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U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

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I’ll be honest in that most people are, in my view mostly consensus driven as far as actual morality goes. Maybe one in a hundred would have something akin to actual morality— as in a code of morals that the person would risk any substantial losses to uphold a moral code. It’s hidden in various ways behind arguments about the definitions of words — in this case fetus vs baby or child, though similar arguments were had in arguments about slavery and the definition of Negro and just how human those Negroes are, or perhaps in the Nazi era there were arguments about how much Jewish ancestry tainted a person as untermensch. The arguments might well sound rational, but the purpose is not to define terms but to define away humanity. Pragmatism often does the same, hiding cruelty behind the line items of a budget. There is always money for more bombs, but rarely for school lunches. We can afford prisons, but paying for schools is not pragmatic enough.

Morality is something we should strive to develop, but in 99% of cases, it is simply to be expected that people will go along with whatever the wider society wants to do. The limits are not some strange scruples that people hold, but thei4 own aesthetic preferences. As long as the nasty business is done in ways that you don’t have to actually watch the deed done let alone do it themselves. Keep it within those bounds and you can get most of the public to be perfectly fine with anything the wider society wants to do. You want to flatten a city, most people are perfectly fine with it, so long as the bombing isn’t on their screens.