Heretic TOC

Not the dominant narrative

Tom O'Carroll

Driving kids crazy: Part 3, gender

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In Part II of this three-parter on the mental health of young people, the focus was on that part of the lives of children and adolescents in which adults are not present, a realm where there is the possibility of developing self-reliance and confidence in peer groups. It was concluded there is a strong case for saying their independent culture has been disastrously undermined. It would be simplistic to suppose, though, that the present crisis of mental health begins and ends with this dimension of concern. As well as culture there is gender, for instance. In our present era of relative […]

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Driving kids crazy: Part 2, culture

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What could possibly count as insanity in a world that votes to make a narcissistic sociopath its most powerful person? Admittedly, we didn’t all have the right to vote, but over two hundred million did. We are told many of those millions are mad as hell, but are they just mad? Are their delusions so profound they should be considered clinically psychotic? I wrote last time that we have moved on since the anti-psychiatry movement of half a century ago. But “Explorer” put me right by commenting that it is actually still alive and well, as evidenced by the website Mad

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Are we (or they) driving kids crazy?

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A barrage of reports lately provides powerful evidence that young people, including teenagers and children, are suffering an epidemic of mental illness. A large-scale study of 30,000 pupils by the Department for Education for England, with thousands of teenagers aged 14 and 15 interviewed in-depth, showed a 10% rise in poor mental health over the last decade; depression or anxiety afflicted one in three teenage girls. The number of under-16s being admitted to hospital for self-harm shot up by an astonishing 52%. A recent survey in England found that one in four women between 16 and 24 had self-harmed, and one

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Does ‘moe’ mean less as Japan moves on?

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Many heretics here will be familiar with ロリコン, though probably only when transcribed from Japanese into our alphabet as “lolicon”. Today we are privileged to have a guest blog on the subject by “Peace”, who doesn’t need translations. Peace knows Japanese and has been reading Japanese message boards, news sites, and blogs for some few years now, as well as sites written by English-speaking people living in Japan. He has also translated Japanese fan-made comics and zines. In his early twenties, Peace is a post-grad student, who spends most of his free time either writing fiction or translating comics and short

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LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM – WTF?

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… localism instead of convergence, identitarianism instead of universalism, short-sighted egotism instead of collaboration, and the calamitous idea of focusing on those considered to be similar while shunning “the other”. I fear the way that so many people hope to defend themselves from the malaise of life, from existential confusion, by choosing a group identity and sticking to it.  – Carlo Rovelli, theoretical physicist, former radical student activist, historian of the philosophy of science The politics of identity is narcissistic and needy…. It’s all inherently censorious. Because if your political activism is indistinguishable from your natural characteristics or cultural identity, then

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People who live in glass houses…

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Today Heretic TOC welcomes a debut guest blogger, “David”,  who is a 50-year-old security officer from Southern England and a  spare-time student of current affairs, politics, history, and religion. He deplores the use of paedophilia by the Far Right as a stick to beat Muslims with, attacking the hypocrisy of some key figures. The Far Left does not escape his critical attention either.  ISLAM, RIGHT-LEFT EXTREMIST POLITICS AND PAEDOPHILIA Islam is one of the world’s major religions with more than one billion faithful followers and growing rapidly across the globe with every year. We are all familiar with the media demonisation of ordinary

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The seven ages of sexual attractiveness

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Neologophilia is a terrible disease that can wreak havoc on its victims, especially those who become trapped inside neologisms emanating from the warped minds of mad scientists. It all started over a century ago with Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing, a man apparently destined by an odd quirk of nominative determinism to become obsessed with strange names. For it was Krafft-Ebing, as he is usually known, who gave us the term “paedophilia erotica” and a whole lot of other new words for sexual “perversions”, now known as “paraphilias”. In more recent times the palm

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Willy power and 'the will to power'

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Women are apt to chastise us guys for being ruled by our dicks, and there is no shortage of high-profile cases that would seem to prove them right. Time and again, prominent figures such as Bill Clinton have fallen from grace thanks to sexual indiscretions of a crazily risky kind, temptations to which they could only have succumbed if their brains were being bypassed at the time. When a Kind man finds himself in trouble over an illicit relationship, no matter how consensual, the outcome is of course much more serious than for a politician, whose job and reputation may be

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The chair is dead, long live the chair!

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The shock resignation of Justice Lowell Goddard as chair of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) last week, offered in a perfunctory two-line letter without explanation, followed by a statement that likewise gave little away, initially brought howls of outrage against the New Zealand-based lawyer, claiming victims would see it as a betrayal; but this was soon followed by hints that she had actually been sacked. My guess is that she was indeed pushed, because her incompetence after 18 months in the job was becoming an unsustainable public embarrassment. She had shown herself to be confused by “local law”

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Acceptable danger: the sky is the limit?

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Paranoid parenting and the “protective” coddling of cotton wool kids are rightly being challenged these days even from such a professionally risk-averse source as Britain’s Health and Safety Executive. Over-protection has made children prisoners in their own homes and led to an epidemic of obesity. It renders them timid and fragile as well: even mild criticism is enough for the snowflake generation to fall to pieces, and the intolerance of robust debate among students of this mindset has become so debilitating as to present a grave threat to free speech. In the face of these alarming trends there is increasingly a consensus that

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