Victims and oppressors

Steven Pinker:

10/7 exposed the moral confusion—a charitable way of putting it—of the identitarian/critical-theory/social-justice/intersectional ideology which divides the world into victims and oppressors based on screwball notions of race, sex, and history. This provides the bizarre taxonomy in which Arabs are lumped with Sub-Saharan Africans and gay Westerners and Israelis with Victorian colonialists. If academia ran by the rules of logic, this would be a reductio ad absurdum. The absurd conclusion is that a movement of misogynistic, homophobic, totalitarian, theocratic, genocidal fanatics is a form of liberation and resistance to oppression. Something must be deeply defective in any set of assumptions that would lead to this wacko conclusion. “Queers for Palestine” should have been a bit of mordant black humor from the Onion or Titania McGrath, but it’s all too real.

Matt Johnson, "An interview with Steven Pinker," Quillette, December 1, 2023.