[Mao] tampered around with agriculture too and came to the perfectly ignorant but quintessentially Marxist conclusion that household vermin are agents of capitalism. Yes, like capitalists, they exploit the labour of the proletariat and therefore must be totally eradicated. And by far the worst of all these bourgeoisie oppressors was, naturally, that most vile and heinous creature, the sparrow…

As part of the “Smash Sparrow Campaign,” children were enlisted to bang pots and pans around, chasing the sparrows out of their nests. Later, adults knocked the nests out of the trees and crushed the eggs underneath their sandals, until there were almost no sparrows left in all of China…

Within a year of the “Smash Sparrow Campaign,” itself part of the larger “Four Pests Campaign,” the locust population exploded and did what locusts do best. The Communists had played God and literally created a Biblical plague.

It seems we’ve gone from “The aboriginal population is primitive and unable to think rationally about things,” which is a sentiment to be denounced, especially in academia, and progressed to “We must treat the aboriginal population as if it were primitive and unable to think rationally about things.” Which, apparently, is something to be applauded. Especially in academia. 

Readers with a taste for “anti-hierarchical collective working” and “defeating uber-capitalism” may benefit from watching Vanessa Engle’s excellent documentary series Lefties, particularly the second episode, titled Angry Wimmin, which follows the adventures and frustrations of the ladies involved in such endeavours. And in which, incidentally, Ms Bindel can be seen insisting that heterosexual feminists are a contradiction in terms and that lesbianism is an ideological duty. You see, any woman can be a lesbian if she just tries hard enough and embraces the right kind of politics. Given her intense political commitment, one presumes that Ms Bindel would have selflessly facilitated any such transformation.

Ms Leung airs her distaste for “white men ideas” – as if they had been uniform across continents and throughout history – while reminiscing about attending a “white AF conference” two years earlier. I was unsure what the “AF” might refer to and searched for some literary or scholarly explanation. It then occurred to me that a “white AF conference” is, to borrow the woke vernacular, a white as fuck conference. Which is how not-at-all-racist academic librarians convey their thoughts, apparently. […]

Having dismissed as tiresome the entire breadth and history of “white men ideas” – from Ptolemy to Babbage, Tesla to Solzhenitsyn, Turing to Shakespeare – these “white dudes” and their “so-called ‘knowledge’” – Ms Leung then makes clear the kinds of feedback she is willing to entertain: “I still have some thinking to do around this topic, but curious to hear what others think. I’m less interested in hearing that you don’t buy it, so don’t bother with those types of comments.”