Well, that’s it, another Christmas Day is over. Mine was fine, I hope yours was, but it must have been pretty bleak for Charles Napier and Chris Denning.
Thirteen years for both of them! Charles Napier, sentenced the day before Christmas Eve, got exactly the same as was meted out to Chris Denning earlier in the month, as though these savage punishments were choreographed to send a seasonal message of goodwill to all mankind except paedophiles.
The message might almost, indeed, have been tailored specially for Heretic TOC, bearing in mind that I personally knew both of these guys and announced recently that I would be blogging about their sentences once both of them were known.
In the circumstances, it would be expedient for me to play down my friendship with the pair, as there is such a thing as guilt by association: a man is known by the company he keeps; birds of a feather stick together, and all that.
It would be cowardly and heartless to disown anyone purely to ensure one’s own survival, though, and I am not going to do that. Instead, I see several possibilities for responding in far more defensible ways. One is to celebrate the best aspects of the person you knew, and to express the hope that their best may be seen again and that their worst – if there has truly been a terrible worst – will not. The Christian message, after all, is that no one is beyond redemption.
Another response, wholly compatible, would be to face the facts of any misdeeds that have been disclosed and examine one’s feelings about them in a measured and sober fashion.
So, let’s see where that takes us.
I’ll start with Chris Denning , who was one of the first announcers heard on BBC Two when the channel began broadcasting in 1964, and was one of the original Radio 1 DJs when the station launched in 1967. Now 73 and in poor health – he has suffered a heart attack and has diabetes – he once worked as a music producer for the Beatles, and helped launch the careers of the Bay City Rollers and Gary Glitter. Older readers will remember that the manager of the Bay City Rollers was himself convicted of sex offences involving youngsters back in the 1980s and of course Gary Glitter’s fall from grace for similar reasons is even more well known. Chris, the Rollers’ manager Tam Paton, and pop impresario Jonathan King are now all notorious for having been regulars at a Walton-on-Thames teenager’s disco in the 1970s known as the Walton Hop, said to have been a happy hunting ground for “predatory” grooming.
I didn’t meet Chris until his years of fame, fortune and Walton Hopping were but a distant memory. My encounter with him was at a very different gig: Her Majesty’s Prison Wandsworth, London, in 2006-7. By this time both of us had a substantial criminal record, his starting way back in 1974 with a conviction at the Old Bailey for indecent assault. When we met, he was already doing time for historic offences involving boys under 16. Then he was hit with a European arrest warrant and extradited in 2008 from Britain to Slovakia, where he had been living. He was jailed there for producing child pornography.
The amazing thing to me about Chris was his indestructible cheerfulness, considering that even then he was locked, apparently permanently, into a nightmare of perpetual police action against him, even while he was safely incarcerated.
A successful radio DJ needs a lively personality, needless to say, with plenty of wit, gags and bounce. But one often hears of a sad dark side to comedians and clowns. Not Chris, though: what you heard on the radio was what you got on the prison wing – a laughing, joking character who brightened the whole place up. Being depressed was not an option with Chris around! Perpetual jokers can be annoying, to be sure, but I always found him interesting to chat to – usually as a guest in his cell during “unlock”, when I would stroll along the landing the deliver my copy of the Guardian to him when I’d finished with it.
I remember one time he said “Thanks, you’re the nicest paperboy I know!”
“No way!” I replied, “not with all the paperboys you must have known in the biblical sense!”
“I said nicest, not prettiest, you ugly old bugger!”
He was a great source of anecdotes, of course, and also of tea bags and dried milk sachets, which I always needed and he was generously pleased to let me scrounge.
As for the anecdotes, here’s a sample. Chris had to go for minor eye surgery, which entailed attending a nearby National Health Service hospital while under guard by two burly uniformed officers to whom he was handcuffed, one on either side. His visit entailed walking through a crowded ward where his handcuffed state was totally visible not just to the nurses and doctors but to all the other patients, who were members of the general public.
Many of us would have felt utterly humiliated by such a public display of our criminal status; but not a man of Chris’s confidence and style.
“Don’t worry,” he shouted out to the entire ward, “I’ve got these two guys under complete control!”
As for Chris’s past, a bit of it turned up right there in HMP Wandsworth in the shape of a middle-aged prisoner called Bob. I met him while he was chatting to Chris in the latter’s cell one day. He was a new guy on the wing, but he and Chris seemed remarkably relaxed in each other’s company, nattering away like old pals – which they were.
A day or two later, Chris told me all about it. He and Bob had met about forty years earlier when Chris had been presenting Top of the Pops on TV. At that time Bob had been a teenager in the studio audience, invited because his brother worked for the BBC. No doubt he had been a very attractive boy because he caught Chris’s attention and the two struck up a relationship.
I have no idea what sort of trouble got Bob into prison, but he clearly wasn’t blaming it on any “abuse” by Chris: the pair of them got on like a house on fire; I saw not the slightest hint of any lingering resentment, quite the opposite.
And despite many “boys” (albeit now quite ancient themselves) testifying against him, this lack of any convincing account of harm done by Chris’s “abusive” sexual encounters is striking. Instead, we are left to infer from the words of the judge in the case, plus reporters, “abuse experts”, etc, that his behaviour must have been devastating.
In the Daily Mail, for instance, reporter Richard Spillett refers to Denning as a boy’s “tormentor”. Judge Alistair McCreath, in the same report, is quoted as calling his behaviour “depraved”, saying “It is not to be forgotten that all of this suffering was inflicted by you without thought for anything other than your own selfish pleasure.”
But what “suffering” does he mean, exactly? What “torment” was there in reality? I saw all the main reports, in the Daily Mail, the BBC (website and TV coverage), the Guardian and the Independent. I saw absolutely nothing to support all this extravagant denunciation. It seems entirely based on dubious dogma and presumption.
Against this, on the other hand, some facts emerged in support of the view that the boys Chris went with were not forced into anything, were happy to be involved and suffered no harm other than hassles from the police.
The Independent, for instance, reproduced a remarkable Prague Post interview with Chris that first appeared in 2001. In that piece, reporter James Pitkin wrote that one boy was 14 when he first met Denning in a Prague club. He testified against Chris but then phoned him as soon as the former DJ was released from prison, and remained close to him during his last days in Prague. The boy was quoted as saying “Chris is my good friend. I had to testify against him. The pressure from the police was really heavy.”
As well as having lived further east, in Slovakia, Chris also dwelt for a while in the Czech capital, spending time in the gay clubs there. He says that in the Prague clubs boys always approached him first and he often formed lasting friendships with them. He would offer payment or gifts at first; once a relationship was established they often they liked to hang out at his apartment.
It is a mistake often made to suppose that so-called “rent boys” such as these were just vulnerable prey to abusive men. Yes, a club scene will expose youths to undesirables but a bigger part of the story is the exciting access they get to the exact opposite: desirables! These teenagers may be hunted by lustful men, but they are also deliberately on the hunt themselves, ostensibly for money but in reality they often crave the glamour and excitement of having their own big, properly grown-up, friend – and if they are gay, the desirability of the adult will focus on, well, desire – a hunky guy is precisely what they are after.
Chris knew this. He had been a rent boy himself from the age of 13. This had been entirely voluntary. Coming from a comfortable middle-class home, with non-abusive parents, he wasn’t desperate for the money nor is he a case of “the abused becoming the abuser”.
He does, however, remember being sexual from long before his teens. In boarding school, he says relationships with other young boys were commonplace. At eight, he was visiting an elderly museum curator for “favours”, and as a teenager he was hitting the streets and clubs of London on weekends, getting paid for sex but often giving it away free.
He insists that for men, prostitution is a choice. “The press always talks about being forced into it, as if they were reluctant,” he told the Prague Post. “They do it because they enjoy it.”
The teenagers at the Walton Hop were not on the gay scene like the Prague rent boys. But you don’t have to be gay to appreciate a glamorous adult in your life, as Chris was. To the straight youngster at that age the attraction is often a matter of overwhelming, hair-trigger, sexuality that will burst out at the slightest provocation, combined with the flattering attention of a hero-worshipped grownup and a positive need for affection.
Men like Chris are excoriated for “grooming” such youngsters. But what does this mean? It means being decent, nice and kind enough to make friends with a kid and spending time with him, rather than just having sex. It means being affectionate, taking an interest in the boy’s own life and preoccupations. It means earning a boy’s trust through being reliable and steadfast.
All these things are good and fine qualities. Simply to propagandise against them by insisting they are somehow evil is itself a monstrous distortion and perversion of the truth.
As for the middle-aged men who made the allegations in the UK case, it may be that some or all of them were approached by the police following leads in the aggressive pursuit of their Operation Yewtree, set up as one of many investigations aimed at leaving no stone unturned from the supposed misdeeds of decades ago, following the (still totally unproven) Jimmy Savile allegations. In other words, rather than having gone through decades of “torment” over what happened, they may instead merely have been badgered by the police into making statements. If any of them had made powerful and persuasive “victim impact statements” you may be sure the media would have made a meal of it.
I was going to write about Charles Napier as well in this piece. In order to justice to his case, though, I will have to return to it separately. More soon, then, inshallah.
THANK YOU, HERETICS
A huge thank you to all those heretics who have responded with encouraging words after hearing the audio recording of the interview I gave to Testimony Films, which was intended for Channel 4’s The Paedophile Next Door but never used. It is very gratifying to know that the consensus view is clearly much more positive than I had feared. Thanks to the sterling work of David Kennerly, it is now also possible to hear an amusing audio of less than 17 minutes in which interviewer Steve Humphries’ questions are stitched together in the absence of my answers, followed by some telling quotes from the programme as broadcast. Titled Stitching Up Steve Humphries, this compilation cleverly shows who was actually stitched up, and how. Excerpts from the show as broadcast come in at the 13-minute mark.
Congratulations to Tom and David for ‘Stitching up Steve Humphries’. You may have invented a new form of satire!
This is not really relevant, but I’ve just watched David Walliams’ ‘The Boy in the Dress’ on the BBC. Delightful! For those in the UK (you need a UK TV licence), here is the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04w7pgj/the-boy-in-the-dress
As someone with a somewhat personal interest in boys in dresses but living no where near the UK, do you know whether it’s possible to get a hold of this program without a UK TV license?
No, not really, James, though I guess there may be a DVD of it available at some point. I would certainly recommend it though. It may not be very realistic but I found it sweet and very, very funny.
Here’s a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrBQXxu5Qy8
Note that it was originally a novel by Walliams.
[Apologies to TOC for not consolidating.]
James, you can watch the whole bloody thing if you use a Chrome browser and add-in an extension called Hola! It is a free VPN which makes the Beeb think you are yappin’ in exquisite R.P. like one of their presenters or glottal-stopping like Eliza Doolittle shopping at Tesco. No proof of licence-paying required since they will make the reasonable assumption that, if you are within the U.K., you will be either a dutiful taxpayer with a guilty conscience or a worthless lay-about on the dole who simply refuses to pay and upon whom one should pin the lowest of expectations.
Thank you! Works great! 😀
Hello J., I remember I recommended to you a film called Mein Freund aus Faro, then couldn’t find it and thought it had disappeared from YouTube. Turns out it’s still there, under the slightly cryptic title ‘M F A F Sub Español’. (I also remember you said you actually prefer English subs, but Spanish is all I could find.) It’s about a fourteen-year-old girl and a twenty-two-year-old butch lesbian who fall in love when the former lies that she is sixteen and the latter tells the rather bigger whopper that she is an eighteen-year-old boy from Portugal. It came to mind because of TOC’s post about the activist who had a relationship with an undercover policeman. The plot is apparently based on a true story, and the presentation of it as a simple love story may perhaps, some would argue, serve as proof of a certain hypocrisy in the lesbian community on the subject of intergenerational relationships.
More interesting heretic viewing on YouTube: search ‘Storyville The Genius and the Boys’. It’s a BBC documentary about Carleton Gajdusek, co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and his sexual relationships in the US and New Guinea with a series of boys aged about 7-16.
Also, search ‘Private Life of a Masterpiece Little Dancer Aged Fourteen’ for a BBC documentary about Edgar Degas’ famous sculpture. The young subject probably ended up in sex work not long after the sculpture was made and, perhaps due to a poor diet and generally straitened circumstances, she was at fourteen still in an early stage of puberty, judging by the sculpture’s immature breasts.
And that brings me to Nude Art Controversies, a fascinating and detailed WordPress blog containing “new insights into the ‘art or porn’ debate surrounding the works of major photographers and filmmakers who exhibit nude youths.” Here’s the link: https://artcontroversies.wordpress.com/ . (No pics, text only, completely fine.)
“I also remember you said you actually prefer English subs, but Spanish is all I could find.”
Don’t worry. I’ll live 🙂
Thanks so much for tracking it down! Thanks also for all the other recommendations 🙂
I would like to mention that those who participated in this discussion thread really should read Roger Lancaster’s excellent recent book SEX PANIC AND THE PUNITIVE STATE. As I’ve said before elsewhere, I honestly believe it may be the most important recent book on this general subject since Judith Levine’s HARMFUL TO MINORS a decade earlier. Lancaster, now a psychologist in his middle age, was a gay youth during the 1970s, the final decade before the sex abuse hysteria overtook the globe, and he had many interesting personal experiences as a loved boy.
The concept of “rent boys” sounds similar to the young American runaways described by Levine in her book who referred to giving sexual favors in return for things like room and board as “survival sex.” It’s always described in the American press as a horrific abuse on the part of the adult, and of course any youth who says they had no problem with the arrangement are considered to be either lying under duress from their “abuser” or suffering from something akin to Stockholm Syndrome. This attitude is exacerbated by the West’s very negative and moralizing attitude towards paid sex under general principles, which seems to have led to the current widespread belief in the “human trafficking” epidemic. I’m not saying it never happens, as we live in a wide world where all types of depravity can and does occur; but one should be forced to question how often that truly happens, and how much of it is media propaganda to demonize the idea of paid sex in general.
Specifically, the moralizing assumption that no one – especially not anyone under 18 – would ever choose to engage in it unless some abusive pimp or their own bad circumstances were literally forcing them to do it is the driving narrative of the age. It sounds remarkably like the yellow journalism from the likes of W.T. Stead, whose panic-driven and highly inaccurate statements about an alleged epidemic of child prostitution in 1880s London resulted in the formation of the stringent age of consent laws as we specifically know them today; and the similar moral panic surrounding a widespread belief in “white slavery rings” that made all the news in the first two decades of the 20th century. These moral panics impede almost any open-minded or thoughtful investigation of the phenomenon of “survival sex” or “rent kids,” so we can’t reliably learn exactly what it’s really like for the typical youth who engages in it.
>the current widespread belief in the “human trafficking” epidemic.
For a sceptical view that appeared earlier this month, see here:
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-myth-of-a-slavery-epidemic/16355#.VJbLIF4jA
The myth of a slavery epidemic
Officialdom’s war on ‘modern slavery’ is built on pure fear and fantasy.
Frank Fruredi
Spiked
16 DECEMBER 2014
Thanks very much for the book recommendation: looks great. Lancaster apparently also wrote Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua, which sounds like another must-read, for me at least.
Heather Corinna of Scarleteen, whom I very much admire even though I don’t agree with her on everything, apparently swapped sex for shelter a few times in her teens and has worked with kids who have also done so. In her view this is not necessarily some terrible trauma: the main problem is that in that situation it can be difficult for kids to negotiate condom use. Naturally nobody, except a few dedicated sex educators, wants to talk about how to help them do that. Vilifying the adults in question is easier and more fun.
those who participated in this discussion thread really should read Roger Lancaster’s excellent recent book SEX PANIC AND THE PUNITIVE STATE. “
My Required Reading list now stretches from here to London >_>
“the moralizing assumption that no one – especially not anyone under 18 – would ever choose to engage in it unless some abusive pimp or their own bad circumstances were literally forcing them to do it is the driving narrative of the age.”
I’ve already indicated elsewhere that my view on this matter is that people should have more choices, not fewer. If one simply abolishes options one believes to be bad, you could simply be destroying the lesser evil and leave people worse off. I simply can’t understand the position of people who think all prostitutes are force into prostitution by poverty, and decide this is a reason to get rid of prostitution. Nothing about expanding welfare; just getting rid of the job these people take to survive. Everyone protesting prostitution might as well be holding signs saying “we get off on the thought of poor women starving”.
(Of course, the point is moot since prostitution is a perfectly legitimate career. Sex-work is work.)
Sadly, James, in our current collective mindset, moralism trumps choice and the need to eat and have shelter over our heads. Because our culture insists that sexual activity is only moral and acceptable if done under very specific circumstances, consensual activity for purposes that society doesn’t approve of is criminalized. The secular, psycho-babble heavy rationalization for these “vice” laws is that no woman in her right mind would actually choose to do something as “disgusting” as have sex with strange men in exchange for money. Normal (read: “decent”) women simply do not do that. So, you will hear this justification used: “The only way a woman would ever actually choose to have sex with men for that reason is if their circumstances were so terribly desperate that they literally had no other choice. So, as far as I’m concerned, prostitution is not entered into by choice.”
Then they add all types of horrifying stories of vicious pimps and slave camp-like brothels, and brutal organized crime “rings” that run vast international sex slavery empires. That’s what I call the “epidemic myth.”Then the stereotype that the typical john who pays for sex is a woman-abusing monster is added to this narrative. Things like this do indeed happen periodically, and the vocation of prostitution is certainly not without risk. Of course, what the moral crusaders gleefully overlook is the fact that the direct cause of the riskier aspects of prostitution is the fact that it’s illegal, and thus forces women to work under secretive conditions that are not conducive to their safety.
Sound familiar? We’ve seen many variations of the “that choice wasn’t a legitimate choice” argument from moral crusaders, including in the age of consent argument. It’s interesting how that same argument is applied to legal adults under some circumstances as well. The same goes for the various applications of the bogeyman myths. These moral panics always take on subtle variations of the same common mythological tropes.
Indeed where the AOC is 15-16: For prostitution its always 18,obviously cos by the UN, 18 is officially an adult,so you can conveniently criminalize anyone that has sex under that age,any gifts is classed as prostitution!
Look at the Swedish model: they only criminalize the “men” for the purchase of sex.However these feminist driven laws are putting more prostitutes in danger,where the purchaser and the seller are under stress,they are forced even deeper into the shadows,exposing the women to a greater risk of harm!
Its not like prostitution has gone down in Sweden: they now have no idea!
And after all, men will always find a way of purchasing sex,when it is on offer!
Re: dangerous conditions brought about by criminalisation: absolutely. You can’t say fairer than backup from the British Medical Journal: http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/6/e005191.full
Also, if buying sex (as they call it in Scandinavia now) is made illegal, then the men who aren’t scared off by that and buy sex anyway will probably contain a higher than representative proportion of people with antisocial personalities who may be a danger to sex workers. And if a good-guy john spots something bad, such as trafficking or what have you, he’s a lot less likely to report it, because reporting means incriminating himself, perhaps breaking up his relationship, losing his kids, losing friends, losing his job…
I once heard that in the Netherlands in the 1980s there was actually a boy sex workers’ trade union. Anyone know if this is true?
“So, you will hear this justification used: “The only way a woman would ever actually choose to have sex with men for that reason is if their circumstances were so terribly desperate that they literally had no other choice. So, as far as I’m concerned, prostitution is not entered into by choice.””
And this is the part that baffles me. It raises the question: what thing is so awful that people are forced into prostitution to avoid it? Since prostitution is defined to be terrible, Awful Thing X must be even worse. Now the issue becomes: if you abolish prostitution you effectively force people to accept Awful Thing X which is, itself, even worse than prostitution. That’s the problem with restricting choice: you almost always make the situation worse by forcing the diminished choices to be even worse than whatever the status quo was. It’s never the worst possible choice which is removed because no one would choose it in the first place. This is all just simple economics I find it a stretch of my credulity to believe there are people who fail to see this. Can I just dismiss anti-sex-work “feminists” as non-existent leprechauns?
The Awful Thing X tends to be starvation and homelessness. The moral pundits claim that any decent people would simply donate money charitably to prevent these women or girls from being out on the street or starving, rather than “taking advantage” of their situation by having them exchange sex for money. As you said, never do you see them pushing the government to extend social programs so that no one is without a basic degree of food and shelter, or better yet, passing legislation that requires the government to guarantee everyone a job in public works if they can’t find one in the private sector.
Instead, the U.S. is too busy spending 50 cents of every tax dollar collected on the Pentagon for the war machine that is directly responsible for so much death and destruction across the globe, and another big chunk on subsidies for corporations who screw up, including the recent vast amounts spent on the bank bail-outs… much of which went into hefty bonuses for those same executives who nearly caused the U.S. economy to collapse, rather than paying federal prosecutors to see they got the jail time they deserved. And this is not to mention the imperialist and colonialist foreign policies of America, including their control over the World Bank and the IMF, that is directly responsible for much of the poverty that leads to widespread prostitution in the first place.
This is why I think it’s extremely hypocritical that these pundits pretend to be so concerned about morality, and spend more time “liberating” women from the sex work profession and arresting johns who purchase their services than putting their resources into changing these economic conditions and legislative policies in the first place. Regular citizens are always expected to be charitable, yet the government never is.
Dissident,
I felt like standing up and applauding after reading this post. Brilliant!
You dare to articulate the truth that the dominant ideology is driven to repress most vigorously; the fact that, in the name of a morality that only it has defined and imposed on everyone else, it has endangered, incarcerated, ruined and destroyed many individuals and families.
Where are the Lenny Bruces of the 21st century, I wonder, attacking this constipated, tight-arsed, moralistic tyranny with uncompromising humour?
Anyway, as you can probably guess, I wholeheartedly endorse your sentiments. Bravo!
Thank you, Ben. Your support is much appreciated!
“spending 50 cents of every tax dollar collected on the Pentagon “
Citation Needed
(Don’t doubt that the proportion is huge; just want a source on 50%)
” their control over the World Bank and the IMF, that is directly responsible for much of the poverty”
Citation Needed
You sure that they’re the direct causative factor behind the poverty? Don’t get me wrong: my country has gone through more than enough “fiscal adjustments” and “IMF” is kind of a swearword around here, but saying that it’s “directly responsible for much of the poverty” is a strong claim requiring strong evidence.
“Regular citizens are always expected to be charitable, yet the government never is.”
I find this to be particularly interesting since a government is basically a mechanism for coordinating the actions of the citizenry. The government being charitable is basically the same as every citizen (who can afford it) being charitable through their tax return.
I agree with the spirit of your and dissident’s point, but I think it should be noted that the difference between taxation and ‘coordinated charity’ is that by definition, taxation is non-voluntary.
In a system that runs on money (which I do not support in essence, but that’s a whole other topic), a public coffer is required to see to it that many essential services are covered for the general public that should not be left at the mercy of the “can’t pay, can’t have” mentality of the system. If this public coffer didn’t exist, then we would be forced to pay out of pocket for these services, or buy expensive insurance policies to do so (as we currently must do for health care), which would ultimately divest us of more of our dollars per month and per year than the tax requirement does.
That being said, the main reason why so many Americans in particular object to paying taxes is, 1) We get so little in exchange for our taxes compared to other developed nations, with so much of it going to the Pentagon and corporate welfare/bail-outs, instead of, for instance, universal health care, subsidized higher education, and superior public transportation; 2) The collective American ideology has a strong fetishistic reverence for money and those who have the most of it, that they equate the power and privilege of those few with the “success” and standing of the nation in general; and, 3) The portion of the citizenry in America who pays the bulk of the taxes is the “middle class,” not the wealthiest, something we do not oppose strongly enough due to our strong materialistic support for the concept of individualism (not to be confused with individuality). Because of all that, Americans disproportionately believe that it’s best if no one had to pay taxes, and see a link between liberty and the right to abstain from doing their part for the collective welfare of everyone, as opposed to just themselves.
This subject is mostly off-topic here, so I won’t delve into it in any greater detail, save in the future when it becomes directly relevant to the topic at hand.
I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this. I was just making a semantic point about the word ‘taxation’.
Ask and demand… and you shall receive, James, my friend.
“spending 50 cents of every tax dollar collected on the Pentagon “
Citation Needed
(Don’t doubt that the proportion is huge; just want a source on 50%)
As the below link from the National Priorities website makes clear regarding U.S. tax expenditures in 2013, the average taxpayer – meaning, member of the “middle class” – in the U.S. pays about $11,715.00 per fiscal year. Of that portion, about $3,174.25, or 27% of that, is remanded to military spending.
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2014/04/07/tax-day-pictures/
As the following 2010 article from the progressive Common Dreams website makes clear regarding the then-upcoming 2011 budget for the Pentagon:
“The 2011 military budget, by the way, is the largest in history, not just in actual dollars, but in inflation adjusted dollars, exceeding even the spending in World War II, when the nation was on an all-out military footing.
“Military spending in all its myriad forms works out to represent 53.3% of total US federal spending” [emphasis mine].
Not only that, but:
“US military spending isn’t just half of the US budget. It is also half of the entire global spending on war and weaponry. In 2009, according to the venerable War Resisters League, US military spending accounted for 47% of all money spent globally on war, weapons and military preparedness. What makes that staggering figure particularly ridiculous is that America’s allies–countries like France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan–account for another 21% of the world’s military spending. Fully 12 of the top-spenders among big military-spending nations are either allies of the US, or are friendly countries like Brazil and India. That is to say, America and its friends and allies account for more than two-thirds of all military spending worldwide.”
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2010/04/13/your-tax-dollars-war-more-53-your-tax-payment-goes-military
” their control over the World Bank and the IMF, that is directly responsible for much of the poverty”
Citation Needed
You sure that they’re the direct causative factor behind the poverty? Don’t get me wrong: my country has gone through more than enough “fiscal adjustments” and “IMF” is kind of a swearword around here, but saying that it’s “directly responsible for much of the poverty” is a strong claim requiring strong evidence.
Not the following 2005 article regarding the role of the World Bank and IMF behind the Bush administration’s financially motivated reasons for invading Iraq under the pretense of “liberating” the people from a dictatorship and just retribution for the 9/11 attacks and alleged stockpiling of WMDs, neither of which Iraq had anything to do with despite the fact that Hussein was indeed a dictator… albeit one fully supported and armed by the U.S. during the 1980s when he was “good” for U.S. business rather than defiant.
https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/168/37224.html
That is similar to how the World Bank – IMF operates in regards to what it expects in return for many developing countries around the globe who borrow funds from it, and thus become fiscally indebted to the org. This essentially makes the U.S. and other wealthy First World nations become creditors for all of these nations, and their inability to effectively pay back these urgently needed loans come at the price of the U.S. seizing de facto control over many aspects of their economy, including the privatization of much of their formerly government subsidized programs. This “restructuring” leads to a huge degree of hardship for the people who live there as mostly American corporations rack up the profits.
For a more thorough analysis of this, check out these top ten reasons to oppose the IMF from the Global Exchange website (which can be downloaded as a handy PDF file):
http://www.globalexchange.org/resources/wbimf/oppose
“Regular citizens are always expected to be charitable, yet the government never is.”
I find this to be particularly interesting since a government is basically a mechanism for coordinating the actions of the citizenry. The government being charitable is basically the same as every citizen (who can afford it) being charitable through their tax return.
As you can well note, it’s sadly ironic and hypocritical that a culture builds certain values that are inimical to the economic policies and supportive legislation of its own government.
How can citizens of a nation expect to develop charitable attitudes towards their fellow human beings if the very system they live under is built upon the encouragement of selfishness, one-upmanship, inequality, and ruthless competition? For those pundits who essentially have their heart in the right place when they oppose the exploitation of some people by others, why do they basically ignore the policies and economic rules of their own nation? Why do they simplistically seek to just “end” the practice of prostitution without changing the economic basis of their system, or at least initiate policies that provide guaranteed opportunities outside of that vocation in public works policies?
The same thing goes for their proposals to simply fire children employed under sweatshop conditions instead of instituting policies that replace such a labor environment with humane and ethical workplace conditions that could eliminate the perceived need to force children out of the labor force, and thus live under conditions that cause many to turn to prostitution? Instead, the progressive media has bastardized the term “child labor” by automatically making people who read the word conjure up images of bleak and merciless sweatshop conditions where children are forced to labor for 12 hours a day while earning pennies per hour.
This is what makes me suspect that these pundits are actually moral crusaders attempting to hide under a progressive skin. I should note that Robert Epstein delves into this issue in detail in his book Teen 2.0.
Well I checked out CommonDreams and I must say I’m…. unimpressed.
I knew something was up from the moment I read “The 2011 military budget […] exceeding even the spending in World War II”. Like, no shit? Do you even GDP growth? I feel tempted to find this Dave Lindorff guy and smack him over the head with the thickest Econ textbook I can find. Our science may be dismal, but this guy’s (mis)understanding of it seems downright depressing.
So then I checked out how he calculated “US military spending”. Needless to say, he showed the same fine intellect I expected from him. His classification of what money falls under the “military budget” is clearly gerrymandered. It was bad enough when he included ‘veterans benefits and health care spending’ since this is, in effect, basically welfare for military veterans. However, I accept that you could argue that if there wasn’t a military there wouldn’t be veterans and if you squint that looks a bit like saying vet benefits are military spending…. sort of…. in a way….
It’s when he said “$400 billion in interest on debt raised to pay for prior wars and the standing military” that the smoke started coming out of my ears. Did he seriously just decide that all US debt is used to fund the military? I’m not sure wtf he was smoking when he wrote this but I want a bag of it at my New Year’s Eve party. Interest paid on debts reflects debts which depend on what they were spent on. To say that all the interest lies at the feet of the US military requires you to assume that the military, until that year, got all the money! I know things are bad but still. You mean to tell me they didn’t spend a single dollar on public schools? This is either a massive tragedy or utter BS. *sniff* Judging by the smell, it’s the latter….
Then he says: “For the past decade, and continuing under the present administration, military budgets have been rising at a 9% annual clip, making health care inflation look tiny by comparison.” Part of this is, of course, the fact that his “military budget” is gerrymandered. Who could have guessed that the interest on debts you don’t pay back gets bigger? Fucking. Genius. What seems really weird, though, is his claim about healthcare. I didn’t have the data for the healthcare budget’s year-on-year increase for the decade so I took the increase from each budget from 2007-2011 (4.61%, 13.85%, 7.37%, 9.42%) and averaged it for a year-on-year increase of 8.81%. The data set is more restricted here but just assuming this is a little bit representative, it makes me wonder what the hell this guy means by “tiny by comparison”. A hair’s breath smaller?
At this point I just gave up on the article. I couldn’t take it. This simply confirmed my general rule of not going anywhere near a site who’s tagline includes the terms “news” and “progressive” since I can be 90% it’ll have neither. It’s not even like this article was bad by the standard of politics, but when you mess up this badly on basic Economics, that shit gets personal!
Now please excuse me while I load my gun and track down Mr. Lindorff’s address….
BTW: As may be implied by my previous comment, I’m kind of afraid to follow the link about the IMF for the sake of what little sanity I have left. I apologize since I can’t know for sure it’ll have any problems but it’s politics + economics so I don’t have much hope here. Not a single site is considerate enough to trigger warn for bullshit.
He actually did mention how much is spent on public schools, James. I can’t say I have the math and calculating skills that you have (impressive, to say the least!), but the fact that the American military is extremely bloated is a well known fact that can be easily observed when you see the degree of its colonialism and imperialism across the globe. I don’t believe everything I hear on “progressive” sites either, but you will scarcely see any of this info on the IMF or vast military expenditures of the U.S. compared to other nations reliably contradicted anywhere. In fact, American citizens (I’m sorry to say) routinely brag about the power and size of the U.S. military; it makes them feel powerful by proxy.
This whole subject is rather off topic, but I have found it an interesting exchange. I’d also like to congratulate Dissident on an admirably calm reply given that the stats he posted got such a blasting!
I don’t disagree with the substance. Only the specifics. What I said about schools was a joke. I agree with pretty much every political position you’ve expressed in this thread so far. However, I’m a stats nerd and an aspiring economist so when I see some of the things that were in that article. You’re fine. That Lindorff guy can’t economics to save his life.
X being starvation and death, I guess!
All I can say, Tom, is “Very, very good! Doing great! Sounding and looking great! What you’re doing is PERFECT for us! Great eye contact, really eloquent!”
LOL!
LOOOOOOOOOOL
I propose a new rule: any time someone delivers a compliment on this blog, they are to quote Humphries’ interview statements/questions.
Thanks for the idea, David. “What you’re doing is perfect for us!” 😀
Imagine having a group of frat boys listening to that interview while playing the “drinking game”: They have to gulp down a shot glass of vodka every single time Steve says, “You’re doing good, Tom.” How long would it be before those poor souls were suffering from alcohol poisoning? 20 minutes, tops?
Alright, I will try to post this *once* and see if it makes it past the spam filter, rather than keeping on hitting the button and flooding poor TOC’s inbox.
The polymath Quebecois researcher Pierre Tremblay has irritated many in the gay community by steadfastly pointing out that many gay boys actively seek out sex with men because they are only attracted to men, not to boys their own age. In his experience, it is not uncommon for men to mistreat these boys in various ways, but it is far from ubiquitous or inevitable. He wrote this fascinating and sympathetic paper http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/200/300/cicc/cahiers_recherche_criminologiques/CRC_2002_N36.pdf in which he extensively reports on, among other things, positive experiences of twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys in sex work.
This also makes an interesting read: http://www.brendabethman.com/queercity/2012/01/21/boys-who-like-boys-who-like-men-who-like-boys/ .
I think your point that in order to be successful at making friends with boys a man probably needs to be kind, affectionate and reliable is especially true because these are relationships between men and boys we are talking about. Boys are not brought up to believe that they will/should be swept off their feet by a tall, dark and handsome man. Quite the reverse. There’s nothing there for a man to take advantage of, and a fair amount that he has to overcome.
Anybody here know anything about Czech culture? Are they particularly sexually liberal? Because there’s that Prague Post interview, there’s the film Daniel’s World, and then there’s the world’s only zoophile rights organisation, Equality for All, which is also Czech. And there may be some hope for the zoophiles at that, given this recent ruling: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/21/orangutan-argentina-zoo-recognised-court-non-human-person
Thanks to David Kennerly for the very effective skewering of Humphries. And I thought this might amuse TOC (scroll down to posts 3-5): http://www.psychforums.com/paraphilias/topic154040-10.html
Tom, in my country (and many other civilized countries as well): 1) “crimes” like those would have been statute-barred for a long time, 2) even if they weren’t, they would by default entail a short suspended sentence because they were perpetrated a considerable time ago and because they have no connection with the current situation, and 3) people older than 70, particularly people with ill health, normally don’t go to jail. So my question to you is: are these judges ignorant, hypocrit, or are they just a kind of merely perfunctory puppets at the service of the system (sorry, I can’t see other possibilities)?
No time limitations here in the UK, I’m afraid. The present tsunami of “historic” cases means the prisons these days could be mistaken for old folks’ homes, going by the ever rising age of the inmates.
I see… However that may be, those judges of yours are adorned with lavish wigs!
Barrister Barbara Hewson has been particularly outspoken about the need for a statute-of-limitations in the U.K. to prevent just the sort of frenzy which we are now witnessing there. The U.S., where statute-of-limitations are offense-based and enacted state-by-state for state-level offenses, has mostly been done away with, unfortunately. It does, however, prevent the prosecution of those whose “offenses” had come under those laws before they were eliminated. So we still get to look forward to the day when offenses as old as those currently being prosecuted in the U.K. will be prosecuted in the States.
On that subject: I just got to your Peter Pan section in your book,Let’s face it,daytime Christmas TV is just full of kids animation and family-friendly clap-trap! So therefore iv’e got passed your section on the Netherlands,where you ask the question “how would these relationships turned out,If Jacko lived in the
Netherlands”? One thought that went through my head was,what if MJ was still alive and lived in the UK?
As for Christmas TV, I was only referring to daytime TV, saw some good thrillers late last night on film four: In fear and dead man’s shoes,both British-made films!
>One thought that went through my head was,what if MJ was still alive and lived in the UK?
Good question. If he had been put on trial in the UK for any such relationships he would not *in practice* have been able to remain silent as he did in his US trial of 2005. Remember, he never took the witness stand in his own defence in that case. In the UK the defendant has always *officially* had the right to silence but in recent years the law has been changed significantly. You are still entitled to remain silent but if you do so the jury will be instructed by the judge that they can draw an “adverse inference” from the silence i.e. jurors are allowed to think it is a guilty silence if the accused does not produce an innocent explanation of his conduct that he is prepared to defend on oath and in all likelihood under cross-examination.
You will see that there are several chapters on MJ’s trial in chapters after the one you are now reading. The book actually answers your question. See page 495 for a sneak preview. The question of his decision to take the stand or not is first discussed on page 418.
Anyway, I’m glad you’re reading the book (Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons). Thanks for your interest!
Since mr p has brought this up, I would be interested to know what you make of the new accusations against Jackson by Wade Robson and James Safechuck. To me it looks like both stood by Jackson while he was alive, then once a decent period had elapsed after his death started trying to get their hands on some of his cash.
>To me it looks like both stood by Jackson while he was alive, then once a decent period had elapsed after his death started trying to get their hands on some of his cash.
Exactly so, in my view. The circumstantial evidence always was pretty strong in relation to both of them, and now their testimony matches it.
I’d read it if it was safe to have in the house!
I suspect I’ve lost quite a lot of potential readers to that consideration! 🙁
*Raises hand*
That and money/time. It’s amazing how the threat of busybodies going through your books is such an effect form of censorship. What a terrible chilling effect 🙁
I’m trying to encourage Tom to release the book on Kindle or some other e-reader format. This could both make it more affordable and “covert”. Both of Tom’s books are excellent and I wholeheartedly recommend them.
Memo to self: must get around to this.
I second David’s point here, Tom. Getting both of your books into digital format would be a godsend. Not only would that make them more affordable, but having them secure on your reading tablet will prevent “nosy” individuals from happening upon them, as they can easily do if the treeware version of the book is laying around somewhere in the house, or on your bookshelf (mine is there, as I’m “out” in real life, so I have no problem with that… but others may not want just anyone to know they have subject matter of that sort in their possession). Better yet, reading tablets like the Kindle can be pass code protected, so even if someone other than the owner gets their hands on it in the house they cannot access its contents without the pass code.
When getting them in digital format, you just have to make sure that it’s formatted properly, so the text doesn’t look a mess in digital version. You could make it available in different formats, including epub, mobi, and PDF. I think Smashwords would likely allow you to sell it there, as there is nothing illegal about your book, and the administration there has recently vowed to allow all legal material to be sold there, unlike Amazon. Let’s see how serious they are about that vow. Note their stated commitment to this in their announcement of Paypal deciding to allow Smashwords authors to use its service to transact all legal books:
http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/03/paypal-revises-policies-to-allow-legal.html
Smashwords, eh? OK, worth thinking about. Thanks.
It IS safe to have Tom’s book in your house, Stephen (at least in the UK). Early this year the police seized all my BL novels, sociology/sexology books (Martinson et al), including MJ:DL, and they were all eventually returned to me, with no questions at all about the books.
Ah, when I said ‘safe to have in the house’ I was using a rather melodramatic phrase. I was referring to the possible reaction of certain members of my family if it was discovered.
I’m glad to hear you got your books back!
The courts and press always must assume harm whenever minors and sex is the issue. Without harm, they would have little else to use to prosecute the war against sex. That’s why it is always called rape. That is why they always call it abuse.
To the average consumer of the news, they merely take it in and store it. They do the same for the other sections of the news as well. That’s why our drones only kill “terrorists” and nobody else, and why when our politicians cut spending on programs for the 95%, it for our own good.
It’s propaganda pure and simple and the more people like you that are pushing back, the better off we all are.
It’s always intrigued me that when child salvationists hear the word “sex,” especially if it’s closely followed or preceded by the word “child”, they immediately seem to think of rape and violence, whereas those who have never repressed or forgotten their childhood sexuality are more inclined to think of words like “joyous” and “ecstatic.”
Tom’s superb post gives the clue: there are certain forces at work in language and meaning-making that we would do well not to ignore or remain ignorant of. Jacques Lacan called them “master signifiers.” I won’t bore anyone now with a long treatise on the Lacanian concept of the master signifier here (I know I’m an anorak and I can go off for ages on such topics, oblivious until it’s too late that everyone’s eyes have glazed over and they’re desperately seeking someone else to talk to or rescue them). But I’ll just say this: in Lacan’s work, master signifiers are special, unexpressed and unacknowledged terms that silently determine the meaning of the rest of the vocabulary we customarily use. The word “sex” means something entirely different when under the influence of the narrow and exclusionary master signifier “abuse/rape-and-incest” than it does under the generous and loving master signifier “ecstatically pleasurable and jubilantly thrilling shared intimacy.”
It seems from everything that Tom has written that Chris Denning’s erotic liaisons with adolescent boys fell into the latter category. But he has been judged in the vastly more brutal and primitively black-and-white terms of the former, and this is meant to represent the high-point of social morality, a form of progress that resembles the Dark Ages and The Inquisition.
So, when I was twelve and enjoying sexual intimacy, I was, according to the dominant master signifier, either abusing or being abused, despite the complete absence of coercion, intimidation or violence and the powerful presence of strong mutual desire. A few years later, I was simply expressing love. As Catherine Tate’s character “Nan” might have put it, “What a load of old sh*t!”
Absolutely. I think there can also be a covertly pornographic element to some of the news coverage of these things. It allows people to get their jollies while also feeling virtuous. Marty Klein puts it well here: https://www.ipce.info/library/web-article/sex-evil-film-11
I couldn’t agree more, A. You don’t have to be a Lacanian to work out that aggressive prohibition always eroticises whatever it most stridently forbids. This, it seems to me, is the toxic combination: aggressive prohibition sponsoring erotic fascination, a fascination that tends to become more violent in its fantasies as the prohibition becomes more brutal. The psychoanalytic term for this is Superego: an intrapsychic (and social) structure that takes full advantage of an inseparable opposition, converting simple erotic interest into fascination and then into a curiously hybrid form of enthralled revulsion that I call “disgustination”. Violence and murder are never very far away when disgustination is at work, as the ruinous sentences associated with “historic abuse” might suggest.
In Freud’s and Lacan’s work, the Superego is the very opposite of an ethical agency; it is never the “voice of conscience” as Freud is usually misrepresented as claiming. It’s the voice of sadistic moralism, or perverted piety – a piety that derives immense kicks of obscene enjoyment as it denounces the sexual scenarios it is most enthralled by. It’s a deeply perverse and a unassuageable agency, feeding off the material the ego (/public) believes to be prohibited by Authority but can’t help thinking about all the time precisely because it’s so aggressively prohibited.
The people who are the greatest danger to the wellbeing of the young, it seems to me, are precisely those self-appointed guardians of decency who cannot contemplate a child without picturing violation and rape. In their disgust (or ‘disgustination’), in their fanatical efforts to project the violence of their libidinal inclinations onto a scapegoat called ‘paedo’, they reveal a great deal about themselves, from a psychoanalytic point of view at least.
I like ‘disgustination’ very much. Carol Queen’s partner coined the term ‘absexual’, which Betty Dodson defines as a description of the sexuality of “folks who get off complaining about sex and trying to censor porn”.
Reminds me of a guy I listened to,on the radio,who worked with sex offenders.
“They are so devious,only a lethal injection will do!” I think wow! where does this hatred really come from?
Tom,
We stand up like Chris Denning. Our destruction will bring light and air to the world as did the Massacre of The Paris Commune. Life ahead is going to be better, much – much better because of us who are on the barricades.
RE: Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/fires-paris?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_DAILY_122314&CNDID=24436398&spMailingID=7383864&spUserID=MjczNzc1MjU1MzES1&spJobID=583038860&spReportId=NTgzMDM4ODYwS0
Linca