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Why are we constantly raising the bar and treating adults as children? They are not so underdeveloped that they should be lacking this much in the sense and good judgment department. In my parents heyday, young children were doing very complex tasks (no they weren’t doing hard labor, thank God) and learning on the fast track. There’s been a great coddling of people in the 21st century.
People I work with at my current job think I’m some kind of magical worker for no other reason than the fact that I do my job. It has nothing to do with that at all. It’s a product of the culture I was raised in. Young children are adults in training.
I think the argument isn't really "this 20-year-old is so young he couldn't understand the severity of what he was doing". It's more about how we shouldn't punish his future 30-year-old self over what he did at 20, in the way that we would feel comfortable hampering a 40-year-old's freedom over crimes he committed at 30, because a 30-year-old is much less likely to repeat his 20-year-old self's mistakes than a 40-year-old is likely to repeat a 30-year-old's.
(I'm not impressed by the argument as it pertains to 20-year-olds, but I think that's the basis on which we don't try, say, 9-year-olds like adults. 9-year-olds are not inherently "lacking in the sense and good judgment department" in the sense of not being responsible for their own actions; they know that killing is wrong and they shouldn't do it. But you aren't in any realistic sense keeping people safe by keeping a 9-year-old murderer off the streets for forty years, the likelihood of someone committing murder aged 9 is basically apples and oranges to their likelihood of committing murder aged 40 unless genuine mental illness is involved.)
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Because the gerontocracy has a massive incentive to pull the ladder up behind it. Gerontocrats favor increasing conservatism and fear of... well, life in general[1] so as the balance of power (being a zero-sum game) in society is stretched thinner, it's inevitable that the law protects but does not bind the old while binding but not protecting the young.
It's basically just racism, but for age; complete with the exact same skull-measuring behaviors.
The problem with modern society is a failure to reinvest with "but muh risk" as the excuse, one would expect that to impact its most vulnerable members first, which it has. And this happens all the way up the honor roll, so to speak; as we punish parents who the aged don't judge sufficiently risk-averse for that reason as well.
[1] New advancements that nullify their stores of value for retirement are inherently threatening, so 'just being able to go do things' inherently conflicts with their class interest. Which is exactly what we have seen since the '80s.
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It's also a ridiculous world if we're gonna be saying in some cases that like a 24 year old isn't adult enough to be held responsible for crime, while also in other cases charging 15 year olds as adults..
And for bonus points, getting charged as an adult for a crime that can only be committed by a minor.
The system is broken, and the young are too weak to purge it.
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