Fair point, I am advocating that we discriminate against would-be presidential candidates below a Constitutional age limit.

In your opinion, at what age should we let people vote? Smoke? Drive? Sign contracts? Drink? Have consentual sex? Get married? Require them to be off their parents' health insurance? Permit catch-up retirement contributions? Allow tax-free withdrawals from IRAs? Allow claiming Social security? Etc.

It would only be fair that people who are subject to adult taxes, regulations and jail should be allowed to participate in the processes that subject them to involuntary actions (such as taxes and jail) - This doesn't only mean voting but being eligible to be voted for - After all taxation without representation was literally the rallying cry of our nations freedom.

Given what we have now, 18. Stupid 18 year olds you say? No problem they won't get elected. What if someone does? Well, then that person is clearly an extremely exceptional 18 year old and might be smarter than both you and I. Basically, meritocratic participation. I'm not sure how someone can argue against it.

Now, if you want to put in a requirement to have some level of public service experience before being president, that is not discriminatory, though it opens up a whole other can of worms - Personally I'm against this, but at least such a requirement would actually make sense in a meritocratic way, instead of just being silly ageist discrimination, which hopefully one day will be seen for being similar to other vile views like racism, sexism and classism.

The rest of your questions aren't really relevant to this point.

> The rest of your questions aren't really relevant to this point.

I disagree. We, as a society, discriminate on age in myriad structural ways because we believe that it is beneficial for both individuals and society as a whole.

Maybe there are exceptional 6-year-olds who should be able to smoke, drive automobiles, and collect Social Security. But I see no reason for our culture to permit them to do so, even if they landed a majority of the Electoral College.

No one is talking about 6 year olds smoking cigarttes. Only you.

We are talking about adults being treated like adults when it's in societies interest (pay taxes, go to war, go to jail), but not being treated like adults when it isn't (get elected) - This is an issue.

The issues you bring up don't cover this issue. These questions are a whatabboutism, bordering on trolling given the extremity.

Specifically, you are responding to the following comment, so any comment that is a sub of this comment is expected to be on topic, which you will see your smoking 6 years olds are most definitively not part of:

"Yeap, and legally enforced age discrimination means we can't actually take many offices. We can vote for old farts. We just can't be elected.

Double think starts: But that isn't discrimination. Because it is legal. Instead it is called 'age of candidacy'."

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Whatabboutims works like this: Person 1 says "adults are being discriminated upon so they can't be part of the political process"

Person 2 doesn't agree, but has no argument. So person 2 states "But what about children smoking? what about pensions? what about..."

Person 2 isn't (an many times can't) answer the point, so they try to highlight that some similar issue is happening in some other place in a way to undermine Person 1's position. But in the end... Person 2 isn't addressing the issue being brought up.