this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Ageism is stupid, but recognizing the limits and needs of the upper limits of age related physiology isn't ageism.
We don't let 5 year olds run the country for the same reasons we shouldn't let 90 year olds. Is there an occasional exception that might actually make a decent leader? Absolutely! ...and frankly the 5 year old comparison stands there too - I'd take most 5 year olds over most of the current assholes running the world. But I digress - we shouldn't run shit like age barriers on the possibility of exceptions.
Another angle I don't see people talking about much here is that making someone work literally all the way to the grave, is fucking cruel. I get that these folks are power hungry wastes of oxygen who want to just occupy what would otherwise be useful space for as long as possible, but again, exception not rule.
Society has already decided on a general retirement age. Social Security age eligibility should be the cut off for all elected positions.
Man, you really want to raise the social security age that badly?
As long as someone has their cognizant abilities and is capable of doing the job and they want to do the job they should be able to do the job.
We as voters should be voting them out of the office if we don't like the job they're doing, or even if we feel they're out of touch with their constituency, but we shouldn't be excluding them from taking the job just because of their age.
I'm personally cool with that, but only if we have a system to process them as exceptions. Mental wellness checks, verification that they actually understand the things they're legislating - like iirc there was a recent story with a law maker who was handling some of Google's recent shenanigans, but let slip that didn't know what a browser is. He didn't have any mental disease that I'm aware of, he just didn't grow up around tech and found himself legislating on something he had zero understanding of as a product of his age.
We can't just rely on voters to vote them out - name recognition is and will continue to be a helluva drug. Also not every office is decided by voters.
We need to handle the age problem in politics. It doesn't have to be some heavy-handed "just kick out all the 65+ers!" shit, but our policy now is to just wait until they die, which is equally unacceptable.
Totally and completely agree with your take.