I definitely think it’s a slippery slope to totalitarianism and that’s kinda how I directed my hypothetical, but really I think it’s just undemocratic to have age limits. Not because it might lead to totalitarian racial, sexual, etc. discrimination, but because it’s just as wrong. There’s not a specific age at which the brain starts to decline. Maybe famously, fluid intelligence declines at some point but crystalized intelligence just increases over time (assuming normative brain function). Some people stay sharp until the day they die at age 100 and others get early dementia.

I have the same problem with age limits as I do with literacy tests and other forms of voter suppression. If you want people to elect good leaders, the most fair way to do it is to allow everybody to vote and then educate everybody so that they know who’s actually better. People shouldn’t vote for somebody whose age is impairing their ability. But age shouldn’t limit eligibility.

I do agree that incentivizing people to increase longevity is a good thing. And that men should take better care of their health. But yeah I think age limits are not the way to do it, though it’s of course an interesting thought experiment.

Making it different based on gender is interesting. We could actually implement other lifespan predictors to define a different mandatory retirement age for everybody in positions of power.

Your birth year also impacts your lifespan independently from your age. A NZ man born in 1965 should retire before age 69 but a NZ woman born in 2023 can go up until 85.
I found a really great paper that shows NZ lifespan data based on a whole bunch of different factors. Māori have a lifespan of about 6 years less than average New Zealanders, so they of course should retire from positions of power earlier by 5 or 6 years.
We can also account for region, income, history of substance use, marriage status, and whatever other data we can get our hands on.

And of course if, in the first place, we’re doing this to limit our pool of leaders to those who are physically & mentally fit, we can automatically rule out anybody with certain diagnoses and disorders.
Once we narrow it down enough we can be pretty sure that everybody who has public or private power is deserving of that power by, of course, the standards we set.

OR maybe it’s a bad idea to base it on gender or just a really bad idea in general

I wanna play that singleplayer Splatoon that came out. Pretty sure I’m the only person in the world that wanted there to be a single player Splatoon game; the Splat 2 campaign is one of my favorite games ever. But that’s literally the only 1 game I would play on a Switch 2 so it’s time for emulator

Pretty sure this has been at least partially debunked in that the fairness doctrine had nothing to do with Fox News. It only regulated broadcasts, not cable.

You could argue that there’s still an indirect connection.

I didn’t watch the video though, I only read the blurb.