<div dir="ltr"><div>John-</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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:</div><div><p>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.</p><p>1. They believe they are smart and well-informed.</p><p>2. Their good judgement told them Trump is OBVIOUSLY the next Hitler, or something similarly bad.</p><p>3. Half of the voters of the United States – including a lot of smart people – voted Trump into office anyway.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p>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.)</p><p>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.<br></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 5:42 PM, John Clark <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:johnkclark@gmail.com" target="_blank">johnkclark@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><span><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 4:29 PM, BillK </span><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif" dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pharos@gmail.com" target="_blank">pharos@gmail.com</a>></span><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"> wrote:</span><br></div></span><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">> </div>The USA is a representative republic,</blockquote><div><br></div></span><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4">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? </font></div><font size="4"> <div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">Why is a Wyoming person worth 4 times as much as a California person? If the USA </div>is a representative republic<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"> then things should represent without distortion. </div></font></div><span><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">> </div>The electoral college is there to stop California, Texas and New York<br>
(the most populous states) telling the other 47 states how they are<br>
going to be run.<br></blockquote><div><br></div></span><div><font size="4"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">If nobody is living in those other 47 states then</div><span> California, Texas and New York</span><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"> should indeed be calling the shots. Why should empty land in Wyoming get a vote?</div></font></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4"><br></font></div></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4"> John K Clark</font></div></div><div><br></div><div> </div></div></div></div>
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