Heretic TOC

Not the dominant narrative

Gentle poet Ginsberg doesn’t deserve this

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Last time, Heretic TOC showed how the past is being pilloried in an orgy of accusations and recriminations. Among the cultural icons suddenly being denounced is the poet Allen Ginsberg – a remarkable twist of fate for his reputation so soon after being lionised as a crusader for freedom in two recent movies, Howl and Kill Your Darlings. But do those delivering the damning judgements really know what they are talking about? In a guest blog today, Eric Tazelaar points out that the younger generation of commentators would not have known those they now so freely castigate – unlike Eric, who […]

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Paedogate puts the past in the pillory

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You know when a scandal has made it to the news big league when it gets the “gate” tag, like Watergate. Well, the last ten days or so in the UK have given us Paedogate, in which the rabid right wing Daily Mail launched a sustained campaign to expose left wing support for the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) when I was its Chair back in the 1970s. The aim was clearly to embarrass and undermine three leading figures in the Labour party. It worked. Initially dismissed as old hat because the story had been around for years as vague internet gossip,

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Home Secretary cheated justice by dying!

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It’s not Harman and co. the media should be after but Roy Jenkins, the former Home Secretary, who cunningly escaped justice by dying over a decade ago. Unlike Jimmy Savile whose “victims” (alleged victims, actually, despite increasingly injudicious assertions to the contrary by people who ought to know better, including the politically ambitious former DPP Sir Keir Starmer) numbered only in the hundreds, Jenkins was responsible for policies that affected millions, ushering in the “permissive society” of the 1970s that was responsible for all manner of evils if you believe the likes of Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens – and

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A dam smart way to divert attention

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The Itaipu Dam, which I visited this week, was dubbed one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers 20 years ago, following the project’s opening a decade earlier in 1984. I agree. It is unquestionably an immense and marvellous engineering triumph, generating sufficient hydro-electric power to supply nearly 20% of Brazil’s electricity and 90% of Paraguay’s, drawing on a vast quantity of water from the Parana River that marks the border between the two countries. In terms of electricity generated, it still beats the mighty Three Gorges Dam in China. It also generates

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The high price of respectability in Brazil

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As slums go, the Santa Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro is remarkably pretty, even glamorous.  The stinking open sewers, garbage-strewn alleys and tumbledown shacks are doubtless much like those in many hundreds of such favelas, home to almost a quarter of the city’s population of over six million. But Santa Marta is special. One thing that makes it so, in the mantra of the real estate dealers, is “location, location, location”. Unlike the  vast, sprawling, nondescript favelas of industrial north Rio, Santa Marta lies in the favoured south, only a couple of Metro stations away from well-heeled Copacabana, with its

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The NSPCC is talking PANTS – as usual

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When Genesis superstar Phil Collins and England international soccer player Gary Lineker endorsed an anti-paedophilia campaign some years back on British TV, the script had them declaring “I’m talking Nonce Sense!” As Brits will know, “nonce” is slang for MAPs, and the campaign was called Nonce Sense. Or it would have been except that the whole thing was a satirical spoof. The joke was on the stars and other worthies who took part, including politicians and a senior police officer. They thought they were talking Nonce Sense, but as viewers soon realised, they had been set up to talk nonsense. For

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Skateboarding as metaphor for social shifts

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Heretic TOC welcomes Peter Herman as a guest blogger today. Peter is an occasional contributor to the NAMBLA website, and has been a member and supporter since shortly after the organization’s founding. He has also been one of the editors of the NAMBLA Bulletin. In the late 1960s in the US, child abuse briefly captured everyone’s attention. It was not sexual abuse if that is what you were thinking. It was physical abuse of children. And, no, neither was it the seat of the pants spankings that were a generally accepted form of discipline at the time. It was the broken

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The pre-WEIRD world, according to Rind

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Dr Bruce Rind charts new territory in his latest published work. Or rather he newly charts some very old terrain, going deep into history and beyond, to the evolutionary origins of our sexuality. There are literally charts, six magnificent ones, each of which sets out a table of studies and a summary of their findings across a great swathe of fascinating erotica and exotica, with characteristic Rindian thoroughness. Did you know, for instance, that “pederastic-like behaviour” is so pervasive among bighorn sheep that females will mimic young males in order to get sexual attention from the more mature males! Or that

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Cognitive 'distortions' and dissonance

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Welcome to 2014 at Heretic TOC! No looking back over the past year, this time, or crystal ball gazing into the future. There’s so much to talk about I’m just going to crack on, starting with GirlChat. Every online minor-attraction forum is surely acutely aware their deliberations are followed with interest by law enforcement authorities and monitoring bodies such as the Internet Watch Foundation. But do they know that academic researchers have their spies too? I can’t find any chat on GirlChat to suggest they know their forum was under particularly intense investigation in August 2012. If I’m wrong, blame Google

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Benjamin Britten: both ‘gay’ and a boy lover

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Benjamin Britten, as a boy lover, will need little introduction to many heretics here, especially after a new biography in this centennial year of the great composer’s birth, and all the other razzmatazz that attends celebrity. So is there anything more to be said about him, as the year draws to its close? There’s the usual exclusion principle to note, of course, which makes it impossible to be simultaneously both an esteemed figure and a paedophile, or not an active one at least. Britten still just about makes the cut in this regard: his hebephilic, rather than truly paedophilic, preference for

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