Rick:

“Insufficiently empirical,” huh?

While the horrors in the Congo were going on (i.e., from 1998 to the present) I was a busy worker bee, mixing with Americans of all classes, races, and stations in life, certainly including a good many Roman Catholics and, I am sure, at least a few evangelicals. Until 2004 I was also attending my own (Episcopal) church, though I’ll admit less and less often.

In all those years, with all those people, in all those venues, I don’t recall hearing anyone speak of the Congo massacres, not once. That seems to me like a pretty darn good empirical foundation for the remark you took objection to: “North of five million people have been slaughtered in the Congo this past twelve years, and nobody much (no, not me — how about you?) has lost a wink of sleep over it.”

The Congo Wars didn’t even rise to the level of occasional water-cooler chat that, as I remember, the ructions in ex-Yugoslavia did at the earlier part of that period. Interesting contrast.

Empirical-foundations-wise, I believe I’m in good shape.

New-clothes-wise, the Emperor of Universalist Humanitarianism hasn’t got any.