More Thanks Are Due

~ Clarissa

In the meantime, a guy in Tennessee recently murdered an 18-year-old girl because he enjoys shooting at people for no reason. The murderer has a long history of criminal activity, including the 2021 shooting at a mother and two toddlers for which he received no punishment. Here’s a short list of the criminal activity by this criminal:

  • 2011: Police seized a .40 caliber handgun from Taylor during an incident when he was a juvenile.
  • 2015: Taylor was charged with robbery and given probation
  • 2016: Taylor violated that probation when he was charged with aggravated burglary and was sentenced to a year in jail.
  • 2021: Taylor was arrested after he and another man fired a gun into a car on Dickerson Pike in East Nashville. He was charged with aggravated assault.
  • May 2023: He was released from custody after three court-appointed psychologists deemed him incompetent to stand trial, but also found he didn’t pose an imminent threat to himself or others.
  • Sept. 2023: Taylor was charged with auto theft and released on bail, but an arrest warrant was issued for him last Friday when he failed to show up in court.

There are more crimes on his rapsheet but it’s impossible to list them all without turning this into a mile-long post. The guy is the definition of a career criminal.

Now a young woman is dead, and the only reason this bastard might finally get isolated from society is if there’s enough of an outcry. Of course, the people who like to complain about gun violence will stay mum because they aren’t interested in this un-PC kind of gun violence. This is also the majority of gun violence in this country but we aren’t supposed to know that we can get randomly shot while jogging by a guy that is too much of a victim to pay for his crimes.

Shaquille Taylor, the murderer, is only 29 years old. Imagine how many more people he can victimize in his life.

So let’s give even more thanks that we are not the morons who are hiding from these news reports because they contradict a convenient narrative.

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Published by Clarissa

26 thoughts on “More Thanks Are Due”

  1. I worry that we may already have crossed some horrible cultural line, where people have grown up with the completely justified expectation that they can do almost anything and face no real legal consequences, and the majority of the population lacks any hint of the countervailing moral/ethical norms that are like “we don’t do these things because they are wrong– not just because we might go to jail”.

    After that point, the only thing you can do to criminals is shoot them on the spot.

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    1. “may already have crossed some horrible cultural line”

      I think that was passed a long time ago and things are just warming up. The leftists that support the policies that kept Taylor out of jail/mental institution are suuureee they’re in the right and will only ramp things up.

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      1. I am deeply afraid that my lifetime will see the “shoot shovel and shutup” rule extended to problem humans. The default state for humans seems to be meet stranger= murder on sight. Blood feud is a step up from that, that virtually every culture develops, where we discourage violence and larceny by making those who do it accountable to their own tribe and the tribe of the person they’ve offended. It’s not great, but it’s functional, sometimes. We all jumped onboard with state-administered rule-of-law because it was actually better. Freed us up to act as individuals and all.

        I don’t think we have enough cohesion left to do feud justice anymore. Once rule of law collapses… what do we fall back on? All that’s left is violence. We haven’t got tribes, but we have certainly got gangs. How long before we develop warlords and rediscover the rudiments of civilization? Decades? Centuries?

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        1. …and, you know, rule of law working at all was heavily dependent on being embedded in a culture that supported it. With that largely gone… no amount of better/stricter enforcement will save it. We can’t go back. So what does forward look like?

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        2. “The default state for humans”

          Nasty, brutish and short in Hobbesian terms… western style civil society with rule of law is a rare, precious and delicate accomplishment and being attacked by both left and right for different reasons….
          I despair for the future as so many countries are locked into systematic government collapse (both the US and UK and a few others seem to be speeding toward an abyss that they do not understand is even there….).
          It won’t be a societal collapse (humans are too good and just barely getting by for that) but it will be incremental worsening of quality of life for 80 to 90 % (or more) of society.
          I first heard the idea back in the 1980s proposed by both left and right that globalization means unifying living standards across the globe and it’s easier to make richer countries poorer than the reverse….

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    2. And that’s why the phrase “he needed killin'” is a thing in the rural Southeast …

      But times have changed!

      Between owners of wood chippers and mobile butcher shops, modern life in the rural Southeast presents so many alternatives to shovels.

      As for the collapse of the rule of law? There were families that specialised in solving problems for the ruling polities before the police and the modern legal code.

      Oh, but they no longer exist?

      Try again: they were at Nuremberg, not as the defendants.

      That future you are seeing is where Judge Dredd is real and drives a white van full of “mobile justice solutions”.

      That would make a great movie for Hollywood … while there’s still time.

      To repent, of course! 🙂

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      1. Let’s just say I’m not looking forward to a future where I have to join a “mutual protection and retributive justice” co-op in order to safely venture out of the home compound.

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  3. Read surprising (to me) statistics:

    // Two more words about the Palestinians.

    Here is Denmark. Wonderful country. In 1992, it accepted 321 Palestinian refugees. Benefits for refugees, pensions, etc. And here are the results:

    38 Palestinians – imprisonment (you need to do something very serious to go to prison in Denmark)
    33 Palestinians – suspended sentence
    133 Palestinians – fined
    ————
    Total: 204. Out of 321: Danish Ministry of Immigration and Integration Source

    Moreover, it is not only the Palestinians themselves who commit crimes, but also their children. Every third child. And this is just what has become known.

    The original post in Russian with a link to document in Danish is here:
    https://mi3ch.livejournal.com/5775406.html?view=comments#comments

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        1. ” really depressing”

          Hah! Think that’s bad? Look at this info from the Netherlands….

          But rest easy, the Dutch political establishment is closing ranks so that the guy that just won the election on a non-immigration platform won’t have any voice in policy and they keep the inflows at high rates…

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          1. “Dutch … guy that just won the election”

            And I know he gets money from russia, which is just another indictment on how seriously the Dutch political class has failed for at least 15 years to leave such a gap between policy and citizen preferences for russia to exploit….

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              1. “see what’s happening in Ireland?

                Yes… riots led the “far right” (with no reason given whatsoever) and stories about the stabbings with no mention of who the stabber was…. it’s like they’re two separate unrelated things.

                I keep wondering… do European governments want violent revolution? Because this is how you get violent revolution.

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          2. oof. Though past the initial “wtf is wrong with those countries of origin?” I’m actually kind of fascinated that Pakistani immigrants rank about the same as those from Australia, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

            “depressing” — wasn’t even really looking at the crime stats, though those are downstream I’m sure. But the article points out the IQ studies finding an average of 85– if you’re being optimistic and squinting a little. I’m curious what the spread is on that– do most people run around the average, with a few outliers, or is it more like, people skew toward 100ish but there are a lot of brain-damaged kids pulling the average down? The cutoff for joining the Army is around 85, and at that level, pretty much all they will let you do is drive trucks. Below that you need a special waiver to get in and… drive trucks. Brother went to basic with one who had such a waiver, and only because the dude had spent his childhood driving tractors on his daddy’s farm, so at least they knew he could drive heavy equipment.

            But, like… if even the army can’t find a use for you… quite apart from criminality and stuff, what can you do? Is there any future anywhere for you, in a country where goat-herding and stick-gathering aren’t among the options? Are there enough openings for ditch-diggers in any of these target countries? We’ve automated away most of the jobs they used to do– longshoremen and the like. Who is even moving these people around? They can’t possibly be doing the planning and paying on their own account, can they? Whose interests are served by this? Does it even do the migrants any good, or are they being snookered too?

            I have an instinctive fear, loathing, and hopelessness in response to this sort of thing. It is very similar with… completely non-immigration issues I am trying to work my way through, with our neighborhood, schools, social groups, churches. More than almost any other factor, our culture segregates by intelligence. Rightly, wrongly, or indifferently. Results in the margin are brutal and ugly in so many ways. I would never subject my kids to the elementary school we live next to. I’ve met the neighborhood kids who go there and they are dumb as posts– though none held back a grade. Only a couple of bad apples, but you can tell already they’ve got no worthwhile future ahead of them in the world we currently inhabit. They are friends and my kids play with them and all, but we have already had to have several conversations about code-switching (i.e. using smaller words so other kids don’t feel embarrassed and everybody understands what you’re saying), treating everybody respectfully even if they can’t keep up with you, and why everybody doesn’t know the same things you know, or share your interests. Why are they so concentrated here? That’s not a normal distribution is it? I assume because smarter parents make more money and don’t live in our neighborhood. You might well ask what our problem is– and that’s simple: if we prioritized making money above all other things, we wouldn’t live here either. Did we choose wrong? Are we cheating our kids out of an equal peer group because we weren’t ambitious enough? Is that what the middle classes are buying when they spend too much for ugly houses with too many square feet in aggressively dull neighborhoods? Smarter neighbors?

            Meanwhile, we’re going to a church that’s picking up converts at a quick clip lately. And it’s hard not to notice that the church, and in particular the converts, overwhelmingly self-select for very bright people. They’ve read themselves into the church by way of Vladimir Lossky and St. John Chrysostom. I’m delighted to see them there, and equally delighted that at least in this one place, my kids have other kids to play with who can offer them a challenge. And also dismayed and disillusioned in the most awful way. Self-sorting by class is one of the things I hated about Protestantism in the US. I’d lay good odds you could tell one denomination from another blindfolded, if you simply had the career stats on the parishioners. Catholics are the only ones who come anywhere near the church’s self-proclaimed principles (salvation is for everybody!) in that respect. Give Orthodoxy another century or two and maybe it could settle in and become something like that, but we are nowhere near it now, and I don’t see how we get from here to there: we’re not supposed to be the church of the intelligentsia. That’s not a good thing. How did that happen, and how do we fix it?

            That is a yawning mouth of chaos we are staring into there, with or without unrestricted immigration. We’ve built a society that locks out anybody on the below-average side. We fail to integrate them, we grant them no dignity, we sell them morality only the rich can afford, pawn them off with cheap entertainment, and… what? Hope they just go away? Wall ourselves off so we don’t have to deal with it? Then what?

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            1. “Whose interests are served by this?”

              quick and sloppy answer, the smugglers and those paid by governments to house and feed them in the beginning and then later try to turn them into something besides economic dead weight (usually failing in the process but they get paid so it’s all good for them)

              “Does it even do the migrants any good”

              Of course not, that’s the last thing on the mind of the smugglers, NGOs and the rest of migrant money chain. My best, very imperfect, analogy is the slave trade except the people are selling themselves and there’s no labor involved at the other end.

              It’s really indefensible from any point of view and preening liberals and clueless libertarians are facilitators of it while those that see through the scam are prosecuted or called ‘far right’ (and worse) for their trouble.

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              1. Well, that’s… still very depressing. It’s so hard to reconcile with my internal image of “immigrant”. I know a lot of immigrants– the legal sort. I’m related to a surprising number of them. All around– a gain for the US and a loss for all the various places they came from, I’d reckon.

                That seems to leave a vast well of the sort of immigrants I don’t come into contact with. Who are not at all the same cohort. And yet, back in the days when people were coming in great numbers from Italy and Greece, Poland… didn’t we have the same laments in the press– “OMG they are uneducated and stupid and criminal (and some of them were, too!), and they’ll drag us all down”? But somehow out of that group came my (much-beloved) great-uncle, pretty much all of my sister’s inlaws…

                What’s changed?

                Is it the countries they’re coming from? The process of getting here? Just the tolerance for people doing it outside the established legal processes? The sheer numbers?

                Is this a Sicilian-mafia problem that’ll sort itself out in a few decades, or is this an irremediable disaster?

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              1. I think I’d need the numbers and outcomes on that to even tell whether it’s a good thing or not, though. Like, one of my best friends when I was younger was born in a refugee camp in Indonesia– her Khmer family was sponsored over by some protestant church group, that for their first year or so helped them out with paperwork, English, job placement, housing, that sort of thing. Her family is well-adjusted and a credit to the process– it’s been a lot of years since then. Parents still aren’t good with English, but they have no trouble finding/holding jobs and they own their own home. Parents worked in factories. Kids went to college and got white-collar jobs.

                I know there were Mennonite groups who operated less-legal versions of these programs back in the 80s, bringing in refugees from Nicaragua and El Salvador. Ultimately, those didn’t seem to be a big social problem. Possibly because they were limited in scope and size. At least a few of those Mennonites did jail time for it. They’re very conscientious folks, and didn’t seem to mind, but that’s the sort of thing that automatically limits the size of your program– only so many people willing to go to jail for it.

                So it’s like… it’s clear there’s a huge immigration problem now. We’re no longer talking about boat people from Vietnam, who will get here, run a shrimper or a nail salon, and then their kids will end up being dentists and radiologists. We’re not talking about Eritrean refugees anymore. My BIL (child of Italian immigrants) used to love hiring those guys, because they were great employees, amazing friends, and any time a job opening came up, they always had half a dozen equally reliable people they could recommend, which made his job a lot easier. I expect their kids are all in college now.

                My parents have both, over the years, put in a tremendous number of volunteer hours helping people learn English, deal with immigration bureaucracy, and study for the citizenship exam. I remember one nice older Brazilian lady who became a family friend (she was the widow of a US serviceman, and stuck in the awkward spot of trying to navigate military pension paperwork with limited English)– we all trekked over to the state capital for her swearing-in as a US citizen. It was a beautiful day.

                So… what’s changed? What has happened to make the immigrant situation so very different now, compared to what it was just 20 years ago? This is a recent thing. Is it money? Government policy?

                My growing-up years make it hard for me to just blame “church organizations” or even “enablers” for the current crisis. We did that. My family did that sort of work– successfully, with some really lovely people who are now out there making positive contributions to the tax base and their communities.

                Clearly something is very different now, but I’m having a hard time understanding exactly what changed. I get that it’s partly a bias in which immigrants I meet: my cousins have acquired spouses and inlaws from India, Ukraine, Egypt, Korea– nice people! Lots of Khmer and Viet refugees came over in the 70s and 80s. A lot of them did really well, and those were the ones I met. But from what I’ve read and heard, a lot of them also got involved in gangs and criminal activity, especially in the big cities, and that’s kind of opaque to me. Blind spot.

                So… the immigration problem we’re having now: is it the same kind as the immigration problems we had in the 70s and 80s, where there are a bunch of them who settle in, work hard, do very well, and their kids are fully-integrated Americans, doing well in school, getting good jobs, running businesses, etc… but there’s also a sizable portion who don’t do well, don’t integrate, and join the criminal underworld? Like, same problem only larger now? Or is it a fundamentally different problem? And if so… different how? I’d like to understand the mechanics of the thing, what’s changed. Why is it different now?

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  4. “hard to reconcile with my internal image of “immigrant””

    Time to retire that word. by now “immigrant” is a thought terminating cliche and no useful discussion or policy can come about while people still use it.

    Old school immigrants (my definition: people who want to join a new society and want their children to belong to that society) are so rare now as to be exotic. Migration is about a lot of things now, but… that’s not one of them, especially in Europe.

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    1. See my reply above.

      Do you have a good sense of the how and why of what’s different now? This is a thing I’d very much like to understand. Like, it’s very clear that it is different. That the immigrants I had contact with for the first 30 years of my life have basically nothing in common with the people we’re talking about now, when we say “migrants”.

      What changed?

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  5. “What changed?”

    Bunch of stuff…..

    Within the EU there is no ‘immigration’ but rather the “free movement of persons” (one of the core ideas of the EU). In theory a German can move to Spain and be under no obligation ever to learn the local language (any kids might have to have it as a subject in school).

    Most European countries have a history to a greater or lesser degree of assimilating arrivals from other places (or taking over places and assimilating people to various degrees). I’ve known people born in Poland with last names from… a lot of different places. But no European country has really thought of itself as a melting pot (the closest might be France and that’s only within Europe).

    Also anti-colonialist ideology has imprinted both residents and arrivals with the idea that Europeans have aggregiously sinned against those arriving and it’s not their place to make any demands upon them by making them conform to local standards in…. anything (none of that is conscious but it’s entered the collective sub-conscious).

    There’s also the idea that religious conviction lets you be a jerk. So you have things like muslim women wanting to have ID cards that don’t show their face or entire school lunch menus have to take pork off the menu just in case a muslim student might sometime appear.

    There’s also the weird, very weird, fact that a lot of those fed into the migrant industrial complex have no concrete ideas about why they want to go to Europe or what they plan to do once there. There was a film where someone went to a camp in France ‘the jungle’ asking them why they were so determined to reach the UK. Most had no answer or lamely said ‘family there’ without being able to say what family they had there….. asked long enough they become aggressive.

    Once they arrive rather than tell those back home what a miserable dangerous experience it was they lie and say how great it is which encourages more to give their luck a try…

    And there’s more but it’s soooo depressing, that’s enough for night now.

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