Why do people believe crazy stuff? It's because they fall for “fallacies”, we're told. Memorize the classics (ad hominem, post hoc, straw man) and you’ll be inoculated against error. It's a neat little story, and I used to believe it too. But I've become a fallacy apostate. 🧵/1

Zelensky and the Ukrainian army don‘t hide behind civilans, it is as simple as that. The Ukrainian civilian victims are 100% avoidable and deliberate. Civilian casualties in Gaza are only avoidable if you refrain from fighting Hamas. But you know that very well, don‘t you Ewald?

Voici les images de l’agression subie par le Professeur @DamienERNST1, en plein cours, à l’@UniversiteLiege. Cette attaque contre la liberté académique est revendiquée par la même mouvance #antifa liégeoise qui s’en était déjà pris à @GLBouchez l’année passée. La gauche a le monopole de la violence politique.

Eredoctor Albanese legt nu uit dat zelfs de concentratiekampen, de holocaust, en antisemitisme niet tegen de Joden gericht was. Maar ook tegen moslims. Tegen wie niet wit was. Tegen alles wat niet Europees is en Christelijk was. Zonder begrip dat ‘Muselmann’ meestal… Joden waren (de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muselm…) Mocht iemand me even terug op mijn stoel komen zetten. En mocht naast dit moreel failliet een jurist even de negationismewetgeving kunnen toetsen. (Op de link eronder loopt het fragment langer door)

Race Realist Rattles Rector Confessions of a Disillusioned Academic (Part II) "The moment I heard that 'race realist' Nathan Cofnas had been hired by Ghent University, I knew shit was about to hit the fan." "My academic colleagues claim that discredited 'pseudosciences' like race realism have no place at a university. If only." "This reasoning has a whiff of the 1987 classic The Untouchables, in which the mobster boss Al Capone is ultimately taken down not for the murders, bootlegging, or racketeering the police are trying to pin on him, but for simple tax evasion."

It seems like it’s the United States that’s more in a doom spiral among Western nations. I think there’s a really good reason the developing world is more excited about AI. As an example — in healthcare where I work, I’m almost certain that the first fully autonomous AI doctor will emerge from an underserved region of the world where the choice isn’t between AI doctor vs. human doctor, but AI doctor vs. NO doctor. The debate about “whether” AI might (or should) replace human doctors, lawyers, or teachers (all of whom it already outperforms) is an argument of privilege. In parts of the world where you have just one doctor per 20K people, the choice between patient welfare and professional preservation is a no-brainer. If the data continues to show (as it’s beginning to now) that AI-alone systems lead to better outcomes than even AI-human hybrid systems, it would be unethical not to do everything we can to replace human doctors. People in many parts of Asia and Africa see AI as the thing that will democratize healthcare in an age of cognitive hyperabundance, where a rural farmer in Botswana can have access to the same word-class medical expertise as a successful entrepreneur in Cambridge for the price of an electric bill (or less). When you’re going from zero to “something, finally!” — and particularly when that something is as good as what everyone else in the privileged world is getting, you’re going to be pretty excited about it.

This is exactly one of the reasons why I left academia (for the time being). It goes without saying that I absolutely condemn this cowardly attack on @DamienERNST1, give him my full support, and have signed the petition. But I’m not the one who should say this, becuase it's obvious coming from me. But how about left-wing academics, especially those who have been critical of Damien Ernst in the past—and above all those who keep pretending there is no problem of left-wing capture in academia, often because they are themselves part of the problem? In Ghent, @NathanCofnas was also assaulted after a lecture by students. Nobody seemed to care, no disciplinary sanctions were taken, and as far as I know, not a single of his critics at the faculty publicly denounced it. Cofnas, of course, is even more controversial than Ernst. But that is precisely the point: academic freedom is for people you fiercely disagree with. 21news.be/agression-de-damie…

Jesus Christ, look at those numbers. The West (minus Israel) has been swept up in a doom spiral about AI, while the rest of the world—especially Asia—is all fired up about it. Is it a coincidence that Israel is the Western exception? They're also the only Western country still making babies, which is probably the ultimate expression of belief in the future.

Elke vorm van intimidatie of agressie - verbaal, fysiek of anderszins - tav lesgevers, onderzoekers, medewerkers of studenten is volstrekt inacceptabel. Laat deze barbarij ophouden. Aan prof. @DamienERNST1: alle steun - u verdient die zeer. 21news.be/agression-de-damie…

I was very disappointed when @Ayaan converted to Christianity, but she's still a force of nature. This is a very forceful statement of the respective dangers of the Far Right and Islamism in the West: "There is one final asymmetry, the one that ought to settle the matter once and for all. There is no flight from Europe by anyone—no community, no religious minority, no ethnic group, no political tendency—as a consequence of European far-right violence. No Muslims, no Jews, no atheists, no ex-Muslims, no gay men and women are packing suitcases in Frankfurt or Manchester or Marseille and applying for asylum in Cairo or Islamabad or Algiers because European far-right militants have made their lives untenable at home. The traffic runs, on a massive scale, in the opposite direction, and it has run in the opposite direction for two generations. Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, Baha’is, Ahmadiyyas, ex-Muslims, secularists, feminists, gay men and women, and religious minorities of every description are leaving the Muslim-majority world in millions, and they are coming to Europe and the rest of the West. They come because Europe, whatever else it is, is not governed by the doctrinal architecture they are fleeing. The presence of a European far right that occasionally shouts at them, or, at the violent extreme, produces a Breivik or a Tarrant, has not slowed the movement at all." thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-ali-…

Waarom AI-proza parasiteert op de welwillendheid van de lezer. maartenboudry.be/2026/09/waa…

Take note: Francesca Albanese in this interview is not explaining antisemitism; she is completely rewriting its meaning, and in the process distorting the history of the Holocaust. Her remarks reveal astonishing ignorance, and malice. First, Antisemitism was not coined to describe hatred of “Semitic peoples,” or of Middle Easterners whom Europeans regarded as foreign. When Wilhelm Marr introduced the term in 1879, he meant hostility to Jews, expressed it in the racial language of his time. “Semitic” denotes a family of languages. It does not make antisemitism a general category of prejudice that can be reassigned to other peoples. Second, the Nazis likewise targeted Jews as Jews. They did not begin, as Albanese suggests, with a broad campaign against “the non-white, the impure, the non-Christian” that later happened to “crystallize” into hatred of Jews. Her account takes a campaign of extermination directed at Jews and makes its victims sound interchangeable. Third, Albanese's claim about Jews being called “Muslims” as they were taken to the gas chambers is especially grotesque. Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, explained that Muselmann was camp slang for “the irreversibly exhausted, worn-out prisoner, close to death.” It described a prisoner’s condition. It did not mean the Nazis regarded Jews as Muslims, or sent them to the gas chambers under that identity. Indeed, Albanese’s theory cannot explain why Hitler welcomed and collaborated with Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. The two met in Berlin in 1941, and the Nazi regime financed the Mufti’s antisemitic broadcasts to Muslim audiences. The SS enlisted the Mufti to help recruit Bosnian Muslims into its Handschar division. Addressing the division’s imams, he called Nazi Germany their ally and identified “World Jewry” as a common enemy. That is the historical record Albanese’s theory cannot accommodate: Nazi leaders recruited Muslims to their cause while pursuing the extermination of Jews. Criticism of Israeli policy requires none of these falsehoods. Albanese first stretches antisemitism until it ceases to identify hatred of Jews, then claims that invoking it is a device to “silence debate.” Her argument depends on stripping the word of its meaning before dismissing those who use it. This is the same Francesca Albanese who wrote in an open letter to her family priest that America was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” Only when later confronted, she called her words “infelicitous, analytically inaccurate and unintendedly offensive.” Yet now she offers a definition under which antisemitism is no longer specifically hatred of Jews. How convenient. These remarks distorting the Holocaust and the meaning of Jew hatred are appalling from anyone. From a United Nations human rights mandate holder, they demand a public answer. We are calling on all UN member states to denounce Albanese’s distortion of antisemitism and the Holocaust. In particular, we are calling on the member nations of the Human Rights Council, including France, the Netherlands, Italy, Czechia, Estonia, Switzerland, Spain and the United Kingdom. The Council must not allow someone speaking under its authority to erase the identity of the Jews murdered by the Nazis.

Anti-Zionism is really melting people's brains. Apparently nobody pauses to reflect on the obvious contradiction here: if Israel intends to indiscriminately kill every single Gazan (which is what "genocide" means), why on earth would it pour resources into sophisticated AI algorithms to calculate the expected civilian casualties of every single strike? What perpetrator of a "genocide" would ever bother doing that? It's like a librarian meticulously cataloguing every book by genre and quality, only to shovel them all into the same bonfire. Or a doctor carefully identifying which cells are cancerous, then administering the same lethal dose to every cell in your body. Are these people just plain stupid? Of course, the Israeli army is not beyond reproach, and there have very likely been war crimes in the current war. But can the critics at least get clear about what exactly they're accusing Israel of? commentary.org/seth-mandel/n…

So you have to read 4,000 words into OpenAI’s post-mortem of the Hugging Face incident to find this rather crucial admission: Oh, by the way, did we tell you all the safeguards were switched off during this test? In their words: “Aside from misalignment, another factor for this incident was that we did not extend the powerful safeguards that we deploy for our externally deployed models to all internal evaluations. There are numerous mechanisms that reduce misalignment in production settings for our customers, including system prompts, harnesses, and control mechanisms such as our auto-review models and safety classifiers. These protections were not applied in the evaluation environment running during the incident. We found the propensity to compromise infrastructure can drop over 100x when using the production ChatGPT harness and system prompt. We also ran our auto-review system on a set of rollouts involved in the Hugging Face incident, finding that it would have flagged a multitude of the models’ dangerous actions.” Of course it makes sense to run internal evaluation without your usual safeguards, to find out what happens. But this kind of belated, tucked-away admission, which was predictably glossed over in all the breathless media coverage, is exactly what makes me suspicious that OpenAI is deliberately stoking fears about AI misalignment to hype its own product. As @RichardHanania puts it in this eminently reasonable piece: “Imagine that when we tested cars for safety, we got rid of the seatbelts, airbags, sensors, automatic braking, and stability control. We then find that cars kill a lot of crash test dummies under these scenarios, and the lesson that people take away from this is that cars are inherently unsafe products.” richardhanania.com/p/what-if…

Holocaust Distortion from U.N. “Expert”: Francesca Albanese claims Jews in Nazi death camps “were called Muslims.” Antisemitism targets “Semitic peoples” and “not just discrimination against Jews.” Even in Nazi death camps: She cannot name Jew-hatred without replacing the Jews.

For nearly three years, CPJ helped push the incendiary narrative that Israel was systematically slaughtering journalists. Now CPJ just announced that it has removed another 22 people from its database. Twenty were removed after new research established “engagement in combat," meaning terrorism. That’s on top of 8 it had already removed after determining they were Hamas or PIJ combatants. So CPJ has now removed 28 supposed journalists for literal participation in hostilities. And understand how absurdly narrow CPJ’s standard is. Affiliation with Hamas or PIJ doesn’t disqualify you. Even membership in an armed group doesn’t automatically disqualify you. CPJ only draws the line at actual engagement in combat. Yet even by that ridiculous standard, 28 names failed their test. The review began after Hamas and PIJ themselves published obituaries identifying supposed “journalists” as combatants. And those obituaries keep coming. CPJ’s credibility should be in tatters — for good.