cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26024422
Saikat Chakrabarti, AOC’s former chief of staff, thinks the Democrats need a bolder vision.
GOOD.
Pelosi has been in congress for 36 years. To put this in perspective, that’s longer than I’ve been voting. Time to retire.
To put it further in perspective, Nancy Pelosi isn’t a boomer. She’s silent generation.
Not so silent
She seems pretty silent on her inside trading.
But not silent on banning it, always voting no.
Surprising New Primary Challenger
That’s not that surprising. I was hoping it was like a golden retriever or something.
Natural progression of the Air Bud series.
Nothing in the Constitution says a dog can’t be speaker of the house!
Literally half the shit Trump’s team pulls (despite rulings saying otherwise)
Good.
Much like the appeasers that enabled Hitler, history is going to look back on Pelosi, Schumer, Kamala, Biden, Obama, Clinton, Jefferies, and other democrats who stood by and let all this happen on their watch without so much as a wimper.
It’s a big tent party of Chamberlains.
No matter, your view on her, it really is time to retire, she is 84.
I’d rather we judge on mental capacity and not on physical age (so that in theory wisdom is not lost), but there is something to be said for giving someone else a chance to drive the car.
The issue with lifelong politicians isn’t just their mental capacity but their lifelong detachment from reality as they live in a privileged bubble.
Wisdom can be written down, that would be more wise to do anyway.
Yes, but there is also Bernie. He is far more attached to reality than any young Republican in the Senate (or Democrat).
Undoubtedly. However, a Bernie who retired due to age or term limits, would still be able to mentor upcoming politicians. Handing the helm to a competent person and training their successors would be a much wiser strategy than what we currently got.
Why the hell should we keep creatures like Pelosi, who exist exclusively to suckle from the fetid teat of the stock market?
Oh, we should definitely get rid of Pelosi, but not because she aged out. The Pelosi of 30 years ago was just as worthy of dismissal.
Bernie is (unfortunately) a rare exception.
Then demonstrate the trend to me. I’ve given you an undeniable counter example. I agree that Congress is out of touch. Are the older Congress members more out of touch than MTG or the psycho tradwife Katie Britt? I don’t think so.
No one can argue with that, but the reason his name comes up every time is that he’s the exception, not the rule. His net worth is also a fraction of that of Pelosi’s or most of his political peers.
A ceiling on net worth for representatives is certainly an interesting concept, but not really relevant to the conversation.
It gets hard to show a correlation with time in service to detachment from reality when one of the longest serving members is the most grounded, and many of the youngest and most recent members are absolutely insane.
Even Pelosi is pretty progressive relative to the rest of the Democratic representation, and certainly of Congress as a whole. (Very feint praise given the field). She is certainly out of touch, but she was that way when she was far younger as well.
And he’s acknowledged himself that he’s an anomaly in that regard.
No doubt he’s an exception, but where is evidence for the rule that would justify punishing the exception? When I think of out of touch Congress members, all the first names that come to mind are almost all among the youngest in Congress. Even Pelosi would never be on my short list if she wasn’t in leadership. (She is definitely out of touch, but she has some fierce competition). Also, all the older ones that I think of were just as bad or worse when they were younger.
No, we need a physical age limit. Aside from needing to get new people in so that we can pass on institutional knowledge before their staffers are voting for them while they hang out in a nursing home.
The fact that we live in a gerontocracy is part of the reason we’re in so much shit in general. Why should the 83 yo senator from Bumblefuckia give a fuck about climate change, they’ll be dead way before it’s a problem. Why do they care about proper financial regulations when it might impact their ability to insider trade and pass off their unearned wealth to their kids.
Why should the 83 yo senator from Bumblefuckia give a fuck about climate change, they’ll be dead way before it’s a problem.
They shouldn’t. I wouldn’t consider them wise if they didn’t give a fuck about it. Wise people think of the future as well as the present.
Just for the record, I’m not defending her personally (hence my “giving someone else a chance to drive the car” comment), I’m pushing back against Ageism in general. Biological age is not always a good indicator for capability (see Bernie Sanders).
Not sure why people keep conflating age with capability/morality, they’re definately seperate things.
Not sure why people keep conflating age with capability/morality, they’re definately seperate things.
Because while they may be different things, but they’re absolutely not separate things given how age and cognitive decline are correlated. Because for every Bernie sanders you have multiple Feinsteins or Grangers that are at best not there or at worst hindering processes, holding up committee votes or taking up committee seats that could be used by someone who actually wants to improve things instead of making the line go up.
Bernie is an exception who proves the rule, unfortunately.
they’re absolutely not separate things given how age and cognitive decline are correlated.
Of course, degradation comes with age, but when I say they are still separate, what I’m saying is the degree of degradation is not exactly the same for every human being, but people judge ALL older people as having the same level of severe degradation, and that is Ageism.
Bernie is a proof of what I’m saying, that not everyone degrades at the same amount/rate over the same amount of time, and it is possible to have elderly people that are very sharp-minded and very capable of doing the job, plus having the wisdom of surviving those years and the knowledge they built up from doing so to be beneficial to the rest of society.
The prejudice of Ageism really shouldn’t be justified. Anyone over a certain age shouldn’t just automatically be thrown away, there are younger people who could have mental illness that are not capable of doing a job, so age does not directly relate to capability, physical and emotional status of the brain does.
Ageism already exists in the system and we don’t have an issue with it. It’s just okay to be ageist against young people.
We say younger people are not mature enough for certain tasks, but I know plenty of kids who are younger than the required age but able to understand and perform the same tasks. Does that mean we should let 12 year olds have drivers licenses? Are we just going to ignore these kids because they haven’t met a specific age criteria? Or are we going to say that as a rule, they don’t have the mental capacity to have that privilege/responsibility.
We already have rails in place for older people to have their driving privileges taken away, at the very minimum there should be one for government work. You keep saying this is ‘throwing away’ older people, when in reality, this is removing people before they do not have the capacity to do it themselves. No one is saying they can’t advise, but they absolutely should not be steering the future of this country. Because that’s how we get to where we are now.
Ageism already exists in the system and we don’t have an issue with it. It’s just okay to be ageist against young people.
I personally don’t agree with this at all.
I don’t judge younger people by their age. I look at their ideas, and consider those before passing judgment.
Actually there’s a lot of times where I see young people doing something that I would first think “wow that’s silly”, because I’m set my ways (which I fight every day to try and not be). But then I would actually give the young person some trust and the benefit of the doubt, and actually support them in their beliefs, in a “fresh minds, fresh ideas” sort of way.
My idea is when one generation gets older that they kind of become the assistants of the next generation coming up behind them, and then we just repeat that cycle every generation.
Ageism at any age is wrong, but I’ve seen it practiced a lot more against older people that I have against younger people (especially online), hence my initial comment.
That’s not surprising. The left has been looking for someone capable of primarying her for years.
And for years she’s always held onto her position because of name recognition and money from Super PACs. Ratfucking is a bipartisan tool.
All these fucking useless Democratic leaders are so selfish. You’ve failed and failed over and over again, miserably, yet you still insist on trying to lead? Do the right thing. Step down. Quit. It’s truly disgusting how they’ve strangled their party and country with their incompetence.
And let progressives who actually have plans to stop Trump win for once? Never!
I don’t have much hope in the voters. Last time a great challenger came along, Shahid Buttar in 2020, they still elected the geriatric choice. The DNC and Dem voters are the fucking worst. I mean, as long as you pretend the racist, fascist, ignorant, magats on the other side of the aisle don’t exist.
You would think that the Democrat’s consistent record of utter failure would count for something, but I think it has the opposite effect. The worse things get, the more insecure people feel. Insecurity makes voters risk-averse. Republicans capitalize on that with calls for a return to an American that never really existed. Democrats capitalize on it by making Democratic voters scared of new leadership.
I try to explain it with AIDS as an example. AIDS is a horrible disease, but it doesn’t kill you. It just sets you up to die from another opportunistic infection like pneumonia. The fascists are pneumonia, and the neoliberals are AIDS. It’s the fascism that kills you, but it’s the neoliberalism that was the underlying cause that should have been dealt with.
The challengers we need are to the entire DNC. They are a failure at representative government
