Rescuing People from Cults

It isn't hard to imagine a child being brought up by parents within a small community of bizarre cult beliefs. The child would initially accept the programming without question no matter how damaging, because that is what small infants are hard-wired to do. Later they might begin to question the ideas, but everyone they know would profess conviction and it is easy to see the difficulty of snubbing their entire community and becoming a social outcast.

If we were able to rescue the victim from the grip of the cult, then even as an adult it would be difficult to reverse the damage. We would need to train the critical thinking skills that all cults must suppress to exist. Our efforts might well look like the popular notion of 'brainwashing'.

This is precisely what the Chinese are being accused of with the Uighurs. Some are calling it "psychological torture", and even the BBC are calling it "systematic brainwashing".

"Wait a minute," you say, "the Uighurs are Muslims, not a cult." I'm sorry, but indoctrinating billions of people rather than dozens does not make it better, but much worse. No, I don't know what is going on in the camps. It is perfectly possible that I wouldn't agree with the treatment. But I do applaud the intentions. And no, I don't think that it should be only Chinese Muslims that are re-educated. The Catholics and Buddhists would benefit as well.

Reports from the camps say that people are being forcibly removed from their community, that authorities are trying to transform behaviour and beliefs, and that they promote repentance and confession. (Remind you of anything?) Isn't that exactly what our rescue attempts from a cult would look like?

Some are claiming that the authorities are trying to wipe out the Uighurs of Xinjiang as a separate cultural group, but I see no evidence of that. People are being re-educated to counter years of religious indoctrination, and then returned to their community. They are not being exterminated.

No, of course we should not grant China carte blanche in their handling of minority groups, and the Chinese propensity for deceit certainly does not help. But I would urge you to consider whether we are being fed a very one-sided version of what is happening – a version that pampers to the asinine Western acceptance of child abuse in the form religious indoctrination.

People are naturally irrational. One of the glories of humanity is that we have education to counter it. Teaching irrationality to children, as all faiths must to survive, is a very common and widespread immoral affront to civilization.

Boris Johnson is a Pathological Liar

When I was a teenager, our class were caught gambling and the head decided to cane us. He lined us up to ask each child if they were involved. Nobody lied; the idea of dishonesty was much worse than the fear of corporal punishment. Boris Johnson is the exact opposite: a pathological liar; a delinquent who derives psychological satisfaction from the slightest deceit; from getting one over on people. And he covers up any exposed mendacity with further fabrications. He was unanimously found guilty of lying to the Head of State by eleven Supreme Court judges. He was fired from his job as a journalist for a campaign of systematic lies about the EU over a prolonged period and after multiple warnings. He conspired to deceive the nation before the Brexit vote with deliberately misleading financial propaganda, when the Treasury's own forecast for leaving was for significant long-term financial disadvantage. He knowingly lied about the difficulty of getting a Brexit settlement with the EU. W

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Covering Your Router In Aluminium Foil

A friend was given a suggestion by someone from IT to alleviate network connection issues. The suggestion is to wrap their router in "tin foil". When they'd finished laughing, they called me for an opinion. Assuming they meant ordinary aluminium kitchen foil, the suggestion is ludicrous. The best you might hope for is that it doesn't make any difference. If it has any affect it would surely be to act as a Faraday cage, keeping external radiation out and internal radiation in. I decided to test it. I performed six throughput runs alternating between uncovered and loosely covered with a folded sheet of kitchen foil. Each run consisted of three one-minute trials, where TCP upstream and downstream speeds were averaged using TamoSoft Throughput. The server was my development PC upstairs; the client a downstairs laptop two metres from the router. Both were connected on the 5GHz WiFi band. Here are the results. The best you can say for the foil is tha

Aniseed Balls

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