Heretic TOC

This blog is under threat of closure. Scarlet Wilde@wilde has tweeted: “Paedophile blogs at WordPress: Heretic TOC, Boy Chat, Girl Chat, CLover, Every Farthing, Growing Up Sexually, (more) am reporting to close.” If the site goes down, I’ll aim to reopen elsewhere but it may take a while. Keep an eye out for new link announced at the start of the month on Boy Links or contact me here to be on list for info about new URL: tomocarr66@yahoo.co.uk . Also, advice appreciated on best way forward. Can we fight this?

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