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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18905 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

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I'm really hoping that the Republican wave coming our way (I have some positions on Republicans winning both the House and the Senate) will cool the fire on leftwing extremism. We need a de-escalation in this country and it's never going to happen while left-aligned people continue to belabor their most noxious positions.

A sound defeat might be just the thing to correct some of the worst excesses of the morality police.

That was my thinking in 2016. It didn't work then, and I don't expect it to work now. This stuff has reversed in the past, but the previous reversals, to my understanding, involved economic prosperity that got everyone too busy making money to worry about ideology. I'm not sure we've got another of those coming, and there's reason to worry that this time might be different in any case. Still, if you're looking for hope, that's where I'd look for it.

It seems like modern history has been something of an anomaly where we have had back to back revolutionary gains in productivity. Prior to the industrial revolution, there were long periods of marginal gains punctuated by smaller revolutions such as the printing press. Unless AI or some new energy source can come along and make us more productive I fully expect us to slide back into tribalism.

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