Asklemmy

43731 readers

1120 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

540

Would you support a mandatory retirement age of 75 for US House, US Senate & US Supreme Court Justices and if not why? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

182 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

No, because that's literally agism.

I understand that it's tempting to think that old age necessarily means degraded mental faculties, but there is no scientific link between the two. There are people who develop Alzheimer's in their 30s, and others who remain lucid into their 100s. Tomorrow there could be a scientific breakthrough that doubles the average lifespan of every human on earth, and we'd be sitting here with an irrelevant age limit on the books like simpletons. The abilities of the person are what matters, the number itself is a red herring (in the same way that the color of their skin should not be used to infer anything).

If the issue is term length, then put a term limit on the position. Otherwise, democracy means the people will elect the wrong people sometimes. We're in a unique situation where the baby boomer generation has more voting power than the rest of the population, but this issue will resolve itself.

Edit: the AARP's position on the matter

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Absolutely none of this is true.

Alzheimer's is only one specific disease that leads to rapid mental breakdown. There are many forms of senility, all of which including Alzheimer's become more likely as you get older, which means that
There is absolutely a strong correlation between age and degraded mental facilities. If I gave you three citations I'd be leaving out hundreds more citations.
There won't be a scientific breakthrough that doubles the average lifespan of every human on earth. There are so many flaws with this idea it's exhausting just to think about it.
Mandatory retirement ages are in use all over the place. Judicial appointments have this in place already in 18 states. Executive boards can legally have this rule in place as well. Any situation where old age in a job is a safety issue creates an exception in the form of an unmet bona fide occupational qualification. I would definitely argue that old men who create policy for hundreds of millions of people create a safety risk for those people if they aren't mentally qualified to do the job.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Maybe we just need a mental competency exam of some kind... Like, I think Bernie is still thinking pretty clearly, but Trump, Boebert and Greene? Literally mentally ill... And not just to pick on Republicans; Biden is clearly senile, Clinton is clearly a sociopath

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

There is no necessary correlation. Everything you are saying is representative of today, but not universally true. That's my point.

It would be identical to say that a certain skin color is strongly correlated with high imprisonment and low economic status, so therefore we should ban certain skin tones from running for office. Those correlations may be true today, but there are reasons that have nothing to do with the actual skin color that make it the case. Similarly, there is nothing about the number of times you've gone around the sun, or the length of time you've been alive that necessitates your cognitive faculties to degrade.

There won't be a scientific breakthrough that doubles the average lifespan of every human on earth. There are so many flaws with this idea it's exhausting just to think about it.

But there will continue to be scientific advancements that extend our life expectancy by a small bit every year, for an indeterminate amount of time. Which is why raw "age" is not a good measurement to use.

The basis for everything I'm saying is that age is a protected class in the US, which is why forced retirement in general is illegal.

Yes, there are many instances where institutions get away with it anyway, but as the AARP puts it:

Numerous scientific and medical studies find no need for this age-based discrimination.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Tomorrow there could be a scientific breakthrough that doubles the average lifespan of every human on earth

Genetic max age in humans is 120 years (+-5 years).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Based on telomere degradation. Recent developments may result in human telomere repair in the near future.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Which still leaves genetic degradation and a few more to solve. Aside from living standards, since most don't reach even 100. But maybe those cases who reach 120 without doing anything special are similiar cases to the super-healers of lung tissue, which never get cancer even with 2 packs cigare / day?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Recommend anything to read on the matter? Sounds very interesting, but I'm afraid I may find some dubious material before striking anything good.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Puh, i think this was from some science journal years ago. I think mainly due to telomeres?

Now that you mention it, this may be obsolete already. Someone knows?