Heretic TOC

Not the dominant narrative

Tom O'Carroll

Deep in the weird heart of Texas

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“Keep Austin weird!” This eccentric battle cry of a city that is the state capital of Texas surprised me when I looked the place up, especially when I discovered that weird in this context essentially means liberal. After all, the state that gave the world George W. Bush is notorious for its right-wing hard-line anti-liberalism. But that is the point. It turns out the capital is a cultured city, an oasis of civilized values in the midst of a redneck desert – which goes a long way to explaining how it came to play host recently to a conference that included […]

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Making virtues of ‘necessity’ and ignorance

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Many thanks, first of all, to all those who have contributed such excellent posts to a lively debate here at Heretic TOC in response to last week’s blog by the Virtuous Pedophiles. So, what are we left with after the blog itself plus some 7,000 words of comment? I think it will be a useful exercise for me not so much to sum up all this diverse input as to single out a few key themes. In doing so, I am also taking into account a further 3,000 words of email debate, to which I was privy, initiated by psychologist Prof.

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Virtuous turkeys vote for Christmas

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Heretic TOC offers no detailed comment for the moment on the following guest blog, submitted without invitation by self-styled “virtuous” paedophiles Ethan Edwards and Nick Devin, although the headline speaks for itself. Some will wonder why I agreed to carry this piece at all, perhaps feeling all it will do is take us into sterile sparring and deeper entrenchment in mutual antagonism. However, I think there is enough to justify publication, both in terms of clarifying the VP position and obliging us to think about aspects of reality on which we might prefer to bury our heads in the sand. Or,

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Daylight robbery follows thief in the night

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Today’s guest blog is a follow-up to Heretic TOC’s Freedom stolen by a thief in the night, earlier this month, which reported on a sneaky bid by British politician Sir Paul Beresford MP to squeeze a new law under the radar. The Bill would make possession of written material about children illegal if deemed pornographic. This guest piece was submitted by “Mr Phil” as a comment on the original blog, but I feel it needs greater prominence: it presents a lot of new information on this and other dangerous shenanigans currently in play in the UK Parliament. “Mr Phil” prefers to

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A plague on both your APA houses

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Heretic TOC’s first anniversary blog promised something important was on the way. The life-threatening mental anguish of minor-attracted teenagers to which today’s shocking photos draw attention surely measures up to that criterion. This blog has had a strict no photos policy until now, explicitly to avoid any possible association with images of child abuse. Ironically, it is precisely such abuse that Heretic TOC now feels an urgent need to expose: abuse not by adult molesters or rapists but by two organisations that ought to be helping young people instead of making their lives unbearable. These are the American Psychiatric Association and

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What’s the point of it all, really?

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It is exactly a year since the launch of Heretic TOC. Time to celebrate, then? I can’t honestly say I am in party mood. There will be no birthday cake with a solitary candle to blow out. We heretics are too close to being snuffed out ourselves for that to be good symbolism. The very first blog, titled The real silenced voices, began with the words “Are we in the midst of paedogeddon?” This was a reference to the Jimmy Savile upheaval, and the short answer to the question still looks horribly like “Yes”. Only this week there was further fallout

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Freedom stolen by a thief in the night

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It’s been a bad week here in Britain for freedom of expression. For starters, Heretic TOC’s voice has been choked off by a “broadband” connection getting narrower and narrower for weeks now, finally strangling the life out of any internet availability in recent days. This follows a service “upgrade” by my ISP, which, in the Orwellian language of our times, is actually a downgrade. No doubt it’s all a government plot, which is exactly what the press have been claiming about the new royal charter on press regulation, sealed this week (under the Great Seal of the Realm, stamped onto scarlet

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What’s healthy about the selfie

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Back in August, in Cameron’s crusade and the ‘sexting’ generation, Heretic TOC noted the British prime minister’s triple-pronged attack on internet pornography, inevitably underpinned by the supposed need to protect “innocent” children from exposure to it, as though they had no independent interest of their own – a point deeply undermined, it may be recalled, by an NSPCC report showing that sexting now plays a big part in children’s lives. Sexting, indeed, is clearly exciting a lot of grown-ups, too, or rather inciting them to a discursive frenzy, not all of it expressing the dominant moral panic narrative. One fascinating departure

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To thine own self be true

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A guest blog, today, comes from Dave Riegel, who also contributed The missing mechanism of harm back in February. His theme this time, as will be seen, is very much related to recent debates here at Heretic TOC. Dave has had a number of articles published in peer-reviewed journals, including the prestigious Archives of Sexual Behavior. He has also pioneered the use of internet surveys to reach minor-attracted persons, especially BLs. Self Respect  “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” (Shakespeare: Hamlet,

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A less impaired vision of sexuality

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If Heretic TOC were to put it about that the American Psychological Association supports an age of consent of eight, you might think I was having a laugh. You would be right, too, except that when the opinions of over 300 doctoral members of that august and conservative organisation were surveyed on what assessment criteria they thought would show capacity to consent, they came up with very basic factors, such as knowledge of the consequences of sexual behaviour, that an earlier study by one of the same researchers had shown could be met by those with a mental age of eight.

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