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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18859 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.

There are two different types of political extremism, I think. A Republican wave would make the leftists desperate and more extreme outside power structures (to the extent that they even exist outside those). The opposite would make them arrogant and more extreme within them. The only things that would deescalate their extremism in the long run would be federal student debt cancellation, the nationalization of healthcare, a federal minimum wage and so on.

So the only way to prevent extremism is to give the Democrat extremists exactly what they want?

Would you buy "the only way to prevent abortion extremism is to ban abortions, giving them what they want"

Theoretically it's always possible to simply repress the extremist opposition. But that is not a case of deescalation.

Right up there with, "if you're upset about illegal immigration, then just make immigration legal!" retorts. No, I actually want to win on this issue, it's not a mere technicality or question of appropriate paperwork.

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