[ExI] The last chance to stop Trump

[Dylan Distasio]

John-

I've read your extropian related posts.  You strike me as very intelligent,
which leads me to the conclusion that you are suffering from one of the
worst cases of cognitive dissonance I have ever come across.  I'm sure you
already know the answer in regard to Wyoming but will not acknowledge it,
so I'm not going to even bother answering.

Scott Adams does a good job of summing up what you are suffering from right
now.  I'm sure pointing this out won't help break through the bubble though:

This brings me to the anti-Trump protests. The protesters look as though
they are protesting Trump, but they are not. They are locked in an
imaginary world and battling their own hallucinations of the future. Here’s
the setup that triggered them.

1. They believe they are smart and well-informed.

2. Their good judgement told them Trump is OBVIOUSLY the next Hitler, or
something similarly bad.

3. Half of the voters of the United States – including a lot of smart
people – voted Trump into office anyway.

Those “facts” can’t be reconciled in the minds of the anti-Trumpers.
Mentally, something has to give. That’s where cognitive dissonance comes in.

There are two ways for an anti-Trumper to interpret that reality. One
option is to accept that if half the public doesn’t see Trump as a
dangerous monster, perhaps he isn’t. But that would conflict with a
person’s self-image as being smart and well-informed in the first place.
When you violate a person’s self-image, it triggers cognitive dissonance to
explain-away the discrepancy.

So how do you explain-away Trump’s election if you think you are smart and
you think you are well-informed and you think Trump is OBVIOUSLY a monster?

You solve for that incongruity by hallucinating – literally – that Trump
supporters KNOW Trump is a monster and they PREFER the monster. In this
hallucination, the KKK is not a nutty fringe group but rather a symbol of
how all Trump supporters must feel. (They don’t. Not even close.)

In a rational world it would be obvious that Trump supporters include lots
of brilliant and well-informed people. That fact – as obvious as it would
seem – is invisible to the folks who can’t even imagine a world in which
their powers of perception could be so wrong. To reconcile their world,
they have to imagine all Trump supporters as defective in some moral or
cognitive way, or both.

As I often tell you, we all live in our own movies inside our heads. Humans
did not evolve with the capability to understand their reality because it
was not important to survival. Any illusion that keeps us alive long enough
to procreate is good enough.

That’s why the protestors live in a movie in which they are fighting
against a monster called Trump and you live in a movie where you got the
president you wanted for the changes you prefer. Same planet, different
realities.



On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 5:42 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 4:29 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ​> ​
>> The USA is a representative republic,
>
>
> ​All electors have an equal vote in the electoral college, so if it's
> representative why does a Wyoming elector represent 177,556 people but a
> ​California elector represent 705,455 people?
>
> ​Why is a Wyoming person worth 4 times as much as a California person? ​If
> the USA
> is a representative republic
> ​ then things should represent without distortion. ​
>
> ​> ​
>> The electoral college is there to stop California, Texas and New York
>> (the most populous states) telling the other 47 states how they are
>> going to be run.
>>
>
> ​If nobody is living in those other 47 states then​
>  California, Texas and New York
> ​ should indeed be calling the shots. Why should empty land in Wyoming get
> a vote?
>
>   John K Clark​
>
>
>
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> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
>
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