Heretic TOC

Not the dominant narrative

Tom O'Carroll

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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So-called abuse was ‘best thing ever’

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The talk is all Brexit here in Britain, from breakfast to bedtime, and quite rightly so given its huge importance – that and the political shenanigans that have foisted a new prime minister on the country and threaten to shatter the main opposition party. But Heretic TOC is going to show Brexit the exit today as there has also been a lot of Kind news that should not pass unnoticed: not just the now horribly routine draconian sentences but a thoroughly mixed bag of significant stories, with glimmers here and there of resistance to the mainstream abuse narrative. Forgive me for

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Judicial self-delusion on a global scale

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“Britain’s worst paedophile,” we learned earlier this month, “who abused up to 200 Malaysian children and posted videos of his depraved acts online has been given 22 life sentences.” The Daily Mail version of a news story splashed globally said “Richard Huckle, from Ashford in Kent, admitted an unprecedented number of offences against children aged between six months and 12 years from 2006 to 2014.” The judge, Peter Rook QC, was quoted: “You had become consumed with paedophilia. Your life revolved around your obsession with your own sexual gratification”. We heard that as Huckle, aged 30,  was taken down to the

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Should we stay or should we go?

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  “The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That’s one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population – the intelligent ones or the fools?”  – Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People Do you REMAIN confused, or does the Brexit decision LEAVE no room for doubt? We British heretics may or may not have it all sorted before referendum day in a week’s time on Thursday 23 June, but should we really care? Why bother even turning up

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A grim dispatch from the Eastern Front

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Believe it or not, things could be even worse, as today’s guest blogger Cyril Eugenovich Galaburda amply demonstrates with reference to the fate of those damned as paedophiles in Russia. Cyril is a physics graduate in his early thirties with advanced knowledge of plasma physics and IT; he has also undertaken postgraduate studies in psychology. From Ukraine, he speaks Russian and English as well as his own native language and has completed a number of ambitious translations into Russian, including the Rind et al. 1998 meta-analysis, Bertrand Russell’s Proposed Roads To Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism and my own Paedophilia: The

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Latin lovers versus British bum bandits

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The web of suspicion, stigma, bureaucratic regulations and punitive laws that “protects” minors today from unauthorized contacts with adults has become a form of age apartheid as ugly and in-yer-face as the razor-wire fences thrown up across Europe to keep out refugees – and many of us, including one recent commentator here, might feel this web is much more effective than the fences. Thwarted in his attempts to be sociable, never mind sexual, across the age divide, Sapphocidaire is sceptical there are many youngsters who would welcome relationships with anyone more than a few years older. I had responded to a

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Title IX: discrimination against discussion

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Professor Thomas K. Hubbard, a leading expert on sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome, is a busy man. I caught up with him early last month at Edinburgh University, where I heard him presenting a paper at the annual conference of the Classical Association. More about that later, but first we must whisk him off back to his own seat of learning, the University of Texas, Austin, where, later in the month, he was giving a speech to welcome participants at another conference, this time one he had organised himself, on a theme very much about our own time and culture.

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The law, lore and allure of the jungle

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Mowgli, the little Indian boy who grows up with wolves in Rudyard Kipling’s fabled fables, has been brought to life, or at least to animation, in over a dozen movies. First in the role was Sabu, in 1942. The son of an elephant driver, he had himself been cast as a young mahout in the 1937 film Elephant Boy, based on another Kipling yarn. The best remembered Mowgli these days, though, is the cartoon character in Disney’s classic 1967 animation The Jungle Book. And now Neel Sethi, aged 12, a first-generation Asian-American, takes the role in a just released Disney version

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