Heretic TOC

My old leftie friends are going to hate me for this, but I have become a neo-imperialist. Not since I was a 10-year-old schoolboy gloating over the world map showing all “our” countries in the British Empire, displayed in pink and stretching across the globe from Canada to Australia and New Zealand, with India and huge chunks of Africa in between, have I been so puffed up with pride in imperial conquest! Wherefore this sudden resurgence of vainglory? Well, the British Empire has been revived, overnight! Even the American colonies, lost by Mad King George a couple of centuries ago, have

Wow! It’s all happening! Jon Henley’s Guardian article on paedophilia yesterday has provoked an immediate and massive reaction. The piece itself drew over 900 comments on the paper’s website before the no doubt exhausted moderators closed the thread: they had been kept very busy reading and deleting abusive posts. In general, though, the exchanges, though passionate, included a lot of thoughtful if not always very well informed material. There were inevitably those who said they had been abused as children, and there were others who said they had enjoyed being sexually engaged with an adult, without later ill effects. I was

I’ll keep this brief, as I hope you will be more interested in reading the Guardian today than Heretic TOC. The long-awaited article by Jon Henley (see “Taking the hex off a media word in edgeways”, 23 Dec 2012) has finally appeared. Do tell me what you think of it, but first, in the next few hours, you might want to focus on sharing your views with the Guardian, in their comment space. Don’t dither: latecomers (tomorrow, say) are likely to find the comment thread closed.

Heretic TOC is pleased to have attracted on average around eight comments for every blog posted so far. A number have been rejected as unsuitable but the general standard has been gratifyingly high. Some commentators have expressed frustration over the 200-word limit. On the whole I feel it is a useful restriction which encourages everyone to focus on a particular point and stick to it. There will be times, though, when what is needed is not just a “point”, but a developed argument, much as you would expect to see in a good blog piece or an op-ed column in a

Heretic TOC has been on the move this week, on a hectic festive tour of duty almost as demanding as Santa’s, manoeuvring steadily southwards from the blog’s bleak northern fastness to greet old friends, and make merry and in ye fine olde taverns and ale houses of London. It’s proving a tough slog for the blog, which is totally unfamiliar with life on the road or, rather, railroad. Wi-fi was very welcome on Chiltern Trains, but proved to be heavily policed. I was refused access to the IPCE site (see Blogroll), which I needed for reference purposes in connection with the

Will America follow Obama’s bid to tackle the country’s insane gun laws? The signs are slightly more encouraging than in the wake of previous school massacres. Even the stone-hearts of the “right to bear arms” cannot face-down the butchery of so many little kids, right there in the face of the nation. We’d do well not to hold our breath though: any change is likely to be minimal, and long haggled over in ways that need not detain Heretic TOC. Here the focus will instead be on how we look upon such events, whether as individual pathology or cultural malaise. It