• Utter_Karate [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      12 hours ago

      It’s not even that Americans in general used to make fun of that. It’s these actual individual people that used to make fun of that, because they were around to do that during the 70s. And the funniest thing is they used to have a point. The Soviet Union really did have a problem with aging politicians and it wasn’t healthy for the country. Good job noticing that before I was born, guy who is still a senator half a century later!

      • spudnik [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        11 hours ago

        Always have to mention it when this gets brought up: a huge part of why Soviet leadership was so old by then is that a huge portion of the following generation of potential Soviet leaders were specifically targeted by the Nazi invaders during WW2. So there was a damn good reason the Soviet leadership was old by that point. The same is definitely not true about the current us leaders obviously

    • altkey (he\him)@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      13 hours ago

      Soviet people thought late Brezhnev was a mentally cooked geriatic fossil. He died at 75. Both candidates before Harris stepped in were even older than that. That’s something deeply unserious.

    • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      12 hours ago

      uhh actually I’m putzing around in parliament at 300k€ / year with 8 state sponsored caretakers at the age of 75 to vote to nuke algeria so I don’t see why roofers should be allowed to retire at 60