Are Bears an Existential Threat?

The other day, historian David A. Bell tried to put 9/11 and the War on Terror in perspective by comparing it to past conflicts and other, more pedestrian threats. A number of people, most of them on the Right, took issue with Bell's piece, claiming that it unduly minimized the nature of the threat we face. That may or may not be true, but some of Bell's critics seem to have tossed their logical skills out the window.

This morning John Podhoretz directed his readers attention to this blog post, which he claimed offered a "stinging" retort to Bell's piece (h/t Sam Rosenfeld):

While “only” 2,973 people died on 9/11, they died at the rate of 29 people per minute. Taking Mr. Bell’s opening scenario one step further, had Islamofascists murdered 29 people here during every minute of the year following 8:46 a.m. EST on 9/11, more than 11 million would have been slaughtered. Is that a few more than the United States loses in traffic accidents each year, Mr. Bell?

Devastating logic. And it got me thinking.

Last year, a grizzly bear attacked a couple asleep in their tent in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They were killed within seconds. If the bear had continued at this pace for the rest of the year, it would have mauled to death roughly 21 million people. Stephen Colbert is right; bears really are "godless killing machines without a soul."

And there's no reason to confine this logic to existential threats. For instance, last year Takeru Kobayashi ate 53 hotdogs (with buns) in 12 minutes. Had he continued at that pace for the rest of the year, he would have consumed over 2 million hotdogs, an amount which might well have threatened the overall world supply. The man must be stopped!

Look, I don't mean to make light of the tragic events of 9/11, but tragedy is no excuse for resorting to idiotic reasoning. This argument is so astoundingly stupid that it was actually made by Bell himself in defense of the opposite point. Bell's piece began with this:

IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

That's Bell's whole point: that 9/11 would have had to have repeated itself continuously for the threat to approach the scale of, say, World War II. So Podhoretz' "stinging" rebuke is merely a reiteration of Bell's own hypothetical, but divorced from the accompanying logic.