are powers in the world greater than what we see in our everday lives. If Ockham were alive today he would undoubtedly scoff at most conpiracies, some of which take on an almost religious role in our lives, requiring belief and even faith in certain ideals, mainly "the truth", in order believe things we would otherwise write off immediately.
I am obsessed with fiction, and I see conspiracies as a sort of counterpoint to fiction. I'm not going to be able to express this very well at this point in my life (maybe one day I'll write a dissertation (which would have to come after my Roth dissertation)), but I think the idea is apparent. Conspiracies are basically fictions that are applied to the real world. It's not a lot different from history and the news, which often contain elements of fiction, but it's much easier to see the fiction and narrative making behind it.
A funny example of a conspiracy that fictionalizes reality is the World War Crew, from Richmond Virginia. I don't know them personally, but my sister dated on of them, and I've been close to people who do know them, so I sort of know what their deal is. Basically, they're a bunch of teenagers who live in Richmond and graffiti things and do random pranks. But the police decided that they were a gang, and actually went the kid's houses and confiscated their computers and suspected them of being much more criminal than they actually were. I heard they had a whole task force dedicated to the World War Crew, which is pretty hilarious considering that Richmond has one of the highest crime rates in American for a city of its size, and the police were focusing their energies on a bunch of kids in a hard core band.
I found this the other night, which attempts to define the concept behind "Occam's Razor." It's a fairly good description of the concept, if glorified. ("And yet it is, of course, probably the most important principle ever introduced into human logic.") But it made me realize that I have never explained Occam's Razor or it's relationship to this blog. I did some research which is actually pretty interesting.
Occam's Razor (you could probably just read the blog entry or this to understand it but whatever) is basically the premise that given a theory or set of theories, human logic will lead one to trust the theory which requires the fewest assumptions. An easy, but inaccurate, way to say this is that the simplest theory is always true. The simplest theory may usually true because it makes the fewest assumptions, but if one of those assumptions is outrageous, one would have to trust a more complex theory. The weird thing about Occam's Razor is that it's pure philosophy; it will never prove anything concretely.
For example (one that's a bit more specific to my blog than the examples in the link), I'll use the JFK conspiracy. There are basically two theories, though the conspiracy theory popularized by Oliver Stone's movie etc. can have a lot of different nuances. One is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating JFK. The other is that Oswald was a patsy (as he referred to himself in a press conference) for a massive conspiracy that went all the way up to Lyndon Johnson. So if you apply Occam's razor, you have to look at the assumptions that each theory takes to determine which is more probable. One assumption you have to accept for the lone gunman theory is that Oswald was a capable enough marksman to hit Kennedy from the sixth floor of the book depository with 6.5 millimeter Italian carbine rifle and four-power scope. This is hard to believe, but impossible to finitely falsify. For the conspiracy theory, you have to assume that Jack Ruby was hired by the conspirators to kill Oswald in order to keep him quiet. As a possiblity, this is sort of easy to believe, especially considering that the motive Ruby gave was that he wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy from having to testify. But it's difficult to prove. It's also difficult to falsify. But both are just one of many assumptions that both theories require, though the conspiracy theory would probably have many more assumptions.
Okay, long-winded example.
After the jump I want to do a quick summary of the history of the principle, and then I'll explain wtf it has to do with this blog.
The principle is attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th century logician. Some people claim that a bunch of other people invented it, including Thomas Aquinus (my bff) and even Plato (or was it Aristotle). He was a controversial figure with the Catholic church because he basically denied the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. Both require a lot of assumptions. He was an important contributor to the philosophy of Nominalism, to which he contributed his theory of universals, which was that they don't exist. Basically the original skeptic. In some cases he was a little to skeptical, like he denied the comlexity of human biology. But in other cases he was pretty awesome, ie he was one of the first people to advocate the seperation of Church and State.
What's also funny is that there's writing on the "Myth of Ockham's Razor" which denies that he came up with the concept of that it has attributed to him by later scholars. And that it's not really important. That paper is actually really dense, so I don't reccomend reading it, I didn't get very far.
Applying Occam's Razor to conspiracy theories in the literal sense is not really what I'm interested in doing with this blog, so the title is a bit inaccurate. What I'm interested is the narrative form that conspiracy thoeries use. But the principle is important, because it gets to the heart of what is fascinating about conspiracies, which is that they can't be proved, but present a set of assumptions which can be more believable that the theory accepted as status quo. Granted, conspiracies are exploitative, they take advantage of people's natural fears and insecurities to convince us that there are powers in the world greater than what we see in our everday lives. If Ockham were alive today he would undoubtedly scoff at most conpiracies, some of which take on an almost religious role in our lives, requiring belief and even faith in certain ideals, mainly "the truth", in order believe things we would otherwise write off immediately.
I am obsessed with fiction, and I see conspiracies as a sort of counterpoint to fiction. I'm not going to be able to express this very well at this point in my life (maybe one day I'll write a dissertation (which would have to come after my Roth dissertation)), but I think the idea is apparent. Conspiracies are basically fictions that are applied to the real world. It's not a lot different from history and the news, which often contain elements of fiction, but it's much easier to see the fiction and narrative making behind it.
A funny example of a conspiracy that fictionalizes reality is the World War Crew, from Richmond Virginia. I don't know them personally, but my sister dated on of them, and I've been close to people who do know them, so I sort of know what their deal is. Basically, they're a bunch of teenagers who live in Richmond and graffiti things and do random pranks. But the police decided that they were a gang, and actually went the kid's houses and confiscated their computers and suspected them of being much more criminal than they actually were. I heard they had a whole task force dedicated to the World War Crew, which is pretty hilarious considering that Richmond has one of the highest crime rates in American for a city of its size, and the police were focusing their energies on a bunch of kids in a hard core band.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
