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[M]en who share household and child-rearing responsibilities with women are mistaken if they think that this act of choice, often buttressed by the gratitude and admiration of others, is anything like the woman’s experience of being forcibly socialized into these tasks and of having others perceive this as her natural function in the scheme of things.

The means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive—but real—allies of the Haves. They are the ones Jacques Maritain referred to in his statement, “The fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue.” These non-doers were the ones who chose not to fight the Nazis in the only way they could have been fought; they were the ones who drew their window blinds to shut out the shameful spectacle of Jews and political prisoners being dragged through the streets; they were the ones who privately deplored the horror of it all—and did nothing. This is the nadir of immorality. The most unethical of all means is the nonuse of any means. It is this species of man who so vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences between defensive and offensive weapons. Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced from the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not to men. The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.

As thousands blockade airports and fill up city streets, a new generation of amateur Kremlinologists is coming forward with its hastily assembled theories, assembled from bureaucratic signifiers, to say that by trying to stop the harm he’s actually doing, all we’ve done is play into his tiny, tiny hands. […] What looks like the beginnings of a breakdown in effective government, or an opportunity, is nothing of the sort. They planned everything, and everything fell into place. The left is no stranger to this kind of defeatism, and it’s not hard to see why. Capitalism is omnivorous and polymorphously perverse; today’s revolutionary slogans are found on tomorrow’s Coke cans. […] If you look backward from the state of the world today at all the heroic resistance movements that have failed throughout history, it’s easy to think that this was all part of the plan. Much of this is true, but its effects can be paralyzing. We’ve fucked up so much that it’s made us afraid of victory; faced with an enormous and implacable enemy, there are people who are now convinced that its power is infinite. Whenever it looks like the reactionaries have massively over-reached themselves it’s just part of a larger plan, one that we can’t see. If Steve Bannon’s pants fell down tomorrow and he tottered crying into a muddy pond, there would be someone ready to announce that actually, this made him even more omnipotent than he was before. […] It’s almost comforting, in a way, to imagine yourself as a pawn. There’s no moral duty involved: The evil plan is grand and inscrutable; it gives a sense of order in what looks like disintegration, and tells you what your place is in it. But there is a moral duty, and we need to face up to it. And maybe, just maybe, sometimes the people in charge are just as blinkered as we are.

“any time you tell somebody exactly what they have to do to prove to you that they are oppressed, you’re basically proving that they’re oppressed”

It’s also a textbook white supremacist argument, that when white people claim they’re oppressed, questioning that is proof they’re oppressed. Like, it’s one of the arguing points that white supremacists hand out for other white supremacists who are playing the Reasonable White part.

Why do you hate the idea of "internalized anything? "

When my son turned 10 he started talking about wanting to learn to code