Trump Consciousness

Still, this election fraud is so obvious that when I read posts from Malf, the most well-known troll on our board, Ellis, or Chris, my first instinct is to think they are lying. That is, they know that every word they write is false but they don't care because they are trying to support the fraud that has taken place. That is my first impression every time I read their posts. That they are liars, frauds, and cheats. That said, on reflection, it is possible they have bought a series of falsehoods hook, line, and sinker. If that is the case, then surely they feel the same way about me, LS, DB, K9, and others.

If you are going to elaborate all the possible explanations, you should also include something about how cognitive bias and confirmation bias work.

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/trump-consciousness.4080/post-136192

People don't believe what they see, they see what they believe.

People use logic to defend their beliefs not to form them.

Mass hysteria is the ordinary state of human consciousness.

There is an asymmetry in how people use reason to defend their beliefs and how they use reason attack conflicting beliefs. People demand iron clad proof before they are willing to give up their strongly held opinions but they will accept any tenuous hypothesis to justify disbelieving something that contradicts their strongly held opinions.

If someone is faced with a list of conflicting evidence, some that supports their view and some that contradicts their view they don't look at all the evidence and weigh it and use it to make up their mind. They have already made up their mind, they already believe. They accept the supporting evidence as justification for maintaining their beliefs. And they discount the conflicting evidence as false, unexplained, or possibly true but uncertain because it is contradicted by other facts.

Everyone is fooled by cognitive bias and everyone thinks they are the only person who isn't.

Personally, I am not much interested in what motivates a few people in a self selecting group on an internet forum, I am much more interested in what is going on the the minds of the millions of people who voted for Trump or Biden.

It seems to me that when you engage in debates you force your opponents to make public statements that reinforce their position and make it harder for them to change their minds. If you want to change minds you will be more successful using psychology than logic. I don't post in discussion forums to change minds, I do it to share information with people who are interested in the subjects I post on.

Mass hysteria is the ordinary state of human consciousness.
People use reason to defend their beliefs not to form them.
People are persuaded much more by psychological factors than by facts.

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Mass hysteria is that ordinary state of human consciousness.
Here is a somewhat related view by Scott Adams
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threa...itual-engineering-392.4215/page-4#post-126242

Scott Adams writes in his book, "Win Bigly", that when you understand the psychology of persuasion, you are not impressed by the consensus of scientists because they are just as suceptible as ordinary people to mass delusions. According to the psychology of persuasion, mass delusion is actually the normal state of consciousness. This is particularly true for scientists studying climate change because their career and financial incentives are involved. In the following excerpt, 2-D is the normal world view and 3-D is Adam's world view that people are not rational but make decisions based on other factors and then use logic to defend their beliefs.​
On top of our mass delusions, we also have junk science that is too often masquerading as the real thing. To the extent that people can't tell the difference, that too is a source of mass delusion.​
In the 2-D view of the world, mass delusions are rare and newsworthy. But to trained persuaders in the third dimension, mass delusions are the norm. They are everywhere, and they influence every person. This difference in training and experience can explain why people disagree on some of the big issues of the day.​
For example, consider the case of global warming. People from the 2-D world assume mass delusions are rare, and they apply that assumption to every topic. So when they notice that most scientists are on the same side, that observation is persuasive to them. A reasonable person wants to be on the same side with the smartest people who understand the topic. That makes sense, right?​
But people who live in the 3-D world, where persuasion rules, can often have a different view of climate change because we see mass delusions (even among experts) as normal and routine. My starting bias for this topic is that the scientists could easily be wrong about the horrors of change, even in the context of repeated experiments and peer review. Whenever you see a situation with complicated prediction models, you also have lots of room for bias to masquerade as reason. Just tweak the assumptions and you can get any outcome you want.​
Now add to that situation the fact that scientists who oppose the climate change consensus have a high degree of career and reputation risk. That's the perfect setup for a mass delusion. You only need these two conditions:​
1. Complicated prediction models with lots of assumptions​
2. Financial and psychological pressure to agree with the consensus​
In the 2-D world, the scientific method and peer review squeeze out the bias over time. But in the 3-D world, the scientific method can't detect bias when nearly everyone including the peer reviewers shares the same mass delusion.​
I'm not a scientist, and I have no way to validate the accuracy of the climate model predictions. But if the majority of experts on this topic turn out to be having a mass hallucination, I would consider that an ordinary situation. In my reality, this would be routine, if not expected, whenever there are complicated prediction models involved. That's because I see the world as bristling with mass delusions. I don't see mass delusions as rare.​
When nonscientists take sides with climate scientists, they often think they are being supportive of science. The reality is that the nonscientists are not involved in science, or anything like it. They are taking the word of scientists. In the 2-D world, that makes perfect sense, because it seems as if thousands of experts can't be wrong. But in the 3-D world, I accept that the experts could be right, and perhaps they are, but it would be normal and natural in my experience if the vast majority of ciimate scientists were experiencing a shared hallucination.
To be clear, I am not saying the majority of scientists are wrong about climate science. I'm making the narrow point that it would be normal and natural for that group of people to be experiencing a mass hallucination that is consistent with their financial and psychological incentives. The scientific method and the peer-review process wouldn't necessarily catch a mass delusion during any specific window of time. With science, you never know if you are halfway to the truth or already there. Sometimes it looks the same.
Climate science is a polarizing topic (ironically). So let me just generalize the point to say that compared with the average citizen, trained persuaders are less impressed by experts.
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People use reason to defend their beliefs not to form them.
Why Won’t They Listen? ‘The Righteous Mind,’ by Jonathan Haidt By WILLIAM SALETAN SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW MARCH 23, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html
The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others.​

Scott Adams, who in addition to being the author of the comic strip Dilbert, is a trained hypnotist. In an interview on FoxNews@Night with Shannon Bream on March 19, 2018, Scott Adams explained that hypnotism teaches us that people don't use logic to make decisions even though we think we do. (2:59: youtu.be/vLhcrbtbCEg?t=2m59s):
We humans ignore facts but we think we don't. The great illusion of life is that we're rational beings making rational decisions most of the time. But when you become a hypnotist, the first thing you learn is that that's backwards and that mostly we're deciding based on our team, our feelings, our emotions, irrational reasons, we make our decision and then we rationalize it no matter how tortured that rationalization is."​

https://www.economist.com/news/book...g-knowledge-between-minds-making-people-think
People overestimate how well they understand how things work. Direct evidence for this comes from the psychological laboratory. The great Yale psychologist Frank Keil and his students first demonstrated the illusion of explanatory depth, what we call the knowledge illusion. He asked people how well they understand how everyday objects (zippers, toilets, ballpoint pens) work. On average, people felt they had a reasonable understanding (at the middle of a 7-point scale). Then Keil asked them to explain how they work. People failed miserably. For the most part, people just can’t articulate the mechanisms that drive even the simplest things.​

People are persuaded much more by psychological factors than by facts.
In the video below, Scott Adams, who is a trained hypnotist and writer on the psychology of persuasion (in addition to being the author of the comic strip Dilbert), says people are 90% irrational and 10% rational. We make decisions based on emotions not facts. He says you can't be a hypnotist if you don't understand that because otherwise nothing about hypnotism would make sense.

I wanted to understand more about this so I looked into some references on persuasion to see how people are influenced by factors other than facts and logic. Adams has a list of recommended books on persuasion and I tried to find information online about what those authors wrote. What I found is that the vast majority of the techniques of persuasion identified by experts are based on psychological or rhetorical "tricks" that have nothing to do with facts and logic. I think that is what Adams means when he says people are not rational.

Here are some excerpts from Adams reading list on persuasion. I did not list all the books, just examples that help convey what a category is about. See the link for the full list. The full list includes books on skepticism including books by authors such as James Randi that show people are poor judges of objective reality. It also includes books by authors such as Sam Harris that support the belief that we are biological robots "moist robots" .
http://blog.dilbert.com/2015/09/24/the-persuasion-reading-list/
I have grouped the reading list by virtual chapters as if this is one meta book.
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Chapter 1 – Things You Can Stop Believing
The first chapter is designed to make you skeptical about your ability to comprehend reality. If you are already a hardcore skeptic, you can skip this chapter.
  • An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural – by James Randi
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Chapter 2 – Stretching your Imagination
These books are selected to open your mind for what follows. If you have experience with LSD or mushrooms, you might not need this chapter. (Yes, I am serious.)
  • Jonathan Livingston Seagull – by Richard Bach
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Chapter 3 – The Moist Robot Hypothesis
The Moist Robot Hypothesis first appears in my book that is listed below. The idea is that humans are biological machines, subject to cause and effect. According to this view, free will is an illusion and humans can be programmed once you understand our user interface.

With this chapter I ease you into the notion that humans are mindless robots by showing you how we are influenced by design, habit, emotion, food, and words. Until you accept the Moist Robot view of the world it will be hard to use your tools of persuasion effectively because you will doubt your own effectiveness and people will detect your doubt. Confidence is an important part of the process of influence.
  • Free Will – by Sam Harris
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Chapter 4 – Active Persuasion
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  • Trump: The Art of the Deal – Donald J. Trump
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Here are some of the techniques of persuasion I found discussed by some authors on the list (Blair Warren and Robert Cialdini) and by some authors not on the list (I have a link to web site about NLP but the page I quoted from does not mention the NLP authors on Adams list: Grinder and Bandler - I don't know if the quote does or does not reflect their views.) Notice that these methods of persuasion do not rely on facts and logic, that is what I think Adams means when he says people are not rational. And there is a difference between not using reason and using faulty reasoning. But even when people are not using reason, if you ask them why they did something, they will give reasons. Our experience is that we think we are rational even when we are not using facts and logic ie reasoning. And by "we" I mean materialists, non-materialists, new-agers, and self identified super-rational "skeptics".
  • Blair Warren wrote: "People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies." :http://www.actionplan.com/pdf/BlairWarren.pdf
  • Certain words can influence you to think in ways that will cause your own mind to aid in persuading you. For example, if someone says, "Imagine ...", it causes you to visualize what they want to to believe. "Because" is also a "power" word. When you give a reason, even a weak one, people are more likely to do what you ask. "You" is another "power" word. More of these "power" words and explanations of why they work can be found at these links:
  • Robert Cialdini is a professor of psychology who is a well known author on the subject of persuasion. He has identified several "principles of influence":http://changingminds.org/techniques/general/cialdini/cialdini.htm
    • Reciprocity - We feel obliged to give back to people who have given to us.
    • Consistency and commitment - When we make a promise, we feel obliged to work hard to fulfil that promise. When we make a decision, we like to feel that this is the right decision for us.
    • Social proof - We copy what others do, especially when we are unsure.
    • Liking - If you can make people like you for example by showing them you are like them and or by praising them, they will be easier to persuade.
    • Authority - We defer to people who seem superior.
    • Scarcity - When things become less available, they become more desirable.
    • Click, Whirr - When certain cues are presented to us, we feel an urge to complete actions that have, in the past, been successfully paired with the cue.
  • https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/282642
    • Unity - Any sense of shared identity such as family, ethnicity, geography, etc. can aid in persuasion.
  • .
    You can take an on-line quiz to test your knowledge of these principles at https://www.qzzr.com/.

  • Subliminal Persuasion, Conversational Hypnosis: The web site nlpnation.com explains several techniques of subliminal persuasion or conversational hypnosis.
    If someone tries to influence you directly you might naturally resist them. But there are several techniques that can be used to sneak information past your "resistance filter". The general principle is that instead of making a statement or suggestion directly, it is included in a broader statement so you hear it indirectly while you are focused on something else.
    1. Questions: If someone makes a direct statement, you might doubt it. But if they put the information into a question that assumes what they want you to believe, you may get distracted thinking about the answer to the question rather than whether the premise is true.
    2. "And" and "But": If someone tells you something you don't want to hear you might start to argue with them. But if they give you the bad news first followed by "but" and something good or positive, you are less likely to start arguing. They also might add more positive statements linked by "and".
    3. Because: People are more likely to do what they're asked if given a reason even if the reason is not very compelling. If things seem to make sense people don't look too closely at it and it may slip past their resistance filter.
    4. A means B: This is another way to sneak things through your resistance filter. If you're reading this, it means you are learning important information that will help you avoid being manipulated. That sentance was an example of a means b. Did you notice it?
    5. Awareness patterns: Certain words and phrases cause you to assume what is being said is true rather than question it. For example, "As you know ... ", "Clearly...", "Undoubtedly ...", "I'm sure you realize / notice / see ..."
    6. Agreement Frames: Instead of disagreeing outright someone may say they agree, but then try to convince you of something else. "I agree, and this means ..." or "I agree, and what's more ...". Notice they use the word "and" not "but". They may agree in principle or agree that something about what you said is true without ever directly saying they disagree.
    7. Pacing and Leading: This technique tries to sneak a suggestion past your resistance filter by presenting you with a natural progression of events. You get distracted by the logic of the progression and are more willing to accept the suggestion.
  • The article at nlpnation.com has links to pages with example that illustrate these methods.
The subject of persuasion is related to the subject of how internet applications are designed to make you use them compusively which also shows how we are influenced by factors other than facts and logic. In particular we will unconsciously do things that cause the brain to produce chemicals like dopamine that are involved in experiencing pleasure. Here are some links and excerpts on that subject:
Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, said

https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-2508036343.html


... The thought process that went into building these applications ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?' And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you more likes and comments.​
It's a social-validation feedback loop it's like exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators - it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people - understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.​
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God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.​

I invested early in Google and Facebook. Now they terrify me.Roger McNamee, Aug. 8, 2017, usatoday.com

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opin...s-made-fortune-but-now-they-menace/543755001/

Facebook and Google get their revenue from advertising, the effectiveness of which depends on gaining and maintaining consumer attention. Borrowing techniques from the gambling industry, Facebook, Google and others exploit human nature, creating addictive behaviors that compel consumers to check for new messages, respond to notifications, and seek validation from technologies whose only goal is to generate profits for their owners.​
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Like gambling, nicotine, alcohol or heroin, Facebook and Google — most importantly through its YouTube subsidiary — produce short-term happiness with serious negative consequences in the long term. Users fail to recognize the warning signs of addiction until it is too late.​
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Consider a recent story from Australia, where someone at Facebook told advertisers that they had the ability to target teens who were sad or depressed, which made them more susceptible to advertising.​
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In the United States, Facebook once demonstrated its ability to make users happier or sadder by manipulating their news feed.​
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The fault lies with advertising business models that drive companies to maximize attention at all costs, leading to ever more aggressive brain hacking.​
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The Facebook application has 2 billion active users around the world. Google’s YouTube has 1.5 billion. These numbers are comparable to Christianity and Islam, respectively, giving Facebook and Google influence greater than most First World countries. They are too big and too global to be held accountable. Other attention-based apps — including Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, SnapChat and Twitter — also have user bases between 100 million and 1.3 billion. Not all their users have had their brains hacked, but all are on that path. And there are no watchdogs.​
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Incentives being what they are, we cannot expect Internet monopolies to police themselves. There is little government regulation and no appetite to change that. If we want to stop brain hacking, consumers will have to force changes at Facebook and Google.​


Nir Eyal is showing software designers how to hook users in four easy steps. Welcome to the new era of habit-forming technology. by Ted Greenwald in technologyreview.com
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/535906/compulsive-behavior-sells/
Forging new habits has become an obsession among technology companies. In an age when commercial competition is only a click away, the new mandate is to make products and services that generate compulsive behavior: in essence, to get users hooked on a squirt of dopamine to the brain’s reward center to ensure that they’ll come back.​

How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist Tristan Harris May 18, 2016
https://journal.thriveglobal.com/ho...ian-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” — Unknown.​
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I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities.​
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I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.​
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And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention. I want to show you how they do it.​
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Hijack #1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices​
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By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones.​
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Hijack #2: Put a Slot Machine In a Billion Pockets​
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If you want to maximize addictiveness, all tech designers need to do is link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.​
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When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got.​
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When we pull to refresh our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what new email we got.​
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When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next.​
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When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.​
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When we tap the # of red notifications, we’re playing a slot machine to what’s underneath.​
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Hijack #3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI)​
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Another way apps and websites hijack people’s minds is by inducing a “1% chance you could be missing something important.”​
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Hijack #4: Social Approval​
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When I get tagged by my friend Marc, I imagine him making a conscious choice to tag me. But I don’t see how a company like Facebook orchestrated his doing that in the first place.​
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Hijack #5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat)​
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Like Facebook, LinkedIn exploits an asymmetry in perception. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested contacts.​
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Hijack #6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay​
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News feeds are purposely designed to auto-refill with reasons to keep you scrolling, and purposely eliminate any reason for you to pause, reconsider or leave. It’s also why video and social media sites like Netflix, YouTube or Facebook autoplay the next video after a countdown instead of waiting for you to make a conscious choice (in case you won’t).​
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Hijack #7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery​
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Companies know that messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously (like email or any deferred inbox).​
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Hijack #8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons​
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For example, when you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), and that’s on purpose. Facebook wants to convert every reason you have for using Facebook, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things.​
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Hijack #9: Inconvenient Choices​
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Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder.​
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For example, NYTimes.com lets you “make a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they send you an email with information on how to cancel your account by calling a phone number that’s only open at certain times. Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies​
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Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies​
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Lastly, apps can exploit people’s inability to forecast the consequences of a click.​
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People don’t intuitively forecast the true cost of a click when it’s presented to them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small innocuous request to begin with (“just one click to see which tweet got retweeted”) and escalate from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually all engagement websites use this trick.​
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I’ve listed a few techniques but there are literally thousands.​
 
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This conversation is bizarre. It is like a conversation between one group of people who only speak Swahili, and another group that only speak Aborigine. Assuming for the moment that both sides honestly believe that what they have written is true, there is no way to resolve the debate because at least one side is either ignorant of the relevant facts, incapable of understanding them, or unwilling to make the effort to understand them.

From my perspective, I have made an effort to understand the anti-Trump side of this, before and after the election. A few months ago, I started writing a book tentatively titled "Deception Nation". Several chapters deal with dishonest portrayals of Trump in the media. To write those chapters, I had to do a lot of research to know what those portrayals were, and whether they were true. Only then could I shoot them down. I discovered that there is very little truth in anything the media writes about Trump. They generally get the spelling of his name right but after that, it's almost all either hyperbole, exaggeration, speculation, or outright falsehood. Sometimes, it can be shown that the information is not only false but that the person reporting it had to know it was false at the time of their reporting.

For instance, the media have effectively convinced many people that Trump is a racist. They accomplished it by repeating the lie that he is racist, and then conflating unrelated things as if they prove racism, such as Trump's desire to stop illegal immigration or defense of Confederate statues. There are other explanations for those policies besides racism, and they have the benefit of fitting the facts much better. The media also ignore all stories that undermine their narrative, such as Trump being the first person to allow unrestricted Mar-a-Lago club membership to anyone who can pay the fee: black, Jewish, homosexual, etc. The city council told him he couldn't do it, so he sued them for a hundred million dollars, they backed down, and he opened his club to the most diverse membership possible. In later years, other clubs followed suit, but Trump was the first. When confronted with this story, which isn't often, the media say that Trump did it for "business reasons" not because he isn't a racist. Talk about a self-serving lie that can only be known with telepathy. It isn't a fair criticism but it also is an unprovable criticism. For that reason alone, no responsible journalist would utter it.

Everything the press writes about Trump is like that. It is so easily proved false that I'm amazed anyone believes it. However, believe it they do. I think one of the reasons is that the primary media sources and social media encourage readers to stay in their lane. That is, to avoid encountering contrary information on other sites or sources, they censor what they publish and how information is served on social media to emphasize the foolish over the serious, the false over truth. In other words, if you've grown up on an anti-Trump diet, you are unlikely to passively encounter any serious or solid evidence to counter what you've been told. On the rare occasions it happens, the press have prepped their audience with superficial explanations that suffice to wave the evidence away, provided it is not carefully reviewed.

The election is no different. Except, perhaps, the press has become far more aggressive than before. The evidence of election fraud is so widespread, so deep, so credible, that it is astonishing to me that anyone would think otherwise. But then, I take a look at the mainstream media, as I have had to do often the last few months, and it becomes obvious why. The mainstream media is collectively avoiding certain stories completely, blatantly falsifying others, and promoting their narrative about a Biden win as if it is clear cut. If you derive your information from any mainstream source in the USA, you have little choice but to believe it unless you have some personal experience that wakes you up to the reality of how false it is.

Still, this election fraud is so obvious that when I read posts from Malf, the most well-known troll on our board, Ellis, or Chris, my first instinct is to think they are lying. That is, they know that every word they write is false but they don't care because they are trying to support the fraud that has taken place. That is my first impression every time I read their posts. That they are liars, frauds, and cheats. That said, on reflection, it is possible they have bought a series of falsehoods hook, line, and sinker. If that is the case, then surely they feel the same way about me, LS, DB, K9, and others.

The problem is that the evidence of fraud is overwhelming. In a contest between the evidence for fraud and what passes for evidence there was no fraud, evidence of fraud must win any fair contest. To go a little further, I have yet to see any evidence that fraud didn't take place. What I have seen are a number of lawsuits dismissed on procedural or technical grounds before discovery or the presentation of evidence took place. I have seen people who are believed to have committed fraud, claim innocence. That is not proof of innocence, though the press and some politicians have adopted that position. It is as if Charles Manson, when confronted with accusations regarding his involvement in the Tate/LaBianca murders, had said, "I'm innocent", and then everyone walked away and said, "looks like he's innocent."

I have seen jokes at Trump's expense, each designed to paint him as unpopular, craven, and dishonest. Those parodies are no more convincing than propaganda from North Korea, where Americans are portrayed as long-nosed green-eyed demons. Such infantile attempts hardly rise to the level of evidence, yet people here have obviously been influenced by those caricatures, based on the language they use to describe Trump.

In the end, my question here remains, "are the Trump skeptics knowingly telling falsehoods to propagate the fraud, or are they innocent but compromised?" Their arguments are pathetic. They remind me of some of the arguments used in the Salem witch trials, the transcripts of which I have read. They contain so many false assumptions that there is no way to treat them seriously.

The alternative is that I have somehow been fooled, but my internal lie detector, which has proven so reliable in the past, reminds me of the many hours, possibly hundreds of hours, that I have spent carefully studying this subject. It is true that I am not forthcoming with my reasons why. This is laziness more than anything else. It is also because I don't see the point of wasting my energy writing something here when I can be paid to write identical content for my editor. More than once, I have been paid to convert Facebook posts into articles. This post here may become one of those articles, should I make a few modifications and show it to my editor. The point is that I don't like to give away for free what I am paid to do elsewhere, particularly when the people I am writing for are unlikely to understand or appreciate what I have written.

For instance, I have more than a hundred references in the few chapters I've written so far for Deception Nation. I haven't shared any of them here. The reason is that it would take me time to open the document, find the citations, and then copy them over. Again, I am paid to do that kind of thing, so I don't like doing it for what amounts to no reward. I don't see any way to convince a Trump skeptic for the simple reason that there is plenty of available information already, the same information that I have found, and yet Trump skeptics have not availed themselves of it. If you won't go to the trouble of reading, and hopefully understanding, the material available on "hereistheevidence.com", then there is little point in trying to argue any further.

And yeah, Trump won. Biden lost. Biden lost big time. If justice is served, many people will go to jail for this, including Biden.
I appreciate the time you took to write this post...kudos but I think the kicker for me is, his own people have admitted that there was no election fraud. How do you explain that? Republicans in Georgia, Bill Barr and Cyber Security Director said this...they had the most to lose from going against their King. I've already pointed out his fascist ways and his lack of mental fitness...anyone with even a remote understanding of basic psychology should be able to see this. Trump's rise to the top is an enigma for me...an embarrassment for the US that is thankfully over.
 
Holy shit balls, Edward Solomon's work is beyond next level. That video that was posted is as simple as it gets and barely scratches the surface of what he has documented. It is hard core mathematical proof! Period.

The beauty of mathematics is that it can be verified or falsified. The functions and formula are standardized. Although in this case you have to be working in the highest levels of math in order to comprehend the majority of what he has done. Falsification would have to done by other math gods running the multiple simulations he has performed. The number theory, the ratio patterns, the chance calculations are staggering.

Just look at this. Some of those videos are near 12 hours long! and there are stacks of them.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIxc8YMkny2KBaD5TQsSbpg/videos

I tell you this cannot be dismissed by the morons in the media or even the justice system. You can't just fudge this stuff, it is not subjective.

He also provides all documentation for all his work to be quantified. He has signed affidavits I believe. Yet it seems as though this is for nothing, as we have seen. witnesses and expert testimony is being subverted in a disgusting turning of a blind eye and efforts to investigate blocked at every turn. That in itself speaks volumes. It would not be this way if there were nothing to hide. It would be completely transparent. The exact opposite is true.
 
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I'm still familiarizing with what Edward is presenting. I plan on taking some time and digging in, at first glance it is highly interesting and compelling.
The fraud, at least this aspect of it is hidden via fraction magic. The same way someone could steal money from a bank by stealing fractions of cents over time. Since all balances are reported to the cent it is difficult to trace.
It is great that you are looking into this! However, I don't understand your analogy. If you steal from a bank like that, it depends on there being many customers (candidates) to steal from - so none of them notice, but here you have the two main candidates, and maybe a few fringe candidates, but they will not have attracted many votes to steal. Also there are no fractions to round off here - the machine should be counting integers.

Holy shit balls, Edward Solomon's work is beyond next level. That video that was posted is as simple as it gets and barely scratches the surface of what he has documented. It is hard core mathematical proof! Period.

Is the proof statistical, or definitive?

David
 
Assuming for the moment that both sides honestly believe that what they have written is true, there is no way to resolve the debate because at least one side is either ignorant of the relevant facts, incapable of understanding them, or unwilling to make the effort to understand them.

They may be A.I. bots.

If you can get paid for writing things, you should only link to them here.
 
This conversation is bizarre. It is like a conversation between one group of people who only speak Swahili, and another group that only speak Aborigine. Assuming for the moment that both sides honestly believe that what they have written is true, there is no way to resolve the debate because at least one side is either ignorant of the relevant facts, incapable of understanding them, or unwilling to make the effort to understand them.

From my perspective, I have made an effort to understand the anti-Trump side of this, before and after the election. A few months ago, I started writing a book tentatively titled "Deception Nation". Several chapters deal with dishonest portrayals of Trump in the media. To write those chapters, I had to do a lot of research to know what those portrayals were, and whether they were true. Only then could I shoot them down. I discovered that there is very little truth in anything the media writes about Trump. They generally get the spelling of his name right but after that, it's almost all either hyperbole, exaggeration, speculation, or outright falsehood. Sometimes, it can be shown that the information is not only false but that the person reporting it had to know it was false at the time of their reporting.

For instance, the media have effectively convinced many people that Trump is a racist. They accomplished it by repeating the lie that he is racist, and then conflating unrelated things as if they prove racism, such as Trump's desire to stop illegal immigration or defense of Confederate statues. There are other explanations for those policies besides racism, and they have the benefit of fitting the facts much better. The media also ignore all stories that undermine their narrative, such as Trump being the first person to allow unrestricted Mar-a-Lago club membership to anyone who can pay the fee: black, Jewish, homosexual, etc. The city council told him he couldn't do it, so he sued them for a hundred million dollars, they backed down, and he opened his club to the most diverse membership possible. In later years, other clubs followed suit, but Trump was the first. When confronted with this story, which isn't often, the media say that Trump did it for "business reasons" not because he isn't a racist. Talk about a self-serving lie that can only be known with telepathy. It isn't a fair criticism but it also is an unprovable criticism. For that reason alone, no responsible journalist would utter it.

Everything the press writes about Trump is like that. It is so easily proved false that I'm amazed anyone believes it. However, believe it they do. I think one of the reasons is that the primary media sources and social media encourage readers to stay in their lane. That is, to avoid encountering contrary information on other sites or sources, they censor what they publish and how information is served on social media to emphasize the foolish over the serious, the false over truth. In other words, if you've grown up on an anti-Trump diet, you are unlikely to passively encounter any serious or solid evidence to counter what you've been told. On the rare occasions it happens, the press have prepped their audience with superficial explanations that suffice to wave the evidence away, provided it is not carefully reviewed.

The election is no different. Except, perhaps, the press has become far more aggressive than before. The evidence of election fraud is so widespread, so deep, so credible, that it is astonishing to me that anyone would think otherwise. But then, I take a look at the mainstream media, as I have had to do often the last few months, and it becomes obvious why. The mainstream media is collectively avoiding certain stories completely, blatantly falsifying others, and promoting their narrative about a Biden win as if it is clear cut. If you derive your information from any mainstream source in the USA, you have little choice but to believe it unless you have some personal experience that wakes you up to the reality of how false it is.

Still, this election fraud is so obvious that when I read posts from Malf, the most well-known troll on our board, Ellis, or Chris, my first instinct is to think they are lying. That is, they know that every word they write is false but they don't care because they are trying to support the fraud that has taken place. That is my first impression every time I read their posts. That they are liars, frauds, and cheats. That said, on reflection, it is possible they have bought a series of falsehoods hook, line, and sinker. If that is the case, then surely they feel the same way about me, LS, DB, K9, and others.

The problem is that the evidence of fraud is overwhelming. In a contest between the evidence for fraud and what passes for evidence there was no fraud, evidence of fraud must win any fair contest. To go a little further, I have yet to see any evidence that fraud didn't take place. What I have seen are a number of lawsuits dismissed on procedural or technical grounds before discovery or the presentation of evidence took place. I have seen people who are believed to have committed fraud, claim innocence. That is not proof of innocence, though the press and some politicians have adopted that position. It is as if Charles Manson, when confronted with accusations regarding his involvement in the Tate/LaBianca murders, had said, "I'm innocent", and then everyone walked away and said, "looks like he's innocent."

I have seen jokes at Trump's expense, each designed to paint him as unpopular, craven, and dishonest. Those parodies are no more convincing than propaganda from North Korea, where Americans are portrayed as long-nosed green-eyed demons. Such infantile attempts hardly rise to the level of evidence, yet people here have obviously been influenced by those caricatures, based on the language they use to describe Trump.

In the end, my question here remains, "are the Trump skeptics knowingly telling falsehoods to propagate the fraud, or are they innocent but compromised?" Their arguments are pathetic. They remind me of some of the arguments used in the Salem witch trials, the transcripts of which I have read. They contain so many false assumptions that there is no way to treat them seriously.

The alternative is that I have somehow been fooled, but my internal lie detector, which has proven so reliable in the past, reminds me of the many hours, possibly hundreds of hours, that I have spent carefully studying this subject. It is true that I am not forthcoming with my reasons why. This is laziness more than anything else. It is also because I don't see the point of wasting my energy writing something here when I can be paid to write identical content for my editor. More than once, I have been paid to convert Facebook posts into articles. This post here may become one of those articles, should I make a few modifications and show it to my editor. The point is that I don't like to give away for free what I am paid to do elsewhere, particularly when the people I am writing for are unlikely to understand or appreciate what I have written.

For instance, I have more than a hundred references in the few chapters I've written so far for Deception Nation. I haven't shared any of them here. The reason is that it would take me time to open the document, find the citations, and then copy them over. Again, I am paid to do that kind of thing, so I don't like doing it for what amounts to no reward. I don't see any way to convince a Trump skeptic for the simple reason that there is plenty of available information already, the same information that I have found, and yet Trump skeptics have not availed themselves of it. If you won't go to the trouble of reading, and hopefully understanding, the material available on "hereistheevidence.com", then there is little point in trying to argue any further.

And yeah, Trump won. Biden lost. Biden lost big time. If justice is served, many people will go to jail for this, including Biden.

I agree that there have been many misrepresentations and lies about Trump from the left, just like there are many lies and misrepresentations about Biden on the right. It's what entertainment peddlers do. Personally, that's why I read/watch Fox News (not the entertainment peddlers part of it, the news part), and pretty much ignore the rest of the mainstream media. I am put off by partisan rants against Trump. My opinion about him tries to depend upon primary sources about what he says and what he has done.

Part of the "evidence" problem, which you have recognized, is that a whole bunch of stuff which isn't evidentiary, has been included as though it was. Hundreds of affidavits from people observing something they are unfamiliar with, isn't "evidence" of fraud. Especially when people who are familiar with the process identify it as normal eIection procedure. You can't depend on others excusing explanations from neutral observers, or from officials biased in your favor, by proposing an increasingly elaborate scheme where "everyone is in on it except our highly biased and uninformed-about-normal-procedure witnesses". Find something better.

I mentioned the use of Benford's Law where it isn't applicable as one example, with a reference specifically explaining and testing ways in which it does and doesn't work in election fraud. And that reference should be the template for what you should be looking for from all the supposed numerical analyses - does the pattern I found reliably and validly distinguish between the presence and the absence of election fraud?

If you want to persuade others - which is what you need to do in order to change Biden's win - then the focus should be on developing the strongest information you have to evidentiary level. If you truly think the mathematical analyses are the way to go, don't depend upon the uninformed opinion of fanboys about which ones are valid. Ask those who present their analyses to validate them, get it checked by independent experts, and present that as evidence (assuming it checks out). Don't waste all this time and energy on trying to understand why people don't agree with you, and building this elaborate narrative of how everyone is deluded or evil except you. Trust me, nobody is ever persuaded by that argument.

It's not like actual experts in election fraud aren't already doing this work. For example - https://sos.ga.gov/admin/uploads/GeorgiaAnalytics.pdf. Or look at the link Malf posted showing all the work the states already undertake. Lots of these people are on your side - wishing Trump had won the election. Help them.

ETA: Also, despite your claim, some of this evidence has been before judges and evaluated on its merit (and found wanting). You should drop that "evidence" out of the list, as well, if you are serious about being taken seriously.
 
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Be careful. You don't know what the long-term effects on this will be. It might be funny to gloat and wind up or to feel secure in the lies spoken by officialdom, but you are really really really REALLY playing with fire. Even if you don't agree, you have no idea the amount of resentment building up. This will be a disaster for everyone. It is in your interest to take heed.

I know history of revolutions (as well as rebellions, uprisings, revolts, mutinies, insurgencies, insurrections etc.) well enough to understand what will happen when the things will get in motion (and they will, sooner or later), and what form will it take. I can imagine very clearly, even vividly, how cruel and merciless will it be.

And yet, I'm looking forward to it, wish it to come to fruitition at last, since I understand that this is our only chance of salvation from the infernal existence in the digital totaliarianism which is being built before our very eyes, right here and right now.
 
I'm looking forward to it, wish it to come to fruitition at last, since I understand that this is our only chance of salvation from the infernal existence in the digital totaliarianism

In America the problem is that we have no political organization like the Bolsheviks that can organize a revolution.

The Bolsheviks had the benefits of well-defined political goals, external funding from big business, and the ethnic solidarity of Judaism.

Right-wingers in America have none of those.
 
I appreciate the time you took to write this post...kudos but I think the kicker for me is, his own people have admitted that there was no election fraud. How do you explain that? Republicans in Georgia, Bill Barr and Cyber Security Director said this...they had the most to lose from going against their King. I've already pointed out his fascist ways and his lack of mental fitness...anyone with even a remote understanding of basic psychology should be able to see this. Trump's rise to the top is an enigma for me...an embarrassment for the US that is thankfully over.

Thanks for raising this argument, I had forgotten it. I have a hard time imagining any Democrat saying anything against another Democrat. Republicans, however, are very different. The Republicans you mention, and others, are thought to be compromised and untrustworthy. In the case of Kemp, Raffensberger, and McConnell, there are known ties to Chinese influence. All are considered traitors by many Republicans. Not, I hasten to add, because they have exposed an undesirable truth, but because they have suppressed truth that would vindicate Trump. Speaking for myself, I think of these Republicans as being in some ways worse than any Democrat. They are no more on Trump's side, or even on his team than a man on Mars. John McCain was like them, as is Mitt Romney. Both may as well have been members of the Democrat party.

When Trump took office, I was surprised how many Republicans were revealed as quislings. From 2016 on, I have only grown more disgusted with the corruption in the Republican party. I vote Republican because I prefer their platform than the Democrat platform, but it has felt like an empty exercise until Trump. The reason is that while Republicans on the whole said the right things, they rarely did them. Trump actually did what he said he was going to do, or tried to in the face of stiff opposition, and in the end, got a lot done. After Abraham Lincoln, I have a hard time trying to come up with a better example of an effective president. It also annoys me to think of all the wasted opportunities, thanks to time-wasting attacks from Democrats.

So, in the end, I don't consider Republican opposition to Trump to be a reason to doubt Trump. I can tell you that every time one of these men does anything against Trump, they go on a list of people to be voted out of office at the earliest opportunity. But that brings us full circle. Unless Trump is seated as president, we will never vote anyone out, or in, office again. We will get who they give us with their fraudulent election methods.

I have a hard time even thinking about this because it creates a kind of logic loop. Do I vote in a crooked election or not? This, by the way, is one of the reasons so many people are so angry. They are told, "If you don't like Biden, vote someone else into office in 2024". Well, we know that is impossible because we did that this year. Trump got more votes this year. So if getting more votes for your candidate isn't enough to unambiguously secure the presidency, then no amount of campaigning, campaign contributions, get out the vote messages, or persuasive debates will be sufficient in the future.

Democrats have set up a situation that is almost certain to end in the use of force because Trump's voters know (or to be sensitive to non Trump voters) believe, that fraud in this election has taken away their votes now and forever. From their perspective, this situation is akin to that faced by the passengers of United 93. Normally, airplane passengers do not try to take planes back from hijackers because of the potential for injury or death. The passengers on that plane knew that other planes had just been intentionally crashed into buildings. They knew they would crash whether they resisted or not. For that reason, they resisted.

Trump voters, like the UA93 passengers, know that the vote will be stolen forever if they let Biden sit in the White House. If that happens, voting and elections become meaningless. That is why they are willing to fight. That is why they must resist. That is why they will resist. The only peaceful scenario I can think of is a Biden concession. Even better, a concession combined with a confession. That would be the best thing for the country. However, it would open Biden up to all sorts of legal troubles. It might be worth it to offer him a pardon if he provides evidence against others, but again, that is not the likeliest of scenarios.

Getting back to the Republican politicians you mentioned. They have worn out their welcome among Trump voters. They are now locked into their positions. If they waver, they will lose favor with the bad guys they have helped and likely won't be treated sympathetically by voters. My guess is that some of them were compromised long before the election and are now being forced to take sides to prevent exposure. I wouldn't be surprised if many of them have committed indictable offenses.
 
I don't understand your if/then statement. On the chance you want to see some of my articles, they are here.

Cool link. Thanks. I added your RSS feed to my netvibes.com headline reader.

I mean, If you can get paid for writing things, then it seems to me like you would be better off spending time doing that, and linking to it from here, rather than arguing here with A.I. bots who provide no stress-testing of your arguments, or possibility for learning new things.
 
I'm trying to catch up here.

Sounds like the entire constitutional infrastructure in the U.S. has been established as utterly compromised. The executive branch has been stolen through a proven fraud. The legislative branch is in on the gag and will confirm the fraud through inaction. The judicial branch is brazenly ignoring an air-tight case of fraud. There is no possible way for the truth of this past election to emerge. So the only true patriots are those willing to take up arms against their fellow citizens to re-establish a Trump white house?
 
Cool link. Thanks. I added your RSS feed to my netvibes.com headline reader.

I mean, If you can get paid for writing things, then it seems to me like you would be better off spending time doing that, and linking to it from here, rather than arguing here with A.I. bots who provide no stress-testing of your arguments, or possibility for learning new things.

Okay, now I understand you. You may not be aware of this but at one time I was one of the most prolific contributors to these forums. My activity dropped to near zero soon after I started my PhD studies, now completed. This means there are many forum members that have never seen my earlier contributions here. I not only wrote a lot of posts but I was also interviewed a few times and conducted a few interviews of prominent psi researchers. After getting my PhD, I have wanted to drop in every now and then but have been very busy.

A funny thing is that at least some of my writing, like my six extra-curricular psi articles (extra curricular because they were unrelated to my PhD) were written because of this forum. People here had either asked questions I wanted to answer, or were so persistent in asking the same questions that I decided to put my answers in a permanent form I could refer to instead of coming up with original answers every time. The articles had the additional benefit of being more carefully written than a forum post, which I rarely edit that carefully. Another difference is that my posts here do not contain the kind of data or data analysis found in my articles. The reason is that it takes time to do those things. I remember one article where Daryl Bem was an anonymous reviewer (revealed to me after the review was over). He pointed out one little thing related to my statistical analysis, something like, "your method is interesting, but wouldn't it be simpler to do it this way instead?" The result was three days of work just to deal with that one suggestion that affected a small part of the article.

On this forum, I won't spend three days working in SPSS to derive the most efficient statistical answer to a question. Instead, I will either offer my opinion of someone else's work who has written on the subject, or my best guess based on what I know or have experienced. The same is true of politics. As I wrote earlier, I have had the experience of getting halfway through a Facebook post when I realize I can sell it to my editor, and then I do. Then, I do exactly what you suggest. I delete the post, whether half finished or finished, wait for my article to appear, then link to it.

The last couple of days have been different for a number of reasons, causing me to go back to some of my old posting habits. First, I have cancelled my Facebook account, thus limiting an alternative outlet for these thoughts. Second, my editor has grown wary of Facebook's latest censorship algorithms, which have been targeting election-fraud-related content. The result is that fewer articles are getting through. He accepted one ten days ago that still hasn't gone up as they test the FB algorithm, trying to find which keywords need to be removed to allow sharing of their content. Last, it is difficult to ignore the rising tension in the country, making it difficult to concentrate on other work.

Earlier, I warned a couple posters here about the rising anger in the country, and the foolishness of mocking Trump voters. They interpreted those posts incorrectly as threats. The point I wanted to make is that not taking seriously the real anger building in this country is foolish and dangerous. Last night, I read several articles by people in militias who are talking about how they intend to protect America, and every idea they had involved guns. In one case, home made unregistered guns. That sentiment is far more widespread than Democrats seem to realize.

Keep in mind, however, that martial law does not have to be violent. The purpose is to provide legal authority to perform duties normally performed by others who are not performing those duties themselves. In this case, allowing armed forces such as the National Guard to seize ballot boxes and other evidence so that it can be examined. The officials responsible for making the audit trail available are not doing their duty and thus must be set aside. That can only happen with martial law. However, there will be no violence as long as there is no violent resistance. If the evidence in question is seized without resistance, there will be no violence at all. Somehow, "Martial law" has been interpreted as shooting sprees against Democrats but that is far from the reality.

Getting back to the forum, the dismissive comments made by Biden supporters here can only inflame the passions on the other side. This is immensely stupid in the context of the current level of anger. It is like trying to see how close they can bring a lit match to a pile of gunpowder without igniting it. Eventually, you go too far. When I saw that happening on the forum, I decided it was an appropriate opportunity to write something, and then I got sucked in.
 
The point was made earlier but worthy of repeat. The US is a vast purple country with pockets of red and blue. I don't see this seething anger or at least anything different than what I've seen in the past from the vocal left/right frontiers. Seems to me the Trump voters I know here in the midwest are disappointed, open to the fraud angle but interested in seeing how it navigates due process, wary of a democratic whitehouse, and otherwise going about their normal lives. No stocking up on ammo and venturing out for militia practice.

And ironic that the advice is for dems to stop inflaming the passions of the reps, considering Trump made a cottage industry out of inflaming those who dared to criticize or oppose him. As has been repeated 100 times in this thread: Trump lost the election because of a deep character flaw that resulted in his constant stream of insults and attacks against "enemies" both real and imagined.
 
When Trump took office, I was surprised how many Republicans were revealed as quislings. From 2016 on, I have only grown more disgusted with the corruption in the Republican party. I vote Republican because I prefer their platform than the Democrat platform, but it has felt like an empty exercise until Trump. The reason is that while Republicans on the whole said the right things, they rarely did them. Trump actually did what he said he was going to do, or tried to in the face of stiff opposition, and in the end, got a lot done. After Abraham Lincoln, I have a hard time trying to come up with a better example of an effective president. It also annoys me to think of all the wasted opportunities, thanks to time-wasting attacks from Democrats.

So, in the end, I don't consider Republican opposition to Trump to be a reason to doubt Trump. I can tell you that every time one of these men does anything against Trump, they go on a list of people to be voted out of office at the earliest opportunity. But that brings us full circle. Unless Trump is seated as president, we will never vote anyone out, or in, office again. We will get who they give us with their fraudulent election methods.

I have a hard time even thinking about this because it creates a kind of logic loop. Do I vote in a crooked election or not? This, by the way, is one of the reasons so many people are so angry. They are told, "If you don't like Biden, vote someone else into office in 2024". Well, we know that is impossible because we did that this year. Trump got more votes this year. So if getting more votes for your candidate isn't enough to unambiguously secure the presidency, then no amount of campaigning, campaign contributions, get out the vote messages, or persuasive debates will be sufficient in the future.

That's a problem with democracy. It depends upon others, and too few people share your vision. I won't pretend to know what the solution is, because I'm not always happy about the number of people who share my vision, either. What's the alternative? Whose vision should prevail? I don't like yours, for example. I was always intrigued by the more direct democracy practiced by the ancient Greeks. More people would have a sense of the inherent messiness of the process if they had to take their turn in the kitchen.
 
That's a problem with democracy. It depends upon others, and too few people share your vision. I won't pretend to know what the solution is, because I'm not always happy about the number of people who share my vision, either. What's the alternative? Whose vision should prevail? I don't like yours, for example. I was always intrigued by the more direct democracy practiced by the ancient Greeks. More people would have a sense of the inherent messiness of the process if they had to take their turn in the kitchen.
The Greek method amounts to mob rule. That is why we have a Republic, not a Democracy.
 
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