Three Million

This isn’t just a gray patch, it’s a large number of dots.  I hope you can see them.

If you can’t, try enlarging the picture on your screen.

Actually, I could only get a quarter of a million dots – 250,000 – into that photo.  (And a speck of dust, which was originally too small to see, so that I didn’t brush it off.)  So you’ll have to look a second time–

And a third time–

And a fourth time–

Now you’ve seen a million dots.

Now do all that twice over again, until you’ve studied the picture and counted the dots twelve times over, and then you’ll have seen what the number “three million” means.

 

10 thoughts on “Three Million”

  1. Let’s face the said truth folks…this system rightfully elected someone who is a little off kilter with traditional politics and “progressive policies”. There is a good chance we need this to get our country rightly ordered. If Trump accomplishes this …no one will remember the character flaws or the three million dots. I now doubt that anyone who was acceptable as a typical Red or Blue candidate could do what needs to be done to rectify too many years of “out-of-balance” policies that have hurt this country.

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  2. I think the issue of the popular vote is a red herring. Unfortunately Trump won by the rules as they exist currently. For me the essence of democracy is accepting unwelcome results. I can guarantee that if the result had been reversed then no liberals would be talking about the popular vote.
    That said, Trump has abhorent policies and severe character defects. It is also our right and duty under a democratic system to resist him by all legitimate means. Most importantly we need to require our lawmakers to be even handed, the bar for criticism must be “if Obama had done this would you criticise it”.
    We also need to ignore much of what Trump says and tweets, he uses his twitter feed to spread distraction to cause the media to lose focus on what is actually being done. For Trump bullshit is the equivalent of a fighter plane releasing chaff to confuse enemy radar.
    We need to be ready to impeach him if (and likely when) he crosses the line. The constitution is stronger than one narcissist and the republic will prevail. While these are hard times for progressives, this is not the 1930s and he has as yet done nothing that is unconstitutional.

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  3. I’m sorry but but there’s something deeply disturbing going on when the candidate who wins the popular vote by 3 million goes on to lose. I thought Guy’s picture eloquently–if subtly–made this point.

    Trump’s team has tried to deflect focus away from the popular vote over the past month, with Trump himself even mentioning what he referred to as a “massive landslide victory” in the Electoral College. But in fact Trump’s win ranks near the bottom in terms of the portion of total available electoral votes won by a candidate.

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  4. The problem is that those 3 million people, who live in the urban areas, (this number keeps rising like a fisherman’s tale grows), have their silly lights on so bright at night that I can’t see those 3 million (plus a few) beautiful dots of light we all love, from my house in the burbs anymore.

    The electoral college is an important part of our election process. If you stripped away the urban areas, there was no close contest. What matters to the urban areas doesn’t match up with the interests of rest of the US population. Cities and their burgeoning populations are like black holes, wastefully gobbling up resource from the surrounding areas. Interests and political power needs to be balanced and the electoral college helps do that. I agree with Andrew.

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  5. I must be missing something here ~ in my view of this post, I have no reference to anything except pictures of dots and instructions on how to view them repeatedly until I’ve seen 3 million. I know that Guy has for a long had a publication called Portrait of a Million, but is there some other reference relating this post to the popular vote totals in our recent election? If not, Andrew H. must be a lot smarter than me to have figured that out!!
    If he’s right and this post is about the election totals, I read somewhere that Trump won about 2,600 counties out of some 3,100+ in the country, which I think lends credence to the idea of the founders to provide for more factors (e.g. geographic distribution) in an election than simply the vote total. Nevertheless, I do think there is room for improvement in our system. The two political parties have gamed the system enough that they know how to slice and dice every precinct in the country to the point where both candidates end up spending 90% of their time in only a handful of states or even precincts because those are the only ones that matter in gaining electoral college votes. We would be better served if all candidates would compete for votes in all states, so that for example the Republican candidate would feel it was worthwhile to campaign in California and New York and the Democrat candidate would campaign in Texas and the deep south.

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    1. I too missed the connection. I suppose that Andrew is furiously fixated on that number (or else he noticed that Guy categorized the post under “Voting, politics”.

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  7. Meaningless. Our voting system works via the electoral college. It smooths out the bumps in the system where the large population centers which generally vote democratic holds sway. The imbalance between the popular vote and the electoral college has only happened 5 times to my knowledge in the many elections we’ve had. Perhaps if the Democratic Party picked a candidate democratically instead of choosing one they wouldn’t be in this predicament.

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