Asklemmy

43940 readers

630 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
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

537

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 6 months ago by robocall@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

181 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 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.