Mark Changizi

Even if we accept Hamas’ own claim of roughly 70,000 total deaths in Gaza over the course of the war, and given roughly 25,000 Hamas terrorists, and given roughly 5,000 Gazans killed by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and given roughly 10,000 natural deaths over that time, that leaves about 30,000 civilian deaths attributable to the war. That is 30,000 civilians to 25,000 combatants — roughly a 1.2 : 1 civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio. Historically, that ratio is extraordinarily low for dense urban warfare, and is only possible because of the IDF’s unprecedented civilian-harm-mitigation mechanisms: advance evacuation warnings, phone calls and text messages, leaflet drops, huma...

— Venezuela, Iran, and the Case for Decentralized Moral Action — We already understand why decentralization works in markets and in the public square. Distributed systems are smarter, more adaptive, and harder to corrupt than centralized ones. Millions of actors with skin in the game will always outperform a single committee with a flowchart. And we also understand the danger of centralized systems: they’re easy to capture. Give enough power to a central authority and, sooner or later, someone with political leverage or institutional interests figures out how to steer it. We saw this during Covid — where centralized control over speech and information didn’t make society wiser or safer. I...

These are not abstract test cases — they are real-world laboratories for what happens when tyrannical regimes understand the game. They know the international community will debate, issue statements, and pass symbolic resolutions — and they also know that almost nothing will happen. Centralized moral authority doesn’t restrain them; it reassures them. If we trust decentralization in economics and speech, we should trust it in moral responsibility as well. Strength doesn’t come from routing all action through a single moral bottleneck. It comes from allowing — and expecting — many actors to exercise judgment when judgment is needed. Decentralization isn’t risk-free. Neither are markets, con...

Tenure was meant to create fearless scholars. Instead it created loyalists. The moment something becomes a precious prize, people cling to it—and the more tightly they cling, the more easily they’re controlled. Academics build their entire lives around getting tenure, getting grants, and getting promotions—no one wants to be the assistant professor who never made it. They know their careers evaporate if the funding dries up, they know cancellation can destroy them even if they keep the job, and they know tenure won’t save them if the politics turn. So instead of speaking truth, they appease whoever holds the whip. Tenure didn’t protect academic freedom—it domesticated it.

Why Alien Starships, If They Exist, Will Almost Certainly Be Alive. Moment 559 https://youtu.be/TDuMRaNO2lM

The Jew-haters infesting social media since 10/7 keep screeching that the Holocaust didn’t happen but also that they wish it had—apparently too dim to grasp that their own deranged enthusiasm for genocide is the strongest evidence that, yes, the Holocaust was not only possible but entirely in character for people like them. If this is how they behave in public, in 2025, imagine what their intellectual ancestors did when there were no smartphones, no global witnesses, and no consequences.

People often try to force Jews into modern Western racial categories, usually slotting them as “white.” The whole premise is ridiculous — not only because race is a crude and unhelpful lens for understanding an ancient diasporic people, but because even if Jews were a single race, it would be irrelevant to the moral calculus. The idea that a group’s rights, legitimacy, or vulnerability should depend on where they fall in an American racial taxonomy is itself a moral failure. But beyond that, the very claim is factually wrong. The only reason some Westerners imagine Jews as “white” is because their exposure has largely been to Ashkenazi Jews — the Jews of Europe. Ashkenazim are only one bran...

Lots of democides in the 20th century, and as an adult you should educate yourself about all of them. The Holocaust was, however, different: ~ Industrialized factories built just to kill ~ Transnational, dozens of countries ~ Goal of global extermination ~ Bureaucratic normalization ~ Pseudo-science driving it ~ Victims posed no military / political threat ~ Technology optimized for killing, not war ~ Systematic concealment ~ Entire societies woven into it, not just regime

— Remember when your bare face was a political membership signal? — Communities often find themselves in the strange position of using banal truths as membership signals. These signals aren’t ideological slogans or esoteric shibboleths—they’re simply statements that, under normal conditions, are too obvious to carry any signaling value at all. But when an opposing group anchors its identity to an absurdity, the only reliable way to indicate you’re not part of that community is to state the obvious. Suddenly the mundane becomes rebellious. Saying “there are only two sexes” should be no more of a signal than noting that the sky is blue. But if the opposing tribe has made denial of biologic...

In World War II, more than two million German civilians died outside the camps—women, children, and elderly people crushed in bombings, frozen during mass flight, starved during sieges, or killed during expulsions. Most were not Nazis — they were just civilians keeping their heads down. Yet almost no one today blames the Allies for those deaths. We intuitively grasp the causal chain: those civilians died because the Nazi regime launched a genocidal war, embedded itself among civilians, and left no way to defeat it without horrific collateral damage. The deaths may have come from an American bomb or a Soviet assault, but the blame terminates with Hitler. Why does that perfectly rational m...