that’s who i was really talking about on the right. in the early 1990s ralph reed started talking about “people of faith.” on reed’s part it was mercenary, but i think a lot of christian conservatives have internalized the stances of being persecuted and slighted. to some extent it’s not a total delusion, but the stuff about how it’s so hard being a christian in america is kind of bizarre and tone-deaf. in any case, i think grievance and over-sensitivity are probably cognitive defaults….

It strikes me that half-assed attempts to embarrass are about all the Right can do these days – they appear to have made not having alternative policies a policy in itself.

(We have our own fuckups on the Left, but at least they aren’t stuck in the 1950s.)

Unfortunately, some people on the right, particularly the more Christian sort, have actually started to take this stuff seriously instead of understanding that it’s all just a put-on to embarrass the Left.

Then started mentally listing all the other relevant possible causes of death I could think of – bacterial and viral infections; other types of parasites besides malaria; yeah, well, every other treatable and non-treatable disease other than malaria (most diseases that are treatable today weren’t treatable as little as 100 years ago); war/violence/accidents; starvation/malnutrition; ‘old age’; suicide; natural predators (snakes/lions/bears/wolves ect.); childbirth/infant mortality…

Even if the claim is true, which it’s almost certainly not, there’d be _no way_ to know that. Not even the deaths recorded by doctors could be trusted 200 hundred years ago (ie. look up ‘miasma theory of disease’). Besides, how many record-keeping doctors were around in present day Ghana in 1000 BC?

I simply do not understand the motivation behind making such a claim. Did she write that sentence in order to induce me to buy the book to ‘learn more’ about where it came from? Why would she think that would work, instead of making me think of her as a (well-meaning) fanatic (who can’t be trusted) with a cause?

About 110 billion people have ever lived according to fairly recent estimates. (that aren’t very precise – 50% either way wouldn’t be many sigmas out I think but it is a number) So there have been roughly 104 billion deaths since the stone age. This is dominated by the number of infants who died young in the past. Estimates as high as 50% of all infants died before 3 years old in some eras. Whatever the major killer of infants in the past is the major killer of humans.

I know a lot of the 50% of death numbers from malaria are due to a study of Sri Lanka where the death rate went from 22 to 10 per thousand when DDT was introduced, so there is some validity there. The fact that modern, last couple hundred year, death rates don’t dominate make me suspicious.

Almost half of all deaths were between 10000 years ago and 2000 years ago and only 1% or so before that. 25% of deaths were from 2000 years ago till 800 years ago, so these two eras dominate. Were that many people in areas where malaria was a cause of greater than 50% of deaths? That seems a bit unlikely to me.

Anyway, congrats on being more than half white

this sort of frothy material, while indeed catchy, is not perhaps entirely becoming of a gentleman blogger of your senior standing. a man of your station should comport yourself appropriately.

cheerio, cv snicker