A PAIR: Two must-read commentaries… on “Hashtag heroics” and Thoughts on Paris/Liberalism

Two simply outstanding commentaries have come up since the Muslim attack in Paris last Friday.  Both are simply outstanding and illustrate the intellectual paucity of liberals when it comes to dealing with threats to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

First up, from the New York Post.  Rich Lowry, Paris doesn’t need your hashtag ‘heroics’.

In short, hashtag heroics are the meaningless fluff designed to make people feel better.  Here’s a tease:

The instant online symbol of global support for Paris after last week’s attacks was a roughly rendered peace symbol with an Eiffel Tower in the middle of it.

…We have become experts at treacly online mourning. We take grotesque atrocities and launder them into trite symbols and slogans that are usually self-congratulatory and, of course, wholly ineffectual.

(Treacly: resembling something annoying because it is too sentimental).

And the pièce de résistance:

Paris doesn’t need to give peace a chance. It doesn’t need to make love, not war. It doesn’t need to be more understanding or more hopeful. It needs to be better protected by all those unsentimental means that have been neglected in recent years, or overwhelmed by the growing threat of ISIS.

Paris — and more broadly, France and the West — needs more surveillance of suspected terrorists and police raids; a more restrictive immigration policy that doesn’t create large, unassimilated Muslim populations, or welcome terrorists as refugees; and a serious, multi-layered campaign to destroy ISIS and deny it the safe havens from which it recruits, trains and plots against the West.

If someone can come up with a catchy symbol for that, I’ll embrace it. (Although “La Marseillaise” isn’t so bad: “To arms citizens/Form your battalions/March, march.”)

Meanwhile, spare me the #PrayforParis hashtag. Forgive me if I’m unmoved by lighting world landmarks up in red, white and blue, or your putting a tricolor filter on your Facebook profile picture. And please don’t tell me, in the words of the designer Jean Jullien, that “in all this horror there’s something positive that people are coming together in a sense of unity and peace.”

And secondly, Larry Correia at Monster Hunters, Thoughts on Paris:

…For the pacifistic anti-gun dumb asses on the internet who always crop up in the aftermath of any violent event, bitching about imaginary crossfires, or how fighting back would just make things worse. Just shut up already. You’re children, with a child’s grasp of the subject. When people are being mass butchered, barring tossing hand grenades at the bad guy, it is pretty damned hard to make it worse.

…Liberalism is a suicidal political philosophy that focuses on non-problems and ignores real problems. We’ve got an actual death cult massacring people? Well, we’d better crack down on regular Americans civil liberties. Hey, there’s a conservative organization in rural Nebraska that has absolutely nothing to do with militant Islam, better tap their phones and sick the IRS on them. We do security theater at the airports, while having a foreign policy that makes zero sense and no border. Bad guys are massacring people with machine guns they smuggled into a country with incredibly strict gun control? Well, we’d better double down on gun free zones to minimize the number of people who could effectively fight back. DHS leadership is issuing warnings about American veterans, while the actual guys fighting terrorists are stymied with rules that make absolutely no sense.

I’ve got a ton of fans who are feds. Oh, the horror stories I hear from these guys. So many plots have been foiled, so many bad guys have been caught, and the stuff they are worried that is coming next is frankly terrifying… I mean, we’ve not seen anything yet. There are some nightmare scenarios out there that I won’t talk about on the internet. But don’t worry, our administration’s greatest concern is climate change. They’re all over that.

And this:

Our leadership is made up of petulant children more worried about poop swastikas that may or may not have existed, than actual killers who believe in real oppression.

There’s good news though!

Charlie Sheen says he’s got HIV.  That’ll distract the low-information types from scary reality back into their mind-numbed existence.