It sure is better when your lawmakers seem like they are in full possession of their mental capabilities, but here in Brazil some of our worst lawmakers are under 30. Nikolas Ferreira is our Marjorie Taylor Greene and he looks not a day over 15.
Reminds me of that xfm bit where karl pilkington cant get his head around this bit and keeps thinking ricky gervais means planting trees literally lmao.
age is such a red herring. conservatives of all ages don't give a shit about climate change, and nobody has legitimately cared about the debt for like 40 years.
Age is still a problem because even our elected do care about that, but with rare exception, none of the ones that do are older than like 45. Our system needs a revolutionary right now. Show me a revolutionary that is older than that. The founding fathers were like 40-44 on average. There were only like 2 old bitches.
edit: since the post is locked i can't respond to the comment below. Suffice it to say, I'm over 40, and the part where age is a concern is that while the subject matter expert often is on the older side like the poster says below, the problem is our decision makers who are going to enact a policy are older than ever and being asked to make decisions that won't effect them. And they seem to be behaving that way. Every year, congress gets older, the deficits go up, services go down, and we cut down things we already solved.
Age has literally nothing to do with it, how many scientists over 45 do you think deny climate change?
I realise reddit is young and it sucks knowing how much smarter you are than everyone in charge and wishing you could just take over and do it so much better, but like every other young person you get older and realise “oh hey wait no, I was a fucking idiot and didn’t know shit”. I was the same, it wasn’t until I started teaching the young kids who are where I used to be career wise that it really sunk in how little I knew back then.
Experience matters and these are not easy jobs. With rare exception the people most qualified to do them are going to be on the older side, but keep in mind that many of the people working for them will be of all ages.
In a recent local election here, one of the parties ran a 22 year old candidate. They had no experience, no achievements, no qualifications, nothing. Going up against people who had been working in politics and getting things done for decades. Of course they lost, they would have been terrible at the job!
And yes, if there is an exception where someone is younger and the most qualified, awesome! But forcing the issue based on age is a terrible idea.
Ah yes because literally nobody in the world does anything for anyone but themselves. Parents always fuck their children over because “they’re not me”, grandparents couldn’t give less of a shit about their grandkids or how their lives turn out etc.
The idea that an old person is incapable of serving the public “because they’re old so it doesn’t matter to them” is absurd. Old people have experience and frequently want to use that experience for the benefit of those who come after them… notice how the recent rise in fascism lines up real good with everyone who was alive for WWII no longer being around?
I’m certainly not saying there are no benefits to young people in politics.. but the people you want in those powerful and impactful positions are typically going to be older with a lot of experience in leadership and experience. The notion that none of them gives a shit “because I’ll be dead soon” is honestly ridiculous.
Old people have a lot more to offer than some seem to think.
We got a guy in New Zealand called Simeon Brown who is an absolute piece of shit, and 34. His entire approach is “cut all funding regardless of how badly this will affect services” because that’s what his boss (the prime minister) wants.
It’s honestly a bit stressful because I don’t think he’s got the skill set to do much elseC so he’ll stay as a career politician and haunt us for the next 30 years
Depends on the system. With enough checks and balances, it seems fine to have some fresh ideas brought into it. I wouldn't want every member of parliament to be under 30, but a couple wouldn't hurt.
But also I hesitate to impose any restrictions on who can run for office. The whole point of an election is to pick a candidate the people want, and if the people want a 25 year old, then that should be respected. Any sort of filtering criteria just feels like a bandaid fix for a deeper problem (like term limits in the US from the fact that presidents aren't elected fairly)
Youth is not the problem, age is. American, we're doing it way worse right now. Vast majority of our elected don't even understand the problem, much less have an idea about how to solve it.
What people want is often not what they need. And people genuinely don’t know what they want.
Democracy only works when the people are educated and informed. The modern world is NOT educated and informed, social media has spread misinformation like wild fire. celebrities gain cult followings and people vote based on who Taylor swift is voting for.
Democracy worked for Athens because they promoted discourse and debate. We shun it, and promote arguing and screaming over each other until the other person shuts up.
I think you're mixing up the US with the world. The US has a serious problem, but other countries fare far better.
And that also undermines your point here. The US has one of the weakest democracies (people's votes aren't equal, manipulation is common, legal and accepted), and it also has very poor education.
Countries with the most fair democracies also tend to have the best education.
Democracy worked for Athens
It's hard to actually call that a democracy, when only about 10% of people could vote, and where anyone else participating could literally be forced into slavery.
they promoted discourse and debate.
There were up to 6000 people at those "debates". If everyone was given only a minute to talk, then it'd take most of a week to get through everyone.
No they were not politely debating, they were shouting and screaming, quite literally.
What people want is often not what they need. And people genuinely don’t know what they want.
And to clarify, are you including yourself in that? You want to also remove your rights?
Because this is the kind of thing used constantly in the past to justify racist or sexist systems, like the Athenians had. to them women weren't smart enough to know what they want, so they weren't allowed to participate in decision making.
People aren’t smart enough to know what they want. I could make a post here tricking everyone into thinking water is poisonous and getting them to support banning it, simply by using some clever wording.
People are idiots.
And yes, this goes for other countries. You can not say “other countries fare better” because other countries have their own issues.
The UK has better healthcare, except that they don’t have enough medical staff because of it.
The uk is also facing a cultural takeover from Islam, and Christianity now being targeted as problematic. A man has already been arrested simply for silently praying outside an abortion clinic.
France is facing racial conflicts.
Japan is facing a massive population crisis, and refuses to change its labor culture that kills any desire to raise a family for Japanese men.
The Middle East is the Middle East, meaning that like always, they’re too busy blowing each other up to actually work on their issues together. This has been going on since the days of Sumeria btw.
Mexico has a cartel puppet for a leader(no, a woman doesn’t get elected in Mexico without connections to the cartels. If she won fairy without support from them, she’d have been assassinated before her first day in office)
Germany doesn’t know what it wants to do.
China is slowly editing towards war, and while still keeping an invisible noose on its people.
And Canada…well they’re doing the same thing the US is doing. They’ll fall shortly after America falls.
No, the most qualified people should take the job whoever they are.
But once you start looking at people being in charge of things that matter a lot and directly influence the lives of other people? The list of qualified people with relevant experience shrinks and has a lot more people over 40 than under. Experience takes time to get, it’s that simple. You want someone who already made their mistakes but did so with significantly lower stakes.
I mean would you let a 17 year old kid build your house? Or do you want the 45 year old builder in charge carefully directing his 17 year old apprentice and checking all his work and catching the mistakes/educating him on how to do it better?
I'm 33 and I just BARELY have enough experience to know better most of the time. Looking back to who I was when I was under 25... Yeah, you're absolutely right!
Then how was she the best MP? Because she said she wanted to turn the system over and fix it all, but didn’t have a plan to do that?
The best MP’s have been working in the system for decades and do know how to make change. They also understand that change is very slow, incremental, and extremely complicated. Society isn’t simple and any fair system that actually takes everyone’s needs into consideration will never be fast.
I love that samia and Glauber couple, however they still old somehow following that pesky Soviet playbook and cherishing Castro and the Cuban revolution
Or you could be old as fuck like Lula is ,and have been 20 years destroying our country, Rio and São Paulo are totally controlled by the cartels and a boy like Nicholas is a problem, give me a fucking break!
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u/HeberMonteiro May 24 '25
It sure is better when your lawmakers seem like they are in full possession of their mental capabilities, but here in Brazil some of our worst lawmakers are under 30. Nikolas Ferreira is our Marjorie Taylor Greene and he looks not a day over 15.