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Notes -
"To make sure 85-year-old can live to 86?"
Yikes, I see a sentiment like this and it makes me think it's not the left that is on the side of some kind of youth cult that disrespects elders but rather the libertarian right, which is just the entire American right it seems, even when they're not talking about wealth creation and entrepreneurship. There's a flippant, distinctly young healthy male attitude to so much of their thinking
The issue is not that old people are worth less, or some crap like that. It's that the costs here were borne by all of society, for the disproportionate benefit of a small slice of society. That isn't really cool.
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At the start of the pandemic, whenever I pointed out that Covid disproportionately affected the old and infirm and posed about as much risk to young people as the flu, the response from doomers was generally some variant of "Oh, so you think a young person's life is worth more than an old person's? (You monster?)" And I would hastily backtrack and offer some mealy-mouthed equivocation like "Oh no, I'm not saying that, I'm just saying we have to balance costs and benefits... weasel words"
Within a few months, my response hardened into a resolute yeschad.jpg
And honestly, I really don't think that anyone actually thinks an old person's life carries the same moral weight as a young person's. Go to the funeral of an 88-year-old person. Sure, people may be a little sad, but the atmosphere won't be significantly different from a golden anniversary.
Then go to the funeral of an 8-year-old person. People will be distraught. They will be tearing their hair out, wailing and gnashing their teeth. Likewise at the funeral of an 18-year-old or a 28-year-old.
There is no meaningful comparison that can be drawn between any of these and the funeral of an 88-year-old person, and it's absurd to pretend that there can.
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Young men make or break civilisations. They invent, fight, discover, innovate and destroy. There is a reason almost any “historical figure” who did something exceptionally good or bad is a man. A society that channels their energy to productive and creative forces progress. Otherwise the young men will find a way to express their innate energy in whatever destructive way.
Protecting the elderly or the women are secondary tasks of a society and should never come at the cost of telling young men to indefinitely stay at home, not aspire to anything, jerk off three times a day. Because then soon you will have no society left to protect the vulnerable.
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If we have to sacrifice 77 young person years to increase 1 old person year, then yes, I do disrespect the old, and their demands of everyone else to make disproportionate sacrifices for them.
It's not the old people making demands, at least in my experience. Whether it was my older family members or my older customers at work, they gave less of a shit than young people.
Exceptions exist, all the usual caveats, but that's what I saw.
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