Just a few from the May 22nd podcast:

(1) Felony murder. A mighty host of listeners has emailed in explaining this to me. Many thanks to all. I now understand the concept, although I think "felony murder" is a damn silly way to name it.

(2) The nursing-home attacker is an inmate, not an orderly. From one listener among many:

Apparently he had been kicked out of a group home for assaulting a staff member with Lysol prior to this. Whether this is related to his pending assault charges from a November offense is unclear. According to his father, he tested positive for the Wuhan virus, and was placed in the nursing home per the governor’s directive. They had nowhere else to put him, and he was apparently unable to “quarantine” at home with his father. So the brute was pawned off on a for-profit nursing home, where he could indulge his fetish for showcasing himself involved in the most heinous abuse and criminal activity.

So when the kids ship me off to Shady Pines at last, I shall be sharing the place with virus-positive young black psychopaths. Good to know.

(3) On my infamously asserting that "A small cohort of blacks — in my experience, around five percent — is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us." Two listeners have argued for symmetry: i.e., that a similar cohort of whites is ferociously hostile to blacks.

Sorry, no sale. I've lived among white people most of my life. Of the hundreds I've known well enough to form an opinion, only some low single-digit number were ferociously hostile to blacks, in all cases with good personal reason. That's way less than one percent.

And this is what you'd expect from the general principles of social psychology. Where feelings of group superiority and inferiority are in play (whether factually based or not) the usual arrangement of emotions is as follows.

• Directed from the perceived-superior to the perceived-inferior. At the happy end: affectionate paternalism, noblesse oblige, gentle condescension, noble-savagery romanticism. At the other end: dislike, avoidance, contempt, mockery, disgust.
• Directed from the perceived-inferior to the perceived-superior. At the happy end: affectionate loyalty, admiration, respect. At the other end: hate hate hate hate HATE.

(4) Puzzle corner. One listener's attention got snagged on my use of the word "comely." He notes that a fair antonym to "comely" is "homely," and wonders whether there are any other antonym pairs that differ by just a single letter. Uh ... I leave this as an exercise for the reader.