Some Links, 8/17/2025
Armin Rosen on Mamdani; Joseph Holmes on male competition; Andrey Mir on the media environment; David Enoch on liberalism and on Gaza
In New York City, nonprofits received $20 billion in public money in 2021. In 2019, Chhaya got $595,000 in government grants, accounting for one-third of the organization’s revenue. This public largesse didn’t mean Mamdani was drawing a large salary at taxpayers’ expense—though, as the son of a renowned historian and a globally famous director, he didn’t really need one. According to the group’s 990 form from 2019, Chayya split $729,000 in nonexecutive compensation between 27 employees.
…The city is home to more than 600,000 jobs in the nonprofit sector and a roughly equal number of jobs in government. Nonprofits now employ nearly 17 percent of the city’s total private-sector workforce, compared to 10 percent nationally. Wage growth in the nonprofit sector healthily outpaced the rest of the private sector statewide in New York between 2017 and 2022, 29.3 to 25.3 percent.
Working for a non-profit should not be a middle-class job. Old-fashioned charities that gave direct help to poor people were often staffed by volunteers or by employees earning very low wages. Today’s non-profits are funded by government and by the billionaires that Mamdani thinks should not exist.
Rosen writes,
The subsidized classes rose in power as the city’s productive industries faded. New York has gone from about 1 million manufacturing jobs in 1955 to fewer than 45,000 today, with construction and wholesale seeing a similar decline during the same period, from 750,000 to a shade under 500,000 jobs. The NYPD, a longtime source of lower-middle-class employment and social mobility, has gone from 40,000 active officers in 2000 to 34,000 today. The multigenerational working class—the remnant of the city’s mid-to-late-20th-century mix of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Irish, and Italians—has shrunk in relative size and power. New York’s Black population has contracted this century, from 1.9 million in 2000 to 1.7 million in 2020. Similarly, the city’s Puerto Rican population plunged from 715,000 to 574,000 between 2017 and 2022 alone.
Reviewing a new Brad Pitt movie, Joseph Holmes writes,
As Joyce Benenson, a lecturer of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, explains, “Females more than males engage in safe, subtle, and solitary forms of competition.” By contrast, “Males want it public, they want it conspicuous, and they want it very, very clear who’s the winner and who's the loser.”
…Benenson says of men, “What’s nice about the way they do it is, a lot of times everyone gets to be better at something. Everyone who is a member of the group.” Meanwhile, women get very upset if one of their female friends is better than them at anything, so women who are accomplished at something tend to minimize their accomplishments or attribute it to luck.
Holmes writes,
success for men in life revolves around building successful teams with other men in order to beat other teams.
Without this masculine trait, social units would never have scaled above small bands.
You know that I am a fan of Benenson’s work. It informs the chapter on evolutionary psychology in The Social Code.
As the media cater to audiences, people determine what’s significant in a given situation, and the subjective choices of many trump objective truth. Significance is subjectivity married to collectivity.
The phenomenon known as The Current Thing.
In catering to the human struggle for recognition, social media encourage users to sacrifice “objective” content for affirmation. The content of our exchange becomes just a medium for agonistic status contests—a carrier for seeking affirmation from others.
The chances of affirmation rise if we comply with the truths of others. Digital is purely social. Instead of relying on the laws of the physical Universe, one must now conform to the values of the social Multiverse—or the part of it a person wants or needs to belong to.
It may be true that a tree falls in a forest, but nobody hears it because their media feed has them listening to something else.
In a discussion with Yascha Mounk, David Enoch says,
The kind of liberalism that I have in mind is first and foremost about a commitment to some underlying values and principles. And those are not going to surprise you. There’s going to be something there about the significance of well-being. There’s going to be something there about equality, though of course different liberals may understand equality in somewhat different ways. There’s going to be something very central about liberty and indeed about the value of autonomy. …this is not yet anything about specific political arrangements or institutions. So it’s not even directly about free speech. It’s in no way directly about democracy.
I try to read Enoch in terms of the means-ends distinction. In those terms, he is saying that liberals should not try to sell themselves as ends-agnostic. He doesn’t use this example, but saying that you are against the drug war because the means of government coercion is wrong makes it sounds like you are agnostic about whether people ruin their lives taking drugs. It is probably better to adopt the end of reducing drug addiction and other harms, but question the ability of the drug war to achieve those ends.
If you’re going to be epistemically modest, you have to presuppose that there is an objective truth. That’s precisely why you have to be modest, because it’s not easy to actually find out what that objective truth is. You have to be instrumentally wise. Think about the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime. If somebody wanted to criticize that by talking about Saddam’s rights and privileges, then I have zero interest in having that conversation with them. But on the other hand, someone said, of course Saddam does not merit any kind of protection. But, have you given any thought to what things are going to be like once that regime is toppled? Have you worked sufficiently well on suitable, workable, feasible alternatives and so on? I don’t know how much lives have improved in Iraq. I’m assuming that some have and some have not.
Behind the paywall, there is an interesting discussion of Israel in Gaza. One thing Enoch says:
If the issue is the decency and consistency of several critics of Israel, then I’m very worried. If the issue is the lives of innocents in Gaza and whether they’ve been factored in the right kind of way to considerations of decision makers in Israel, then the mere fact that some of the people criticizing Israel have been less than fully decent, less than fully consistent and somewhat biased, it’s just neither here nor there. I hope you will forgive me if I am much more concerned about the latter than about the former.
Enoch takes the view that Israel has been too aggressive in Gaza. He wants to be able to articulate that view while separating himself from those who condemn Israel out of generic hatred for the country. But I hear him as ducking Mounk’s question, which was,
why is it that people feel terribly about the suffering of Muslims in Gaza or other parts of the region, but not at all in China or elsewhere? That’s a little bit strange. Why is it that people discover the supposed principle that there should be no ethno-state, but they have no apparent problem with the existence of Pakistan or lots of other places that are premised on an ethno-religious identity
But set aside argument by whataboutism. No one ever asks Israel’s critics my questions, which are
What is your preferred approach for Israel vis-a-vis Hamas, and how do you see that approach playing out?
How do you want to see Hamas behave, and what leverage can be applied for achieving that?
I’m tired of reading anti-Israel virtue signaling that never speaks to those questions.
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It's a continuation of the "I condemn, but ... " rhetorical fraud. The reverse form for this specific case is, "Israel is allowed to do what is necessary to protect itself, but ... " and then some example of strategically arranged human shields suffering collateral harms that were specifically intended by Hamas to be unavoidable consequences of the accomplishment of legitimate military operations. "I'm not saying Israel can't defend itself, but I am saying it shouldn't be allowed to do anything that produces these tragic impacts." But then when you give Hamas a pass for arranging for the tragic impacts instead of - get this - holding them responsible for it as the laws of armed conflict deem them to be, then you are in fact saying Israel is not allowed to defend itself, that is, you are just saying Hamas must be allowed to win despite their atrocities guaranteeing endless more atrocities and reactions to those atrocities with the predictable impacts falling on Gazans. That's why they never start with concrete action instead of empty "condemnation", for example, "Hamas, which started this war, must immediately release all hostages, lay down arms, give up power, and agree to unconditional surrender, and THEN Israel must stop all operations.)
Hamas takes some Israelis as involuntary hostages, and it also holds all Gazan noncombatants as less involuntary hostages. One doesn't have to be a world class game theoretician to model Hamas behavior if either the hostage or human shield strategies are effective in creating social acceptable excuses for them and consensus on condemning Israel and demanding they cease anti-hamas operations. Disappointingly, even Scott Alexander nods when it comes to this stuff. If awful stories that tug on your heartstrings is what it takes to make you cry for the end of a war before its just and conclusive termination, then you are guaranteeing that Hamas will make it so they can have as many innocent kids as possible carry backpacks full of their brother's limbs into hospitals in naive desperation, and they'll do it over and over and over again.
Not every phrase that contains a "what about X?" is evidence of a "whataboutism" fallacy. Whataboutism (itself a bit vague) is some combination of tu quoque, ad hominem, and red herring. E.g., "you are being a jerk would you please stop?" .. "what about that time you were a jerk once! How dare you be such a hypocrite!".
Instead, the quote above references people discovering a principle of alleviating the suffering of civilians in war-torn regions, and some stance against ethno-states. Enoch wonders, what about all the other (often much worse, at least numerically) war-torn regions? What about the bevy of ethnostates that are not Israel? This is not "whataboutism", despite asking "what about these other examples?" (at least in a charitable reading).
Instead, this is functioning as a sotto voce implication of two fallacies: bad faith (or "dialectical hypocricy" if you wanna sound schmancy) and/or special pleading. If you appeal to war casualties in Gaza but not Sudan, you're doing a "special pleading" where those rules particularly apply to your chosen hotspot but not others. And, moreover, if you're not showing similar concern for other places, not only is this implying your cynical use of specially-plead principles, but is evidence that you are dishonest. In a Western court of law, this would be something like impeachment/credibility/unreliability, and is well-established grounds to ignore you. If you're trying to convince me to join your position, but you prove yourself a cynical hypocrite, I can very well infer that your entire testimony is unreliable and save the time of parsing it further. As certain sages are fond of reiterating, we build knowledge by deciding who to trust. Show un-trustability, and your professions of knowledge will be treated accordingly.
I find the whole topic to be a canard. There used to be an ironclad rule, "we don't negotiate with terrorists". Though capable of being abused (of course), there was an important and fundamental game-theoretic morality to it. If anybody, ever, receives advantage in negotiations by murdering babies, or threatening to, then the advantage-ceder has participated in rewarding the murder of babies (or whatever other civilian harm you wish to substitute). As noted in this comments section, and in most any other plenary discussion of the situation, Hamas has used terror tactics of murder and hostage-taking on citizens of both sides. Any cromulent moral theory of war and terrorism would place the blame of Gazan suffering squarely on Hamas, because you never let those tactics work or else they'll be used again, more and more.