Posted by Psilocybin at 4:10am Jan 26 '14>>the thing is, there really isn't any practical way to deal with age cutoffs or the ages at which certain life events generally happen when you're dealing with millions of people. especially when it comes to issues as complex as going to college at 18 - there are many kids younger than that who are ready for college academically, of course. but they may not be ready socially (when my dad was in college, there was a kid in his class who matriculated at 14 - brilliant and was acing his classes, but being a 14yo when all of your peers are 18-22 did more harm than good).
College is a good example of something with multiple factors in gauging readiness. Then you have issues like medical consent, issues that focus on only one factor in gauging readiness. If someone knows how he wants the rest of his life to turn out, than he can be said to be ready to accept or refuse an operation. (My own views on medical consent are that it's your body and having a splenectomy will leave you spleenless for the rest of your life, including your adult life, so this should be granted to everybody, including convicted felons.)
>>it may not be completely fair to use age as a determining factor in cutoffs like voting - i know a great many minors who would take the responsibility seriously, and i know far more people who can vote that are a long way from being responsible. i would support the idea of a test, for example, that minors could pass in order to vote - but making that test relevant, non-partisan, and fair for every demographic including economic and cultural backgrounds is prohibitively impossible.
an age cutoff, on the other hand, is fair across every demographic - rich children reach 18 in exactly the same time that poor children do, every single ethnic group ages at the same speed, and all sexes reach it at the same time. age isn't a perfect metric, but it's far more fair than anything else we could possibly use.
Voting is a great example of something for which the traditional wisdom should be questioned and at the same time there should be a cutoff point somewhere. Just because there should be an age restriction on voting, that does not mean that the U.S. got it right when it chose 18 instead of 17 or 19. As most people who didn't sleep through high school history class know, it started out with 21, and then came the Vietnam War and its draft, which changed everything. The draft age being 18 has not been questioned much, and if America finally did away with its draft 18 would look completely arbitrary. Even with the Selective Service extant, 16 would be a better age than 18 today because of societal expectations to grow up; 16-year-olds having their feet planted firmly in their hometown (whereas 18-year-olds are soon to move off to college in a town where they may not no much about local candidates and councils); the Flynn Effect that increased IQ's over time among each age bracket; the Information Age making people more informed at younger ages; changing societal attitudes about whether a young person should be jailed for a crime and have the crime upon his/her record permanently, or more generally, whether it should stick with him/her in the minds and attitudes of other people in his/her community; and the taxation of 16-year-olds who work.
>>the argument about different voting ages in different countries is interesting. however, i think it only works when one is talking about equivalent votes. if someone born in brazil could vote in the US at 16 while i had to wait another two years, that would be a problem. instead, it's better to frame it as "no matter where you are from, no matter who you are, etc etc, you cannot vote in a japanese election until you are 20". it's like drinking laws - no matter who a person is, they can drink in europe before they can drink in the us (i have known international students who get very annoyed by this).
Another interesting argument! Yep, Rick Steves smokes weed and even eats ganja gelato when he's in Europe. You seem to view these laws as about what country you're in rather than about citizenship and nationality.
There is also the fact that people die at different ages. An American who dies on his fortieth birthday spends 47.5% of his life able to drink, whereas someone who is 21 now but lives to be 100, assuming no further changes in America's drinking age, spends about 80% of his life able to drink.
>>irrelevant to ageism. there is no ageist component in breathing, yet someone who dies at 40 will have had far less opportunity to do so than someone who dies at 80. this can more or less be extended to most possible human experiences, with or without an age component. any person who will die at a younger age than another will have less time to spend doing anything that requires being alive.
>>... and then . . .
>>and because i was born later than my father, i never got the chance to see jimi hendrix live as he did. i don't think it's fair to compare laws across time; there's an expectation in our society that each generation will grow up in a different world than its parents.
I see what you mean, but that sits on the vicissitudes of life, something beyonf our control. On the other hand, the human population does have control over what laws they make. Rather than compounding an already unfair world in which a person can die of some terrible disease at 27, humans should be making sure it doesn't get any more unfair because of human action. The freedom to practice any religion you want, for instance, is God-given and comes naturally, but then you have all these artificial stoppers like Middle Eastern countries forcing everyone to practice Islam, countries where minors are forced to practice whatever religion their parents make them follow, persecution of Christians in Ancient Rome, etc. Short of discovering an elixir for immortality, humans cannot change the shortness of a person's life or the generation to which a person was born, but they can change the artificial restrictions of Man.
Think of it this way: Every human so far has died, somehow or another, before reaching the age of 130, but if a human, as opposed to Father Time, kills another person (and not in a military capacity), it's considered murder.
People lose body parts in accidents or to natural diseases, but does that make it acceptable to deliberately perform a clitoridectomy on a girl?
>>>>A few years back, there was a 15-year-old boy named Jack living in the U.K. The age of consent in the U.K. is 16, but Jack was terminally ill at 15 and wanted to have sex before he died. The "you can wait" argument doesn't work here because they were sure Jack was going to die before his would-be sixteenth birthday. A female nurse, who remained anonymous, had sex with Jack illegally before he died, but if Jack had waited until he was 16, he never would have gotten that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
>>
>>i fully support this. age-dependent laws are not perfect, they are simply the fairest way we have to deal with these situations. given that they are not perfect and are used just because they are far better than any other approach, i see no reason why exceptions cannot be made - i think in this case it was a perfectly reasonable exception.
I agree that they were right to make the exception here, but too many people go around saying, "If we make an exception for you, we have to make an exception for everyone", etc.
>>>>Then there are ageist attitudes in general, as opposed to formally encoded laws, which don't have an exact cutoff the same way legal ages do. Take youth profiling, for instance.
>>
>>profiling in general is a bad idea. but in this case maturity does play a role - and because it's very difficult to tell how mature someone is at a glance, it's a pretty good rule of thumb to assume that older people are more mature than younger ones. this is especially true when it comes to taking responsibility for the society around you. children learn at a very young age how to look out for their own best interests - learning how to balance those against society's interests (eg, not stealing) takes a lot longer. some never learn it, of course, and some learn it very early. but it's far more likely that a 30yo knows it than a 14yo.
Are you saying that that justifies youth profiling? Because looking for teens to harass doesn't seem to hinge on perceived maturity.
>>I'd be willing to posit that for the vast majority of people, their teenage years involved far more risk-taking than later years.
For most generations, this has been true. For the Silent Generation, however, most of them put their heads down and did what they were told as high school and college students, then had a mid-life crisis in the 1960's or 1970's and became hip folks who mentored countercultural Boomers, rode motorcycles, wore leather jackets and beards, and often even neglected their Gen-X kids. Howe & Strauss wrote about this in several of their books.
>>once you start bringing clothing style into it, you're no longer dealing just with age issues. the very fact that a teenager dressed like a goth will generate more suspicion than a teenager dressed "normally" shows that clothing impacts perception quite a lot compared to perceived age - as it should, since age is not a choice whereas clothing is.
I agree with you that you shouldn't look down on someone because of something s/he has no choice over, be it being Black and born in the hood, or being 15, or being blind, or having an XYY karyotype, or just being vertically challenged.
As for clothing, however, many adults have misperceptions about what different styles of teen fashion represent. On the board EA911 that ran after 9/11, there was a skater girl who said that all the teachers and administrators at her high school thought the graffiti and other vandalism that went on was done by the skaters, when this girl knew for a fact it was done by the Abercrombie/American Eagle kids.
And yes, even *I* draw conclusions about people from their clothes. I mean, if a boy wears a Pantera T-shirt to school, won't everybody think he listens to the band Pantera?
>>basically, i agree that laws depending on age is not perfect by any means. there will always be many exceptions, some of which should be allowed and some of which should just be born (like a 40 year old voting republican - that's moronic, but it would be a bad idea to find a way to stop them from voting).
"Born"? as in "borne out", tolerated, the past participle of "bear"? I agree that America should let Republicans vote like Republicans; that comes with the territory of a free country. (And yes, I believe every country should be free.)
But what does it say about age and maturity that a 20-year-old today is more likely to vote Democratic or Green than a 40-year-old? (I'd be interested in hearing what everyone on the board has to say on this.)
>>however, any other possible and practical way of approaching the many situations age-specific laws deal with is far worse and far more discriminatory. like i said, age applies equally to everyone. socioeconomic status, ethnicity, location, sexual orientation, and even disability don't change how fast someone ages. any child, anywhere, will take the exact same amount of time to reach any given age as any other child. that's about as fair as you can get. and barring terminal cases (which i do give exceptions for), everyone gets the exact same opportunities as everyone else, under the exact same qualifications.
As for "the many situations age-specific laws deal with", are age-specific laws even necessary in some instances (the stores that won't sell anyone under 18 spray-paint, forcing minors to follow their parents' religion, denying medical consent to people under a certain age, disallowing people under a certain age to "endorse" a product/service, making it impossible for a minor to open a checking account)? Or how can a 6-year-old, much less a 17-year-old, actually be harmed by viewing what amounts to pictures of naked people having sex? There'd be a lot fewer problems with status crime laws if politicians realize some things don't need a mature/immature distinction altogether.
Re: Interesting argument - Psilocybin