Prof Ken Plummer, left, and former PIE head Tom O'Carroll: apologists for child rapists.
"Paedophilic interest is natural and normal for human males," said the presentation. "At least a sizeable minority of normal males would like to have sex with children ...
Normal males are aroused by children."
Some yellowing tract from the Seventies or early Eighties, era of abusive celebrities and the infamous PIE, the Paedophile Information Exchange? No. Anonymous commenters on some underground website? No again.
The statement that paedophilia is "natural and normal" was made not three decades ago but last July. It was made not in private but
as one of the central claims of an academic presentation delivered, at the invitation of the organisers, to many of the key experts in the field at a conference held by the University of Cambridge.
Other presentations included "Liberating the paedophile: a discursive analysis," and "Danger and difference: the stakes of hebephilia."
Hebephilia is the sexual preference for children in early puberty, typically 11 to 14-year-olds.
Another attendee, and enthusiastic participant from the floor, was one
Tom O'Carroll, a multiple child sex offender, long-time campaigner for the legalisation of sex with children and former head of the Paedophile Information Exchange. "Wonderful!" he wrote on his blog afterwards. "It was a rare few days when I could feel relatively popular!"
Last week, after the conviction of Rolf Harris, the report into Jimmy Savile and claims of an establishment cover-up to protect a sex-offending minister in Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet, Britain went into a convulsion of anxiety about child abuse in the Eighties. But unnoticed amid the furore is a much more current threat:
attempts, right now, in parts of the academic establishment to push the boundaries on the acceptability of child sex.
Comment: As Sott.net editors made clear on last night's Sott Talk Radio show, there is growing evidence that the USA's days as the dominant world power are numbered, and indeed, that the 'Number 1' position that the USA has enjoyed for the last 100 years has been an aberration, an anomaly that has caused untold suffering on the planet and only came about through manipulation, threats, dirty tactics and aggression.
The reality of the situation is that the majority of the world's resources are found in Eurasia, and that the nations of the Eurasian landmass have been kept artificially divided and 'down' by the machinations of the US elite and their ideological kin in Western Europe. With the resurgence of Eurasian nations, primarily Russia and China, and the increasing exposure of the US economy being backed mainly by military force rather than tangible assets, the old status quo is being seen as no longer tenable, and the USA is increasingly being exposed as a failing and desperate Empire that is acting in increasingly erratic and irrational ways as it sees the writing on the wall.