From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   On Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:53:03 -0800, Dude  wrote:   
      
   >On 2/22/2026 7:46 PM, Noah Sombrero wrote:   
   >> 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.   
   >>   
   >Some people are highly susceptible to suggestion and are very prone to   
   >suggestibility. They sometimes believe things they read on social media.   
   >   
      
   But you and I know better than to do that, don't we?   
      
   >Your data is all over the internet. Good work!   
      
   > > >> 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   
      
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