From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   On Sun, 22 Feb 2026 18:25:37 -0800, Dude  wrote:   
      
   >On 2/21/2026 8:46 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:   
   >> On Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:22:54 +0000, Julian    
   >> wrote:   
   >>   
   >>> Earlier this month, an SOS dropped into my inbox. It came from a student   
   >>> at the University of Sussex. Lest her repressive professors punish her   
   >>> for what I am about to report, let’s call her ‘Emma’. ‘I am in a mild   
   >>> state of despair,’ she wrote.   
   >>   
   >> You must feel sorry for those poor conservatives, they feel despair.   
   >>   
   >Not sorry. There are only two biological genders: male or female.   
      
   I say that your and my beliefs in the matter do not influence what   
   other people believe.   
      
   >Kathleen Stock resigned from the University of Sussex in 2021 following   
   >intense backlash, protests, and accusations of transphobia regarding her   
   >published views on gender identity and biological sex.   
   >   
   >She argued that biological sex is immutable and not synonymous with   
   >gender identity, particularly in the contexts of law, policy, and   
   >women-only spaces.   
   > >   
   >>> "This week alone I have been told that the history of kinship theory has   
   >>> been, up until now, ‘Eurocentric and cisgendered’, and another   
   >>> anthropology module must be viewed through a ‘queer and trans lens’. The   
   >>> word ‘decolonisation’ comes up in almost every lecture. If university   
   >>> campuses represent a microcosm of the greater society, then I fear we   
   >>> are doomed."   
   >>>   
   >>> I’m not surprised. After all, Sussex was the university that so failed   
   >>> to protect the coolly reasonable, gender-critical philosopher Kathleen   
   >>> Stock from a sustained campaign of vilification by students, aided and   
   >>> abetted by some colleagues, that it destroyed her faith in academia and   
   >>> drove her to resign. While the university was fulsome in its posthumous   
   >>> regret at her leaving, it has yet to give any explanation – no matter,   
   >>> make a confession – of its own astonishing failure to defend her.   
   >>> Indeed, it’s currently litigating against a fine imposed by the Office   
   >>> for Students for failures to uphold free speech.   
   >>>   
   >>> Sussex had moved onto my radar before Emma’s email for two other   
   >>> reasons. One is Alan Lester, the professor of historical geography who   
   >>> has made it his mission in life to discredit me, lest anyone should be   
   >>> seduced by my utterly moderate views of Britain’s colonial record. He it   
   >>> was who wrote a 15,000-word takedown of my book, Colonialism: A Moral   
   >>> Reckoning, in which he could find nothing positive to say either about   
   >>> me or the British Empire. Zilch. Nada. He then organised the   
   >>> counter-publication of a collection of essays; every one of them   
   >>> targeted at me. Emma reports that, judging by the amount of classroom   
   >>> time he devotes to debunking me, I now live ‘rent-free in his head’.   
   >>>   
   >>> The other instance of Sussex I’d encountered is Gurminder Bhambra, a   
   >>> professor of social theory. Two weeks ago, she was on the other side of   
   >>> the table in a recorded discussion about empire staged by the Doha   
   >>> Debates in Qatar.   
   >>>   
   >>> Like Lester, Gurminder simply cannot credit the British Empire with any   
   >>> positive achievement. When the moderator put the topic of the Empire’s   
   >>> benefits on the table, she immediately issued the rhetorical challenge:   
   >>> ‘What benefits?’   
   >>>   
   >>> Flying in the face of obvious historical data, this is a main symptom of   
   >>> the ideological character of her view. Her thinking is determined by a   
   >>> theoretical axiom – that empire and colonial rule are totally unjust –   
   >>> that will not countenance any contrary evidence. Not the fact that the   
   >>> British Empire was among the first states in the world’s history to   
   >>> abolish slavery and then led the world in suppressing it from Brazil to   
   >>> New Zealand. Nor that it introduced liberal institutions of a free   
   >>> press, independent judiciary, and representative government to parts of   
   >>> the world that had never experienced them.   
   >>>   
   >>> Similarly, nor that it made India the largest producer of steel outside   
   >>> of North America, Europe, and Japan by 1935, and gave her 47,000 miles   
   >>> of railway against China’s 17,000 by 1947. Nor that, between May 1940   
   >>> and June 1941, it offered the massively murderous racist regime in Nazi   
   >>> Berlin the only military opposition – with the sole exception of Greece.   
   >>> In Gurminder’s eyes – implausibly – none of this counts for anything.   
   >>>   
   >>> Behind this stubborn defiance of historical fact lies a more basic   
   >>> axiom, namely, that colonialism was fundamentally about economic   
   >>> ‘extraction’. In support, Gurminder invoked the argument that, since   
   >>> India produced 25 per cent of world output in 1800 but only 2 to 4 per   
   >>> cent in 1900, it follows that the British had plundered the country. Not   
   >>> at all.   
   >>>   
   >>> It only shows that industrial productivity in the West increased four to   
   >>> six times during that period, reducing India’s share of global GDP. The   
   >>> same fate befell uncolonised China. The neo-Marxist view that   
   >>> colonialism was essentially about the predatory extraction of colonial   
   >>> surplus owes much more to dogma than empirical data.   
   >>>   
   >>> Over 25 years ago, the leading historian of imperial economics, David   
   >>> Fieldhouse, endorsed Rudolf von Albertini’s conclusion, based on an   
   >>> exhaustive examination of the literature on most parts of the colonial   
   >>> world to 1940, that colonial economics ‘cannot be understood through   
   >>> concepts such as plunder … and exploitation’. Recently, Tirthankar Roy,   
   >>> the Bengali-born professor of colonial economic history at the London   
   >>> School of Economics, has confirmed this, writing that ‘[t]he proposition   
   >>> that the Empire was at bottom a mechanism of surplus appropriation and   
   >>> transfer has not fared well in global history’.   
   >>>   
   >>> But that’s the proposition that Gurminder sticks to dogmatically, with   
   >>> the result not only that she denies the obvious – that the British   
   >>> Empire did some good – but also that she spins seriously misleading   
   >>> tales based on a highly partial selection of data. So, she characterises   
   >>> the Empire as consistently callous towards the Indian victims of famine,   
   >>> citing two facts. First, when famine hit Bengal in 1769-70, the East   
   >>> India Company (EIC) callously increased the tax burden on the starving.   
   >>> Second, when famine struck again toward the end of the 19th century, the   
   >>> relief fund mandated by the Famine Code of 1880 was found to have been   
   >>> spent on yet another Afghan war.   
   >>>   
   >>> What Gurminder fails to mention is that, in 1769-70, the EIC governor of   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)