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, humanitarian corridors, target vetting, strike cancellations, delayed attacks, and the use of precision munitions even at significant military cost. Those civilian deaths are nonetheless tragic. But they are on the backs of Hamas: for initiating the war, and for deliberately fighting from civilian centers, embedding military infrastructure among homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.

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, conversations, or human beings. But centralized inaction isn’t morally superior. It’s just safer for tyrants — and more comfortable for paperwork. Civil societies thrive because decent people refuse to look away and wait for authorization. A healthy international community shouldn’t behave any differently.

— 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. Instead, it allowed governments, platforms, and bureaucracies to suppress dissent, protect reputations, and enforce narratives that later turned out to be false, incomplete, or politically convenient. Centralization doesn’t just make mistakes bigger — it makes them harder to challenge. Yet when it comes to behavior — whether inside nations or between them — we suddenly forget everything we know about decentralization. We stop trusting distributed judgment and start insisting that no one should act unless a distant authority signs off first. But that’s not how healthy societies work. In a functioning community, people don’t simply “mind their own business” and hope someone files a report later. They step in when something clearly wrong is happening right in front of them. Yes, they may be partly motivated by self-interest — protecting their block, their shop, their peace. But that doesn’t corrupt the moral act. A neighbor who breaks up a violent incident isn’t wrong just because he also prefers not to live near chaos. Decentralization doesn’t mean anything goes. It polices itself through reputation. Fail to act when you should, and you lose standing. Act foolishly or abusively, and you get publicly humiliated. Markets do this with prices and competition; the public square does it with speech and criticism; behavior does it with honor and reputation. That’s the feedback loop — not permission slips from a central authority. International law, by contrast, has drifted into a world of centralized moral permission. A dictatorship brutalizes its own population — and we solemnly declare that repression “unlawful.” But intervention to stop it? Also unlawful. So the atrocity is documented, archived, and translated into resolutions… while the world waits for “proper channels,” which never quite arrive. That isn’t prudence — it’s paralysis dressed up as procedure. And the irony is that bad actors aren’t waiting for centralized approval anyway. They aren’t sitting around saying, “We’d love to oppress people, but the UN hasn’t cleared the paperwork.” The only people restrained by moral bureaucracy are the ones inclined to act responsibly in the first place. Worse, the system doesn’t just fail to deter tyrants — it encourages them. They know that under a centralized, rules-bound international framework, the odds of anyone meaningfully stepping in are vanishingly small. The very structure of the system signals reassurance: you may face speeches, resolutions, and strongly-worded statements… but almost certainly not consequences. Meanwhile, the same centralization-capture dynamic we see domestically shows up internationally. Global institutions don’t behave like neutral moral referees; they behave like political systems subject to lobbying, pressure blocs, and coalition power. That’s why some nations become lightning rods for disproportionate rebuke, while others — often far more brutal — slip by with minimal scrutiny. Israel is the clearest example: whatever one thinks of its policies, the sheer volume and intensity of international condemnation aimed at it is wildly out of sync with any consistent moral standard. That isn’t moral clarity — it’s what happens when a centralized structure becomes a battleground for interests. And this brings us to Venezuela and Iran.

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 branch of a global people whose history spans continents, empires, and millennia. Worldwide, Jews come in a dazzling range of ancestries and appearances shaped by 2,500 years of exile, migration, persecution, and community-building. There are Persian Jews who look fully Persian. Ethiopian Jews who are Black Africans. Yemenite Jews who look Arabian Peninsula. Indian Jews who look South Asian. Bukharan Jews who look Central Asian. Cochin and Bene Israel Jews whose features track India’s coastal populations. North African and Levantine Jews whose appearance matches the broader MENA region. Chinese Jews historically absorbed into the Han population. And that’s just a partial list. This is what happens when a people are scattered across civilizations for thousands of years: they adapt, intermarry within local communities, and retain a shared identity across time and geography. Jews have never been a “race” in the modern sense; they are a people, with shared ancestry, memory, culture, and religious lineage, expressed differently in each place they lived. The irony is that in cities like Los Angeles — which has the largest Persian Jewish population outside Israel — the absurdity becomes obvious. Tens of thousands of Persian Jews look exactly like their Persian Muslim, Christian, and Zoroastrian neighbors. They do not resemble the “white Ashkenazi” stereotype that Hollywood accidentally taught America to generalize to all Jews. So the real problem isn’t just that the racial categorization is wrong — it’s that the categorization itself should not matter. A people’s history, suffering, rights, or standing are not functions of where they sit on a racial gradient constructed for America’s internal politics. To insist otherwise is to smuggle a grotesque moral logic into what should be a simple truth: Jews are a people, globally diverse, and their humanity and security do not depend on whether they conform to someone’s domestic racial schema.

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 biological sex their loyalty badge, then merely affirming reality becomes its own counter-signal. (This is a close cousin of the naked-king story: once a crowd agrees to pretend the king is clothed, pointing out his nakedness becomes a political act.) The broader principle is this: membership signals need not be peculiar. If one community chooses a peculiar signal, the opposing community’s signal may simply be the negation of that peculiarity. And the negation of an absurdity is often something utterly banal. Examples include: ~ “There are only two sexes.” ~ “Jews are not secretly controlling society.” ~ Or… not wearing a mask during peak mask hysteria.

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 moral reasoning collapse when people look at Gaza? Why do they suddenly insist that every civilian death—despite Israel’s unprecedented evacuation efforts, precision strikes, warnings, and corridor openings—must be blamed on Israel rather than on Hamas, which openly uses civilians as shields and built its war inside dense neighborhoods? The moral logic humans easily apply to 1945 becomes mysteriously inverted in 2024, as if causal responsibility ceases to matter the moment Israel — ahem, Jews — enters the equation.

The people shouting that we must “stop” or heavily restrict AI are naïve in three distinct ways. First is the *Luddite naïveté* — the belief that AI is some simple job-destroying machine rather than a general-purpose technology, and the fantasy that a panel of experts can somehow centrally manage it. This is the old technophobia dressed up in moral righteousness: fear of change, belief in wise overseers, and a blindness to the economic forces driving innovation. Second is the *stoppability illusion*. Even if we wanted to halt AI, we couldn’t. The tech is already global, open-source, cheap, and running on commodity hardware. Models fork instantly, weights leak, developers multiply, and rival nations race forward regardless of what the West decides. You cannot pause a planetary-scale technological diffusion any more than you can pause the economy. Third is *power-centralization blindness*. Every restriction empowers exactly the actors we should fear most: governments, megacorps, and the already-entrenched. Regulation never stops bad actors; it shackles good ones. It guarantees a world where only elites possess advanced AI while the public is left with sanitized toys. Call it “safety” if you want—functionally it’s a mandate for monopoly. Together, these three delusions form a comforting story: that AI can be halted, controlled, or limited to the “responsible.” But in reality, attempts to suppress it make AI scarier, not safer, by consolidating it in the hands of the powerful. A fragmented, decentralized ecosystem is the safer path. If you want a world where AI is aligned with human interests, you don’t get there by banning it—you get there by ensuring it’s open, distributed, competitive, and in the hands of the many, not the few.

It’s not just Islam that’s susceptible to collectivism and crimes against humanity. Moment 555 https://youtu.be/mb17A2odALY

The Tell: Only one side thinks the other wants genocide. Moment 553 https://youtube.com/shorts/AKMRiaB69W4?feature=share

‘‘It takes a village’ was an accidental nod to decentralization. Moment 552 https://youtube.com/shorts/sFDLbb5t9cI?feature=share

Five kindred principles that ground respect for the inviolability of liberty, each tapping into a distinct intuition about why freedom matters. (1) No coercion except in self-defense — Force has only one moral use: to stop force. All other coercion is tyranny in disguise. (2) Embracement of free will — People act, choose, and create; a society that denies agency denies humanity itself. (3) Sovereignty of the individual — Each person owns their life and choices, bound only by the same right in others. (4) Voluntaryism — Human relations are just when they arise from mutual agreement, never compulsion. (5) Freedom as bottom-up discovery — Liberty is how truth, order, and human flourishing emerge: not from command, but from the spontaneous experiments of self-directed lives.

It’s Not Just Islam that’s Susceptible to Collectivism Islamism isn’t some alien force unique to the Muslim world. It’s just another species of collectivism—the belief that the individual is secondary to the group, that society must be unified under a single moral or political will. And like most collectivisms, it often travels with socialism, feeding off the same promise of communal virtue enforced from above. Christian societies haven’t exactly been immune to that impulse. The great democides of the twentieth century—from Stalin to Hitler to Mao’s European admirers—arose largely within Christian cultures. People forget this when they equate Islam with Islamism. The real danger isn’t Islam; it’s collectivism itself. If the West has shed much of that infection, it’s not because Christianity was immune, but because our societies simply moved further along the same developmental curve that others are still on. Before we get too smug about Islamism, remember where Christian societies stood just fifty years ago. In 1975, half of Europe was under communist rule, Spain and Portugal were still dictatorships, Greece had only just escaped its junta, and most of Latin America was run by military regimes that wrapped their collectivism in Catholic rhetoric. The Western world wasn’t immune to political religion—it merely passed through that fever earlier. Islamism is not a unique defect of Islam; it’s the same collectivist impulse that once gripped Christendom. Even the West’s collectivisms once came dressed in Christian robes. Franco’s Spain called its dictatorship a crusade. Salazar’s Portugal ruled under the slogan “God, Fatherland, and Family.” Mussolini signed a pact with the Pope and sold fascism as the savior of Christian civilization. Hitler preached a “Positive Christianity” scrubbed of its Jewish roots. And across Latin America, juntas justified their brutality as moral renewal. Collectivism in the West didn’t arrive with red flags alone—it often carried a cross. The difference today isn’t moral superiority; it’s timing. The Christian world burned through its bout of political religion earlier. Muslim societies, and indeed much of the non-Western world, are still in the thick of it. The pattern is civilizational, not theological. Every society is vulnerable to the same gravitational pull toward unity, purity, and control. The moral isn’t that Islam is dangerous—it’s that collectivism is.

The Real War Isn’t Islam vs the West, but Islamism vs Everyone. Moment 547 https://youtube.com/shorts/zWknWr7bc4E?feature=share

Civil Savage A civil society depends not only on limits to government power, but on how citizens choose to wield their own freedoms. A people who use every inch of their liberty to cancel, boycott, dox, and mob their opponents do not create freedom—they create totalitarianism. This bottom-up coercion is the very essence of what makes societies unfree, though few seem to grasp it. Some arguments are stronger, more respectful, and more constructive than others. But even poor arguments, ad hominems, and ridicule are still arguments. The essential boundary is this: whatever form debate takes, it must remain in the public square—never spilling over into coercion, cancellation, or efforts to ruin lives outside it. But English gives us no good word for this virtue. “Tolerance” is too weak, too suggestive of being nice, too indulgent. It fails to capture that one can be combative, devastating, and even cruel in rhetoric, while still drawing a strict ethical line against coercion. There is no ready-made term that names this essential civic stance. It’s time we coin one: Civil Savage. The oxymoron says it all. “Civil” signals the respect for boundaries, for keeping the fight within discourse, for refusing mob coercion. “Savage” signals the freedom to attack, to ridicule, to devastate ideas in the public square. Together, the phrase perfectly captures the stance that societies must recover if they wish to remain free: a society of citizens willing to be savages in argument, but civil enough never to cancel, coerce, or destroy outside it.

How to rise to the defense of the censored, cancelled, or assassinated. Moment 525 https://youtube.com/shorts/tCEVydpXJE8?feature=share

Why we should humiliate, not cancel, those who publicly reveled in Charlie Kirk’s murder. Moment 525 https://youtube.com/shorts/D66Awe4Jadw?feature=share