I’m basically with Tim on this one, that the order of mangitude, or even one order lower, reflect very badly on what the Bush administration is trying to do in Iraq. Whether the right figure is 300,000 or 600,000 does not change that reflection.

On the other hand, I don’t expect to convince you at all. You’ve said that whatever the Bush administration is trying to do in Iraq is worth 500,000 American lives, so presumably an approximately equivalent number of Iraqi lives is no great shakes in your view.

Wouldn’t 6000 also be deeply worrisome, and even 700, and even 80, and even 9, or 1? I’m pretty sure Cindy Sheehan would be upset if the 1 was her son.

Many good things have a cost, even a cost in lives. Sometimes, in retrospect, the cost in lives was much higher than expected. This doesn’t reduce the benefit of the good thing, but it does reduce the NET value, the benefits minus the cost.

There surely is SOME amount of civilian Iraqi deaths which a majority of voters would say is “too high” — that the benefits aren’t worth the cost. Of course, US voters count American deaths as of much more voting concern than Iraqi deaths.

Because of this, Lancet inaccuracies are deplorable, but the meaning of the numbers is still in the mind of those thinking about it.

Was the D-day invasion worth the price? (If the June 44 alternative is to wait one more year, let the Germans and Russians fight more)

Was Lincoln’s war to save the Union worth it? How many Americans would have had to die before you would say the US Civil War was NOT worth it?

Was it good to run away from Vietnam in ’73, after signing the Peace Accords? Was it good to cut funding in ’75 after the ’74 elections, thereby almost guaranteeing the collapse of a corrupt, incompetent, cowardly, but human rights protecting S. Viet government?
How many Vietnamese and Cambodians would have to be murdered before you would claim that the “cut and run” which the Democratic Party supported was a mistake?

So which is it: there were no “excess deaths?” — there were “excess deaths” but they were moral? — there were “excess deaths” that were immoral and some that were moral and the difference doesn’t matter? — there were “excess deaths” and they were immoral? Are liberals not worth the powder it takes to blow them up?

Is your single proposition, “that liberals always seek to gain a desired ground by finding a single proposition,” a conscious, clever way of showing the weakness of liberalism or simply an unconscious revelation that critics of liberalism fall prey to the same methods? Could it be that these liberals have stumbled on the truth, even though they shouldn’t have because their methodology was faulty?

Is this kind of bitter castigation (mine and yours) of other’s points of view a Lesson of History?

Why can’t we all just get along?

Is Symbolic Logic really any use in the real world? Is it more a tool of those who enjoy the construction of superior, even perfect, world systems over a drink or a smoke?

Did those who launched the war in Iraq determine a level of acceptable deaths, using their own definition of acceptability? If they did, what should they do or say if the acceptable level is exceeded? Should we consider casualty levels or should we follow the philosophy of the Texas Conservatives who say, “let the rough end drag,” when dealing with casualties, or job losses, or votes that don’t get counted, or golf junkets, or health care rationing by bank account size, or… Oh, wait, I have done it again. I have found found a desired ground driven by a single proposition. Well, actually several grounds driven by that single proposition.

So long as you have your Symbolic Logic textbook open, please parse, “Stay the Course,” “You are either with us or against us,” “Dead or Alive,” “Mission Accomplished,” “No child left behind,” “the Death Tax,” “WMD,” “God told me to run for President,” “Democracy is on the march in the Middle East,” “Cut and Run” There are more, but I suspect they will all fall into only one or two logic patterns.

He doesn’t present himself as a neutral reviewer, does he? Part of his essay is partisan and combative, much like some statements by Lancet’s editor. Davies answers the objection (which I wouldn’t have made) that one can’t extrapolate from a 1849-household sample, and the objection (which I reject out of hand) that the numbers don’t matter. He doesn’t address the issue of fraud except to dare anyone to allege it. (It’s alleged by many on the right, but neither they nor Davies have any basis to know). He seems to take the political timing in stride, saying that the issue is important enough to justify it.

But of course we all know that there are countless ways to influence the results of a study that fall just short of fraud. (Among many ways, the easiest would be to allow respondents to report deaths of persons who might not otherwise have been considered part of the surveyed households.) If you doubt the possibility, think of the standards you would apply to an industry-funded pollution-damage study. Are you applying the same standards, or do you think that the issue is so important that you should suspend your normal skepticism?

Tim, I apologize for hijacking your comment section for this rant; I’m assuming that you don’t have to pay for the extra bytes. I’ll stop now unless somebody wants to suggest a better forum.

Naomi Mandel, “I made the ink”: Identity, Complicity, 60 Million, and More,” Modern Fiction Studies – Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 2002, pp. 581-613, available on Project Muse.

A google search finds “thirty to sixty million” in the slave trade rather commonly used (by non-academics)–most “sixty million and up” references seem to refer back to Toni Morrison, who may have started that trope.

“Taken directly from Africa” is a little confusing–I do take as valid the contention that the numbers ought to include people taken as slaves within Africa, who died before they reached the ports, and also the contention that this number can never be more than an informed guess. Do Inikori’s numbers refer to shipment from African ports, or total caught up in the slave trade? I see (google-searching) that he used the number 15M at one point, but I don’t know to which that refers.

This is why I’d agree that relative precision about numbers is often quite desirable, as long as the question on the table is one which meaningfully turns on those numbers. As, for example, in the discussion of the demographic impact of smallpox and other diseases on New World populations, or in evaluating just what percentage of existing West and Equatorial African populations were taken into slavery over particular periods of time.

Withywindle: my thought on Beloved is that she is referring to ALL peoples of African descent who were enslaved within the Atlantic world between 1500 and 1900, and the point here is that there were far more people who were slaves than those taken into slavery because slave populations in the Americas reproduced themselves; e.g., 60 million includes people born into slavery in the Americas. I don’t think anyone, even Inikori, has claimed 60 million taken directly from Africa.

The problem of the impact on daily life is that it was highly uneven: in some places, at some moments, extremely intense, at other places over longer periods of time, slow and diffuse. This is where “Europe” and “Africa” are very bad units for talking about the Atlantic slave trade in the first place: it makes much more sense to talk about “Liverpool” and “Nantes” and “Ouidah”.

Not having my books on me right now, I recollect a figure that ca. 11-12 million slaves actually arrived in the New World (the majority of whom probably died of overwork within 7 years of landing) between 1500 and 1900; that some millions more died in transit from Africa, and some millions more in transit within Africa; ca. 20 million, therefore, is the extraordinarily rough figure for the number of people initially taken captive for the Atlantic slave trade. High enough! — but not 60 million. I think the Adas et al World Civ textbook uses similar figures, and I trust Michael Adas is not taken as a Europhilic minimizer? Although for impact of daily life, I once made a seat-of-the-pants calculation that at the height of the slave trade, a few hundred slave ships each year came to the continent–which translates to remarkably little actual interaction between Europeans and Africans for such enormous consequences.

As for the New World die-off: I think you need to be more precise. A large die-off due to disease is taken as exculpatory of Europeans, on the theory that no matter how they behaved, 95% of Indians would have died anyway. If you discount disease, the effects of European conquest and slavery are magnified. I rather buy the disease theory, surprise surprise, though I do think that if you posit European conquest and slavery as making the difference between 90% and 95% death ratios, that has very great historic impact and moral weight. I found an estimate of 54M for the Americas in 1492 quite convincing, 3M north of the Rio Grande, the rest heavily concentrated in Mesoamerica (25M?) and the Andean heartland (20M?). Higher estimates I gather include 100M total, 10M north of the Rio Grande.