You don't want bring a "political gesture" to a gunfight

I find the blogger Ace of Spades a little much. Not necessarily wrong per se but that his arguments are often needlessly provocative, incendiary and/or belittling of his opponents. He uses a bludgeon where mockery might do. His recent rant is against, well against a lot targets, but starting with John Oliver, John Oliver, Last Month: Boy, Those Fox Chuckleheads Sure Are Paranoid Ninnies to Think That Terrorists Might Smuggle Themselves Into Europe With the Rufugees! And Ace of Spades is right. Within just the past few weeks, left leaning media and bloggers have been mocking the concerns from the right that terrorists would take advantage of the refugee invasion in Europe to slip in some terrorists to wreak havoc. This despite the occasional terrorist being caught up in the security nets.

So now the right leaning critics are vindicated in their concerns. For all his crowing and bluster, Ace of Spades does have some interesting commentary about the epistemic closure which prevented left leaning utopianists from seeing the risk in the first place and which now is blinding them to acknowledging that the risk was indeed real. To the point that they do appear to be simply falling back into a mental safe room where synthetic reality accords more with their expectations. Ace of Spades:

He mocked the idea that terrorists would, or could, infiltrate Europe with Syrian migrants, and invited his flock to laugh at the heathens who thought maybe they could.

Well, despite having a 48 hour lead time, John Oliver wasn't quite ready to address the Paris attacks in last night's show. So he just did a two minute segment in which he called the terrorists "f***ing assholes" and praised the French for their pastries.

He then said, "If you're picking a Lifestyle and Culture war with the French, good luck!"

[snip]

They don't seem to notice that IS did not mount a "Lifestyle and Culture war" against the French; rather, they have, in a series of attacks over the past year (remember Charlie Hebdo?), launched an actual war, a bullet and bomb war, against France.

Yes, John Oliver, the French culture is immensely superior to the joyless death-cult of the Islamists. Well-spotted, as they might say in England (and bien vu as they'd say in France.

But unfortunately, a war is not won when two sides get together on the field of battle and show off to each other who produces the best pastries, the best fashion, the best Progressive Televangelist Rants which "DESTROY" the opponent, nor the best #HashtagMemes.

Wars are not won or lost the way gang wars are won or lost in 80s movies, that is to say, with a dance-off.

They are won with guns and with men capable of and willing to use those guns.

[snip]

It's not that the left is so stupid as to be incapable of understanding reality; though that does, of course, play into it. The problem is that they are a Manichean religious cult which has certain extreme religious views, and anyone questioning those views will be deemed heretic and thrown out of the cult and ostracized.

So it's more a failure of moral and intellectual courage than of intellectual capacity. They could see the truth, and they could possibly speak the truth, but they are, as C.S. Lewis observed, Men Without Chests.

The faux intellectual class is in fact studiously anti-intellectual; they are simply the most degenerate sort of priestly class, the priests who do not actually read or study, but just pass what seems like wisdom from one stupid mouth to one imbecile ear.

It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

They're not stupid, so much as they are cowards; and the ultimate retreat for the ultimate coward is the full flight from reality, the retreat to the #SafeSpace of fuzzy dreams of the way they wish the world were.

[snip]

But as I keep saying, a coward will flee a fight, but the ultimate in cowardice is a full-speed flight from reality. The ordinary coward flees the fight; the new breed of coward claims there was never a fight in the first place to flee, it was just a #FalseRacistNarrative.

And having appalled us all not just with their physical cowardice (which is understandable enough) but their ontological cowardice as well, these simpering assholes then have to pollute the world further with their six billionth treacly, truckling rendition of Imagine.

Well, yeah.

By happenstance, the very next article I happened to read was an opinion piece in the New York Times which, rather inadvertently, supported Ace of Spades' point. France's War Within by Sylvie Kauffmann.

Except this was not any November Sunday. In hospitals, doctors were still fighting to save the lives of those seriously wounded in the worst terrorist attacks ever carried out in the city, which left at least 129 people dead and 352 injured. “Let Us Resist” proclaimed the headline of a local paper, Le Parisien. In shock, Parisians had mostly stayed indoors on Saturday night, but Sunday was different: They chose to resist by living normally and going out, defying fear. Ordering a glass of wine at café terraces, the very type of place the gunmen targeted Friday, quietly became a political gesture.

Under the newly declared state of emergency, rallies in Paris were banned for five days. Yet people also defied this order: By late afternoon on Sunday, several thousand had gathered at the Place de la République, near where most of the attacks occurred, lighting candles and singing “La Marseillaise.” Trying to live normally, yet on the edge: Shortly before 7 p.m., a rumor spread that a gunman was attacking a café nearby. People fled in panic, desperately seeking shelter. Half an hour later, they were back.

Don't bring a "political gesture" to a gunfight.

I get that in the face of tragedy, you don't want to simply ignore it but that your choice of actions that are not clichéd or maudlin are limited.

However, the hard question is whether any of these actions will prevent a recurrence of the tragedy or mitigate the consequences. They won't.

We are stuck with the tragic position encapsulated in the old English adage:

Meek Michael thought it wrong to fight.
Bully Bill, who killed him, thought it right.

Gestures won't resolve this conundrum, only hard choices. By all means, take the time, consider deeply, proceed cautiously. But take action, don't just make gestures.