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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28358 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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McConell had a scary moment which looks like it could be the onset of dementia or Alzheimers. He froze up for a solid 30 seconds just staring aimlessly when a question was asked of him as to whether he would run for re-election in 2026. People have been saying similar things about Biden, although Biden has had the same verbal tics for his entire career so it'd be harder to know for certain. Dianne Feinstein only just recently announced her retirement despite being over 90 years old. Trump is hardly a spring chicken himself at 77 years old.

Some have advocated for age limits on politicians, as older people can have cognitive decline and are presumably out-of-touch compared to younger counterparts. How much of a real issue is this? How long can aides keep cognitive decline out of the spotlight for before it becomes too obvious to ignore?

Everyone declines on their own timeline. Witness Fetterman (54). Also witness Charlie Munger (99) and Warren Buffett (93). I actually think the latter two showed their age at the last annual meetings, but they were functional for a long time and still somewhat functional. Trump I think is in no obvious decline.

Voters get to choose. Ageism is bad. Partisan politics and some other issues are probably letting some bad candidates thru but simply picking ages doesn’t make sense to me.

I’ll disagree with Trump on a lot of things but at 77 he probably shows more life energy than myself.

Joe Biden (80) I think is past his sell by date and should just be enjoying life with his grandkids but the left is able to unite around him so that’s fine to me. I don’t think he’s the decision maker but for whatever reason he likes being the front man.

Ageism is bad

If this is true it should cut both ways. Why can a 34 year old not president but an 84 year old can?

I never said we should have a 34 year old limit. If Trump were to be assassinated and the GOP decides Barron Trump is the best candidate to unite the party around then they should be allowed to. I wouldn’t consider Barron as less qualified than Joe right now.

34 is an allusion to the provision of the US constitution that requires the President to be at least 35 years old.

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

The average age of a member of Congress is 59 years old, the oldest in modern history. The United States used to criticize the ‘gerontocracy’ of the Soviet Union of the 1970s-1980s, as Glen Greenwald points out here.

We have constitutional age minimums for elected office, so why not age maximums? I don’t trust our geriatric leadership to respond effectively to a real threat to the country. If we have to rely on their handlers instead, just now representative are our elected leaders? We need a ruling class that is virile, strong, responsive, and bold.

We need a ruling class that is virile, strong, responsive, and bold. So, we want a ruling class of adolescent males? Weren't the COVID policies that so many here complain about examples of virile, strong, responsive, and bold policies? As was crossing the 38th Parallel.

Perhaps we need a ruling class that is thoughtful, levelheaded, and wary rather than virile, strong, responsive, and bold.

heavy-handed COVID policies were driven largely by the fact that the elderly people in charge were under greater threat than the public at large, and reacted emotionally out of fear. If the government were run by a bunch of healthy, 30-year old frat bros rather than octogenarians willing to sacrifice their grandchildren's schooling for a misplaced sense of security, none of this would have ever happened.

COVID policies were enacted at the state level, where (to hazard a guess) the governors were younger and more responsive to the threat than our elderly Congress. The only federal legislative response I can think of was the CARES Act in 2020. I would have preferred decisive action early in 2020 by Congress—even if wrongheaded—then to pivot quickly once we knew more about COVID. Instead, we got a lumbering, indecisive Congress afraid to take strong actions in an election year. Maybe Congress was too old to risk bold policy in the face of uncertainty. More cynically, maybe this was the point given the Democrat-controlled Congress and a Republican President.

I don’t know enough about the Korean War to comment about that, sorry.

Maybe Congress was too old to risk bold policy in the face of uncertainty.

Alternatively, perhaps they were too wise to risk bold policy in the face of uncertainty. Although it seems to me that Congress in fact did quite a bit.

And my point is not about old versus young. It is about your professed, and it seems to me, rather thoughtless, preference for "virile, strong, responsive, and bold" action, "even if wrongheaded."

Eh, I'm the weirdo who thinks this is just a particularly bad moment with Mitch, Biden, and Trump in leadership positions and it'll soon pass.

Look at both parties - on the Democratic side, whether you like them or not, they're Newsom, Harris, Shapiro, Whitmer, Walz, etc. all of whom are normal political ages, and Pelosi just stepped down.

For the GOP, there's DeSantis, Reynolds, Hawley, Cruz, Kemp, etc. who again, are all in normal political leader ages, and McCarthy and most of McConnell's likely successors.

Now, the actual problem is that in 2028, if he's still living, the 80-something Trump will still likely be the choice of at least 30-40% of the primary voting base.

The exceedingly high average age of our government officials is likely a strong contributor to our absolutely retarded covid response, leading to the economic turmoil we are now suffering years later. There absolutely should be a maximum age limit. People's brains degrade as they age, in ways that are often not readily apparent to an unrelated third-party observer until it advances to a late stage. Their judgment cannot be trusted. We don't allow 12 year olds to run anything except a lemonade stand. I say it should be likewise for those over 75, and that's being generous.

On the other hand, everyone else had an equally awful Covid response except for a few places that were worse.

How determinative is age really, on covid policy opinion? The youthful Briahna Joy Gray e.g. appears to agree with the oldies on this subject.

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