Speaking of the ACLU…

FACT CHECK: Supporting trans athletes hurts no one.https://t.co/zQ9peh1zwt

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

They say, captioning a photo of two boys who Identify As girls winning a race against girls.

Women and girls do not need protecting from the same people who are pushing abortion bans, removing Title IX protections for all girls, and rolling back the clock on gender justice.

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

Girls who are trans are girls. PERIOD.

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

No one is hurt when trans people live authentically.

Not in the restroom.

Not in the locker room.

Not on the court, field or track.

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

FACT CHECK: Many Olympians and other professional athletes support the inclusion of transgender and intersex people in sports.https://t.co/eVPJjrUffm

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

Women with high levels of testosterone are women.

Women who can't or don't want to get pregnant are women.

Women who are trans are women.

Stop policing women. https://t.co/bvPpNNxugB

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

I’m sensing a pattern.

Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.#EqualityAct

— Human Rights Campaign (@HRC) April 2, 2019

TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

Elie Mystal on what a rat bastard Neil Gorsuch is:

We live in a culture that fetishizes vengeance. Nobody is going to cry if Tony Stark blasts Thanos’s face off this summer. Nobody is going to care if Game of Thrones returns with a ritualistic burning of the Lannisters. Morally, our society is more at peace with the death penalty than it might seem.

Compared to moral philosophy, the law offers a much more compelling case against capital punishment. Some would argue that the first law is a law against capital punishment: thou shalt not kill. And if Charlton Heston is not your idea of a law-giver, political philosophers will tell you that the only reason we’re even in a “society” is because “law” was the only way to stop the endless cycle of revenge-killings that we would clearly engage in without it. The law has ever tried to mollify our thirst for vengeance.

…

This week, Gorsuch wrote a majority opinion that was both shockingly cruel and entirely consistent with arch-conservative thought. The case is called Bucklew v. Precythe. Russell Bucklew is a convicted murderer whose depraved crimes are not in dispute. He was sentenced to death in Missouri. Missouri is a lethal-injection state, but Bucklew has a rare medical condition that would cause him to be in extreme pain as the lethal drugs do their work. Bucklew appealed his sentence, arguing that the pain would be a violation of his Eighth Amendment protections, and asked for alternative methods of death that are not sanctioned under Missouri law.

Gorsuch, writing for a 5-4 majority, denied his appeal. Gorsuch wrote: “The Eighth Amendment forbids ‘cruel and unusual’ methods of capital punishment but does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death.” That’s about the most heartless-bastard thing I’ve read in a while, and I work on the Internet.

It does seem harsh.

The Eighth Amendment should not be caged and hobbled in accordance with the wishes of the simple and bigoted minds who wrote it. It’s not our fault that these hypocrites blurted out a principle that would honor human dignity more than they had the will to in their own time. Way back in 1958, the Supreme Court said that the Eighth Amendment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” The Eighth Amendment isn’t an artifact; it’s a challenge. It’s not something to hide behind; it’s something to live up to.

But Neil Gorsuch, and a legion of conservative legal “thinkers” like him, don’t want our society to mature and evolve. They want it to arrest and ossify. They don’t view the Constitution as a floor upon which we can build a better society;, they view it as [a] ceiling which we are doomed to forever struggle against.

People will suffer because of this opinion. More people will spend their last moments on this earth in agonizing pain, because of this decision. That primarily (though not exclusively) “bad” people will suffer is the only reason Gorsuch thinks he can get away with authorizing such suffering. (I’ll spare you Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion in this case, because it’s just a thoughtless contemplation of firing squads. He sounds like a child who’s just figured out he’s strong enough to pull the wings off a fly.)

This decision is immoral. It is painful. It is evil. You don’t even have to be morally against the death penalty to understand what has been done here. You just have to be more decent than Neil Gorsuch.

Do you ever feel as if we’re living in a nightmare?

It’s all so technical, and I don’t have a gender identity degree. It’s over my head I’m afraid.

even in that instance though they still wouldn’t be a trans woman if they were afab, similar to how I am both trans and a lesbian but I am not a trans lesbian bc that’s appropriative of the identities of transfemme ppl.

— fagdyke friday (@bigdoggenergy) April 5, 2019

Damn I’m lost already. People are allowed to be agender/genderless and still call themselves women because they see it as a sociopolitical label…so…does it matter what kind of body they have?

Oh maybe it does, because they’re not allowed to be trans women if they are women with women-type bodies, because that’s…appropriative of the identities of transfemme people? But it’s not appropriative of the identities of women for men to be trans women. Why? Why is it ok for trans people to appropriate the identities of everyone but not ok for people in general? What rule is that?

Also, what are “transfemme people”? What does that mean? “Femme” used to describe lesbians and gay men who played the girly role, but what is “transfemme”? It can’t be the same as trans woman because that means trans woman, so…what, it means a straight person of either sex who…no, I can’t figure it out. It can’t be “puts on a skirt” or similar because that would just be “femme.” And why is “lesbian dad” both trans and lesbian but not a trans lesbian?

You see what I mean; the technicality is mind-boggling.

if they legit see themselves as both agender and a woman though a way to express that without appropriating trans women’s identities would be nonbinary woman.

— fagdyke friday (@bigdoggenergy) April 5, 2019

If they legit see themselves as both agender and a woman? Legit???? Isn’t that the worst crime of all, doubting the legit of somebody’s stated identity? How dare lesbian dad qualify people who see themselves as a logical contradiction, both agender and a woman? How can lesbian dad question their lived experience that way? Is it because lesbian dad has all the technical knowledge at herhisherhisherhis fingertips?

People are allowed to self define but your self definition can impact others and so should be done with care not to harm marginalized groups. At this point I’m decently sure you’re just trolling, because saying you’re a woman because you’re female fits much more as a terf talking

— fagdyke friday (@bigdoggenergy) April 5, 2019

Aw, was that really a pesky woman trolling lesbian dad with all his technical knowledge? Just sad.

Huh. Really?

Admin official slams House Dem demands for Trump's tax returns: "This is a hill and people would be willing to die on it… we will see you in court."

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) April 5, 2019

People would be willing to die on the hill of Trump’s ability to keep his tax returns secret? Really? That’s their noble cause?

Maybe it’s just the one spokes. Maybe everybody else in there is saying “Nope, nope, not me, get yourselves some other fool to die on that hill, I’m not interested.”

President Donald Trump continues to hold his ground against Democratic efforts to obtain his tax returns, with one administration official telling CNN that the President and his team are willing to fight the House Democratic request all the way to the Supreme Court.

“This is a hill and people would be willing to die on it,” the official said.

Of course, there aren’t actually militias outside the Supreme Court ready to shoot down any administration officials who approach.

Marathons threw women overboard a year ago:

The San Francisco Marathon confirmed it will allow trans athletes to compete in accordance with their gender identity.

Which is to say, the San Francisco Marathon confirmed it will make it impossible for a woman to win its marathon ever again.

After the Boston Marathon announced on Monday that transgender runners will be allowed to register in the gender category which most closely corresponds with their identity, a Care2 petition urged San Francisco to clarify its policies. It notes that the Bay Area race “requires people signing up for the S.F. Marathon to select a gender, male or female” on its website.

“We would love to see San Francisco Marathon clarify whether or not it honors gender identity for transgender and genderqueer individuals,” reads the petition, which has been signed by over 8,000 people to date.

Note that “honoring” “gender identity” is far more important than women’s right to compete against women.

In a series of emails to INTO, officials said the race would affirm trans identities.

“The San Francisco Marathon is a gender-inclusive race,” a spokesperson for the San Francisco Marathon said in a brief statement. “We encourage runners to register as the gender with which they identify.”

So women will have to compete against male bodies, which means they won’t have a real prospect of winning.

“We take people at their word,” Boston Athletic Association (BAA) Chief Tom Grilk told National Public Radio. “We register people as they specify themselves to be. Members of the LGBTQ community have had a lot to deal with over the years, and we’d rather not add to that burden.”

We’d much rather dump it on women, because hey, women, who cares.

Chicago and New York also confirmed they would allow trans people to self-identify their gender.

Suck it, wims.

Although critics of trans inclusion have warned allowing transgender women to register as women would give them a competitive advantage in marathons, experts in LGBTQ health argued those concerns are based on debunked myths. Taking estrogen to reduce levels of testosterone, for instance, may lead to dehydration and fatigue – a major obstacle in a 26.2-mile race.

“There’s no physiologic advantage to being assigned male at birth,” Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, who serves as director of education and training programs at the Fenway Institute, told the Associated Press.

Oh. Ok then.

When I was a kid my brother and I liked to entertain the adults after a large meal with suggestions of gross-out combinations to make them squeal in disgust. Anchovies in chocolate sauce, cherry pie with a scoop of chopped herring; that sort of thing. Here’s another one:

If you want tickets for the forthcoming showdown between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek, which will be held later this month in Toronto, better act fast: There are two left — as of this writing, anyway — and they’re $1,500 apiece. The unlikely and unshaven pair will square off at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, which seats about 3,000, where they will debate whether capitalism or Marxism leads to happiness.

Ooooooh no I really don’t. I don’t want tickets, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to see. I’d rather eat anchovies in chocolate sauce.

[I]t’s hard to deny the rubbernecking appeal of the spectacle. How often do two garrulous, ill-tempered, theory-spouting academics fill a venue usually reserved for musicians and comedians?

It’s not hard for me to deny that. I’ve been to enough conferences that included a garrulous, ill-tempered, condescending, smug male academic or two, so I feel zero need to go anywhere to see more of that. Showstopper: two guys peacocking. Nah, thanks, I’m good.

The debate came about after Zizek criticized Peterson in a column for The Independent, poking at “the paranoiac construct which he uses to interpret what he sees as facts” and his “crazy conspiracy theory” that sinister Marxist forces lurk behind progressive social movements. The essay, though, was largely focused on what Zizek views as the failures on the left that help bolster Peterson’s popularity. When it comes to postmodernism, Zizek and Peterson are often singing from the same hymnal.

But prickly narcissistic Peterson was ruffled anyway so he challenged Zizek to a debate. Game on!

While their meeting is more UFC fight night than plenary panel, Zizek and Peterson remain very much creatures of the university. Despite the best attempts of his harshest detractors, Peterson continues to be a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Zizek holds a bunch of academic appointments, including professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London.

Despite all that respectability though, they both love to brawl.

Then again, it’s a mistake to read any of Zizek’s proclamations as necessarily earnest. His rhetorical style is ironic rapid-fire adamance — he speaks as if he’s trying to squeeze in one last insight before a buzzer sounds — and he obviously loves to provoke.

So does Peterson. He revels in sharp back-and-forth and appears to thrive on eviscerating would-be-challengers. Search YouTube and you’ll find that Peterson has “destroyed” or “obliterated” the following opponents: Overconfident Leftist Interviewer, British Feminist, and Entire Panel on Transgender Pronouns.

Laugh if you want to, but this stuff pays.

Such performances have helped garner a sizable, cult-adjacent following for Peterson. He has not been shy about monetizing that appreciation, recently debuting his own line of merchandise, which includes lobster-themed leggings, socks, and pillows (Peterson used lobsters once in an analogy to explain social hierarchies).  For $44.99, you can order a hoodie emblazoned with his much-repeated injunction to “STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK.”

Lobster-themed leggings!

collapses in helpless laughter

I’m still chewing on Kevin’s formulation.

Meanwhile, in reality, transgender kids are bullied for being trans; the principle effect of that bullying is psychological harm; the principle means of that bullying is misgendering; and the principle justification for that misgendering is trustworthy adults in those kids’ lives who argue in support of misgendering transgender people.

The transgender kids who are bullied for being trans…would they be bullied any less or more if they were not trans but nonconforming? Does Kevin know? Does anyone?

As many people have pointed out, kids are bullied for a slew of reasons, because kids seem to have a deep need to police other kids and/or take out their aggressions on them.

How does Kevin or anyone know that “the principle means of that bullying is misgendering”? Nothing about clothes, toilets, voices, preferences, names, haircuts, habits, manners?

And the bit about “the principle justification for that misgendering is trustworthy adults in those kids’ lives who argue in support of misgendering transgender people” really doesn’t ring true at all, unless we’re talking about teenagers (or not even then, really). These kids are explaining “I get to call you the wrong pronoun because these adults I know and trust argue in support of doing just that”? Of course not, but then how does Kevin know that’s the chain of causation?

Anyway…what’s the overarching principle? What if a kid insists she’s a tiger, and gets distraught if anyone disputes her claim? Should teachers and schools tell all the other students to talk to her as if she were a tiger, and call her by tiger-appropriate names, and so on? Which fantasies or counter-factual beliefs about the self are we required to agree with and which can we decline to believe? What principle is there that distinguishes among them?

Adults do play along with children’s pretending, but that’s a different thing. The youngest children may believe or half-believe the parents mean it, but mostly the children know everyone is pretending. Is it really an excellent plan for schools in general to mandate pretending about which sex children are on the say-so of the children themselves?

I’m not convinced it is, myself.

Mueller’s team is not happy with what Barr is doing with the report.

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

In other words, Barr is doing exactly what everyone expected him to do: he’s following up that unsolicited memo to the White House by withholding the report and misrepresenting what it says. He’s running interference for Trump and sabotaging the efforts of law enforcement to hold Trump to account.

At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.

Barr is the wrong person to be shaping the public’s understanding, because he has a clear bias in favor of The Executive Branch. (In his case it’s not obvious to me that the bias is in favor of Trump as opposed to the office he holds.)

Mr. Barr was also wary of departing from Justice Department practice not to disclose derogatory details in closing an investigation, according to two government officials familiar with Mr. Barr’s thinking. They pointed to the decision by James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, to harshly criticize Hillary Clinton in 2016 while announcing that he was recommending no charges in the inquiry into her email practices.

This again, ffs. First they get Trump elected by doing that to Clinton, then they keep Trump in office in defiance of his flagrant criminality by saying oh noes we mustn’t do to him what we did to Clinton. I get that it may genuinely be a matter of “we can’t make that mistake again” but it’s still pretty exasperating to see them offer it as justification. Especially when “they”=Barr.

At the same time, Mr. Barr and his advisers have expressed their own frustrations about Mr. Mueller and his team. Mr. Barr and other Justice Department officials believe the special counsel’s investigators fell short of their task by declining to decide whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed the inquiry, according to the two government officials. After Mr. Mueller made no judgment on the obstruction matter, Mr. Barr stepped in to declare that he himself had cleared Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.

Oh come on, guys. Can you not get it together? This shit is serious.

Mr. Barr has come under criticism for sharing so little. But according to officials familiar with the attorney general’s thinking, he and his aides limited the details they revealed because they were worried about wading into political territory. Mr. Barr and his advisers expressed concern that if they included derogatory information about Mr. Trump while clearing him, they would face a storm of criticism like what Mr. Comey endured in the Clinton investigation.

And that would never do. We mustn’t make Barr uncomfortable. The importance of dealing with the reckless criminal in the White House is trivial in comparison.

Nice snap.

The Planet Today

About Brunei…

A harsh new criminal law in Brunei — which includes death by stoning for sex between men or for adultery, and amputation of limbs for theft — went into effect on Wednesday, despite an international outcry from other countries, rights groups, celebrities and students.

In other words, Shariah, of the most inflexible kind.

The sultan, 72, is also the prime minister and holds several other titles. He first introduced the draconian version of Shariah in 2013, as part of a long-term project to impose a restrictive form of Islam on his country, which is majority Muslim.

It’s nice to have projects, but that’s not a good one.

International protest delayed its implementation at the time, but in deciding recently to put the law into effect, with some revisions, Brunei has stood defiant.

Brunei “is a sovereign Islamic and fully independent country and, like all other independent countries, enforces its own rule of laws,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement on Saturday.

Meh. Sovereign and independent aren’t the issue. The US is sovereign and independent too, but we put way too many people in prison, for way too long, for way too little reason. Oh, also, a very disproportionate number of them are descendants of slaves, another little blot on our sovereign and independent record.

Beginning on Wednesday, extramarital sex, anal sex, and abortion are to be punished by death by stoning. The death penalty will also be required for some other offenses, including rape and some forms of blasphemy or heresy, like ridiculing the Quran or insulting the Prophet Muhammad.

The law requires amputation of a hand or foot for some crimes, and whipping for others. The punishment for lesbian sex, previously imprisonment and a fine, is now to be 40 lashes.

Nasty god they bow to.

Never mind sexual violence, poverty, racism, corruption, Brexit, rising sea levels, disappearing coral reefs – let’s focus on PRONOUNS.

Schools in Brighton are to give out pronoun stickers to pupils in a bid to support transgender children.

The stickers, which are being handed out to pupils in secondary schools and colleges, are part of Brighton and Hove City Council’s pronoun badges campaign which aims to prevent “misgendering”.

The council’s badges indicate whether people would like to be addressed as “he”, “she” or “they” – and some are left blank to allow people to fill in their own pronouns.

Even if I thought people had a right to order the entire world to address them by a Special set of pronouns that don’t match the boring facts, I would still think this was idiotic. Even if I thought people had such a right, I would still think it was one of the most minor rights anyone could possibly come up with. Even if I thought the whole idea made sense, I would still think councils and schools and hospitals should not be wasting one second of their time on it. As it is, I think these people have traded in their brains in exchange for a vat of warm custard.

Trans rights campaigner Sophie Cook said misgendering, the act of addressing an individual by the wrong pronoun, can be particularly harmful to transgender school pupils.

But, for the bazillionth time, you don’t address people by their pronouns; “you” is not gendered. You only talk about people by their pronouns, and no I don’t believe it’s “harmful” to anyone to hear a “he” when xir wants a “she.” Not everything we don’t like is harmful; I get that they don’t like it but I don’t believe it’s harmful. I think that’s just part of the tedious melodrama that keeps getting ratcheted up into more and more lurid eMotional hisTrionics.

She told The Argus: “In these situations, you will have people up in arms. But quite frankly, what difference does it make to those people?

“It’s a great way of making people think about identities of the people they’re talking to.”

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh but what if we don’t want to be made to think about the identities of the people we’re talking to? What then, eh?

I know I certainly don’t want to be made to do any such thing. I’ll decide what to think about when I talk to people, thank you.

A city council spokesperson said: “The badges and stickers help raise awareness that you can’t assume someone’s gender identity and the pronouns they use. We know from a range of evidence that gender is more complicated than is traditionally recognised.”

Blah blah blah. “Gender identity” is hokum. You can “assume” someone’s sex, and sometimes you have to for safety reasons. “Gender identity” is a hobby and not something any other party has to pay attention to. You can assume what pronouns people “use” if you’re going to have a rational conversation in mutually-comprehensible language. The spokes means sex, not gender, and we haven’t suddenly learned that it’s More Complicated; that’s just jargon.

“We all define our own gender and we should respect other people’s identities and rights.”

We don’t all define our own sex, and there is no moral imperative to “respect other people’s identities” – that’s meaningless wokespeak, and it’s worthless.

They added: “We’re proud of being a diverse city, and the council is committed to equality and inclusion for all people, including our trans and non-binary residents. Our equality and inclusion strategy rightly supports those who are experiencing greatest disadvantage.”

There it is again! “Those who are experiencing greatest disadvantage” – who says that’s trans people? Who measured and issued a ruling, and where can we learn more about it?

Brighton and Hove Council has an illustration.

“My pronouns matter” – no, actually, they don’t. They really don’t.

You can’t ruin it if it doesn’t exist.

Republican Sen. Rick of Scott, one of the Republican senators President Trump has tasked with devising a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, denounced the “Medicare for all” proposal, warning that the progressive plan endorsed by several 2020 Democratic White House hopefuls would “ruin” the health care system in the U.S.

The what? We don’t have a system. We have a random chaos in which people who have enough money and/or jobs so exceptionally good that they include health insurance are ok, and everybody else is in deep shit. That’s not a system. A system would make sure everyone was covered, and we don’t have that.

The Florida Republican, a freshman senator who once led one of the largest for-profit private health care companies in the U.S., said the cost of health care and prescription drugs is too high.

Duh. That’s why we need an actual system in which cost is pegged to ability to pay as opposed to what providers feel like charging.

Oh is that what we’re calling it.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. came up in politics as an old-school backslapper whose greatest strength was his ability to connect. He doled out handshakes and hugs to friends and strangers alike, and his tendency to lavish his affections on women and girls was so central to his persona that it became fodder for late-night television jokes.

But the political ground has shifted under Mr. Biden, and his tactile style of retail politicking is no longer a laughing matter in the era of #MeToo.

His “tactile style” is it. I’ve heard that before – creepy guys explaining their creepy guy ways with “I’m a tactile person.” Uh huh, a tactile person with an oddly specific preference for tactiling laydeez.

For Mr. Biden, 76, the risks are obvious: the accusations feed into a narrative that he is a relic of the past, unsuited to represent his party in the modern era, against an incumbent president whose treatment of women should be a central line of attack. Mr. Biden has denied acting inappropriately but has said he will “listen respectfully.”

…

With a vibrant, youthful and multicultural field of candidates on the Democratic stage — and after a midterm election that swept dozens of women into Congress — Mr. Biden is already facing questions about whether this is the time for an older white man to carry his party’s banner into 2020. His handling of the 1991 confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas, who was accused of sexual harassment by the law professor Anita Hill, has also been the subject of scrutiny.

As it should be.

I think Biden is basically a mensch, but I don’t think we need him to run for president.

Another horror from the recent past:

Belgium’s prime minister, Charles Michel, is to apologise on behalf of the state for the kidnapping of mixed-race children, who were torn from their Congolese mothers at the end of the colonial period.

The “métis” children, the product of relationships between settlers and local women, were forcibly taken to Belgium and fostered by Catholic orders, among other institutions, between 1959 and 1962.

The children, born in the 1940s and 50s, did not automatically receive Belgian nationality and often remained stateless. A majority of the fathers refused to acknowledge paternity of their children.

What? What on earth even for? If most of the fathers pretended they weren’t the fathers, why steal them from their mothers? Talk about crimes against humanity…That’s a hideous crime against the mothers and another hideous crime against the children. (The fathers were apparently unscathed.)

It’s very like the system behind the Irish industrial “schools,” as a matter of fact. Steal the children of poor / sexually disobedient mothers and hand them over to the Catholic church to torment and punish.

Two years ago, the Catholic church apologised for its role in the scandal, which affected about 20,000 children in the Belgian Congo, along with Burundi and Rwanda, which were governed by Belgium under a mandate from the League of Nations and the UN.

20,000 children and their mothers.

Belgium’s particularly bloody colonial rule in the Congo continues to be a subject of debate in the country. The Congo Free State was run by King Leopold II as his private domain from 1885 to 1908, looting the country of its rich resources until he bequeathed it to the Belgian state under pressure from the international community. Estimates of deaths in that period range from 10 million to 15 million Africans.

Looting the country of its rich resources via horrific torture of the population, such as cutting their hands off if they didn’t produce enough rubber. The Heart of Darkness was not a fantasy.