Heretic TOC

Not the dominant narrative

Tom O'Carroll

Standing up for justice and diversity

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Galen Baughman is a star, a master of stand-up. Not stand-up comedy, although he is surely smart enough for that, but stand-up persuasion. Telling a personal story with modest, dignified eloquence, this presentable 32-year-old weaves a narrative that artfully compels the sympathies of a mainstream audience who might be expected to loathe him, for he is speaking as a so-called “sex offender”. He stands, alone in the spotlight, for a TEDx talk delivered late last year to college students in New York about his nine-year imprisonment for sex with a willing 14-year-old boy, and his close brush with indefinite incarceration under […]

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Down and dirty in the VP basement

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A confession: distaste for Virtuous Pedophiles (VP) has hitherto deterred me from undertaking a thorough scrutiny of their website. I thought I knew quite enough about them, thank you very much, from their media coverage, plus exchanges with co-founders Nick Devin and Ethan Edwards on Sexnet and here on Heretic TOC. Their input of comments to last week’s blog, Humble or haughty, nasty is naughty, however, meant I would finally have to get down and dirty, scouring their lair from attic to basement in order to make a properly informed response. That is why I have taken a bit of time

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Humble or haughty, nasty is naughty

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When New York-based journalist Paul Willis, from a newish online outfit called VICE News, emailed me early in December, I was not overly excited by his proposition. In fact, I found it a bit depressing, albeit worthy of attention. He wanted to know about paedophiles who suffer from depression. Well, many do, of course. Nothing surprising about that given the stigma and oppression we have to put up with, even if we behave like saints. Mercifully for me, I am blessed with a generally optimistic and cheerful disposition: I may be down, but never for long. So I thought I was

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Truth, reality and baby elephants

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It’s slowly getting better now, I think, following the “distractions of a pressing nature” reported in the middle of the month. I was felled like a Christmas tree at the time, though, and for me the festive season, although joyous in its way, has also seen a great shedding of needles onto the carpet. Needles of truth; shards of reality. Loads of bollocks. What use has the carpet for truth and reality? Why would a Christmas tree make such an improbable gift? What can I say? Not much, unfortunately, except that I fear for this blog’s mojo: will it be lost?

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Truth will not survive the survivors

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  Distractions of a pressing nature unfortunately prevent me from focusing on the new blog that heretics will be expecting round about now. So forgive me if I confine myself to noting some topical items that ought not to go unmentioned, albeit without much original analysis. Most obviously, the Goddard inquiry has stirred into some sort of life again after twice being almost strangled at birth by the very “victims” who are most insistent on the importance of its success. It may be recalled that the so-called Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (it will be “independent” of any heretical input,

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Freedom strangled by macabre fantasies

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Herewith the concluding part of Dissident’s two-part guest blog, which began with Apple bites man from the government.   Who Loves Being Afraid of the Dark? Note the suspicious and familiar-sounding claims surrounding the authorities’ move against Eric Eoin Marques, the founder of server Freedom Hosting, who has been touted as the CP kingpin of the world. I’m not saying “extreme” interests do not exist, or that there aren’t various sites offering means of conducting illegal activity, sometimes commercially. And I’m certainly not denying that human depravity and even pure evil exists out there. What I am saying, however, is that organized

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Apple bites man from the government

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Prolific Heretic TOC contributor Dissident steps up from the Comments column today to the top of the page, with Part 1 of a two-part guest blog on the related topics of state security, fear-mongering and the Dark Net. His piece was submitted on the eve of the Paris terrorist attacks. Although these awful events thus go unmentioned, there is no need to be deflected by them. Dissident’s piece is about baseless, irrational fears, rather than entirely well-founded ones about jihadist fanatics. For more about Dissident, who has a substantial body of published work to his name, see my introduction to his

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Extremists plot to disrupt ‘distressing’ dissent

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Today is Heretic TOC’s third anniversary. So I hope you will join me, in spirit at least, in celebrating. Cheers! Looking back, the occasion of the first anniversary was marked by some rather uncharacteristically gloomy reflections on my part titled What’s the point of it all, really?  To my own question, I replied: To be entirely honest, I am not sure. I know there are umpteen blogs I want to write, and that I am in absolutely no danger whatever of running out of things to say… But I do sometimes wonder whether… I might do better to concentrate my limited

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Holy hots, why not child sex robots?

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It had to be a spoof, didn’t it? Billed as an article lifted from the sober Washington Post, the piece I was reading online about some nutty professor campaigning to ban humans from having sex with robots must surely have been lifted from The Onion. Even the clinical psychologist David Ley, who posted the piece on the research-oriented Sexnet forum, said he hoped it was a parody. But the reference to checkable names of academics and their universities suggested otherwise. First and foremost there was Kathleen Richardson, a senior research fellow in the ethics of robotics at De Montfort University in

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Time to say R.I.P. to V.I.P. 'paedo scandal'?

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At last, a welcome return to some semblance of sanity as the “Westminster VIP paedophile ring” goes up in smoke – a smoke ring, as it were, or a stinking but otherwise insubstantial blast of gas from arse-talking fantasists and a few politicians on the make. The most prominent of the politicians, Tom Watson MP, was recently elected deputy leader of the Labour Party but now finds his reputation slithering into the toilet faster than a dose of diarrhoea. Last night he faced criticism in parliament from prime minister David Cameron, no less. He made a spirited fight of it in

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