blackbelt352

You can still write in his name on the ballot. Nobody is going to arrest you for that. Ridicule you, sure, but not arrest you.

It does match one phenomenon. Survival. Noise is important for listening for predators, smell let's you know if potential food is rotted and our sense of taste helps us distinguish between calorie dense food (sweet), salts and micronutrients (salty), acidic foods (sour), poisons (bitter) and protein (umami).

Most likely Hivemind, could also be called, Gestalt Intelligence, group mind, group ego, or mind coalescence. It's very much a staple of sci-fi for decades.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_mind_(science_fiction)

Partly convenient geopolitical ally (the borders were carved of the region not long after WW2 with the enforcement of the Allied forces) and partly Dominionism where a certain subsection of Christianity, predominantly Evangelicals who are very politically motivated, believe that when Israel controls Jerusalem, the holy land, that is one of the portents of the predictions made in the Book of Revalations, ushering in God's kingdom on earth and the end of time.

The same way Texas did its abortion bounty scheme or Florida made it ok to run protestors over. Empower the chuds to enact violence, maybe lock one or two up for going too far and call it a day, while nothing is actually done to stop the violence.

If thar were the case, what sorts of duties would such a position entail?

Mutual respect and being apolitical are definitely not the same things. Like I said, politics has always been a part of sports.

Eh I tend to find that nothing is truly apolitical. Everything that exists is affected by politics. If you start looking you can find how politics plays a role in everything.

Like this bottle of Coke I'm currently drinking. The corn syrup used in it is super cheap because the agriculture industry is heavily subsidized to grow corn, the logos and branding falls under trademark and copyright law, the plastic that makes up the bottle has regulations on the types of plastic used and can only use food safe plastics, and that plastic is a product of petroleum, so fossilr fuel lobbying isninvolved too, the water that Coca Cola uses could very well have come from a source that was plundered by a PMC (look up Nestle for that one) and stolen from locals. And then just because I throw the bottle into recycling, doesn't mean as soon as it leaves my hand that it's properly handled along the entire processing and doesn't just end up in a landfill anyway. And that's not talking about all the different lobbyists from all the various industries that play a role in making, shipping and disposing of a bubbly brown liquid in a bottle made of polymerization petroleum.

Yeah none of that politics stuff like how Jackie Robinson playing baseball definitely wasn't political, and the US vs Soviets 1980 Olympics definitely wasn't politically charged, and people definitely were expressing their dislike of the Soviets during the game or the entire point of the Olympics being a peaceful gathering of nation states for competition ia definitely not political, or all the taxpayer money that goes to building stadiums also isnt political, or that the owners of sports teams are politically active isnt... political. Oh... wait.

I'd say Nixon, without the Southern Strategy, the republican party wouldn't have been basically taken over by the subsumed Dixiecrats.

There's no way an 8 inch cable works for you. 8 inches wouldn't even span the distance from my car charger to a phone clamp or from my computer to my desk.

3 ft is barely tolerable for me. 6 feet gives me enough room to move my phone around.

So First Past the Post and the electoral college aren't mutually exclusive.

The electoral college is voting logistics, a relic of a time when sending paper ballots in a sealed box from Vermont or Georgia to Washington was a months long horseback ride through dangerous territories. It was a clever solution to solve the logistics of running a democracy on the technology they had at the time.

First Past the Post is a simple voting system where each persong gets one vote with one name on it. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins. The problem with it is it tends toward 2 parties through the spoiler effect. If there are 2 parties that run similar enough platforms, that splits the voting base, because either party will satisfy those issue needs, but the opposition to those issues would be one big voting bloc. Thus the 2 losing parties will siphon off voters from the other losing party until eventually one party remains.

It's why the Dems in this country range from vaguely progressive corporate neoliberals (think Biden or Pelosi) or to highly progressive further left wing* people (think Bernie or AOC. And Republicans range from conservative corporate neolibs (think Romney or McCain) to reactionaries and outright fascists (think Boebert and Marjorie Green).

*compared to the rest of our representatives in America