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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

His observation that the ICU is full of the elderly reminded me of the Obamacare debates when I was younger.

I always felt like I was taking crazy pills when I would leave my conservative elder parents who hated the idea of universal healthcare, and go to my younger liberal friends who were all for it. It was such a clear case of peoples ideology running directly against their self-interest. Young people being against paying for old peoples healthcare (while the elderly control a much larger share of the wealth) made sense to me, old people wanting more reassurance that they would always have healthcare made sense, but the two groups essentially wanting to self-sabotage was always confusing.

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If you abandon your ideals when it conflicts with your own self-interest, it is not ideology at all, just self-interest. You are criticizing integrity here. such as it is..

I would hope that liberal young people (and we millennials) wouldn't be against paying for old people's health insurance at all. The hardest part of believing in a principle is doing so when you aren't benefitting from it.

While I have little patience for Fox News lemmings of any age, I have noticed that the relative lack of older folks in our daily "internet trenches" has caused the digital zeitgeist to take on a distinct anti-elderly tone. From lighter- hearted mockery, to blaming a nebulous organized "boomer" class for birthing every modern sin of civilization, and everything in between.

In any event, as more internet literate adults experience the full lifespan, it may create a corrective trend.

By the way, nearly every reply in this thread has been more informative and thought-provoking than the original article on Substack. A really interesting thread to follow, thanks to the contributors.

A lot of old people have made peace with death. Not all, but many

Fox News & co have spent decades training their target demographic to hate and fear anything that Democrats even pretend to like. There's nothing particularly age-inherent about it other than said demographic being both wealthier and less educated and thus a better group to target with the associated nonsense grifting.

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