(Jan 13, 2019 10:23 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: I don’t think that dementia is an issue. His memory seems to be intact and he was only 79 when he made his first public statement.
Yah, but anywhere in the 70s is adequate for the potential onset (if not earlier):
Brain Atrophy In Elderly Leads To Unintended Racism, Depression And Problem Gambling. Since "dementia" is a loose umbrella classification rather than a single "disease", the executive function deterioration doesn't have to be blatantly accompanied by a full complex of deficits.
Prior to the web holding communications forever, the average candidates for this could only suffer intermittent speech mishaps confined to local domestic or job environments. Whereas a celebrity figure feeling empowered by either their status or the intellect attributed to them in the past might boldly persist down the taboo or controversial public road which their faltering executive faculties chose.
He could have been deliberately covert about his views for most of his career before finally "coming out" -- a bevy of several people's recollections about his private life in earlier days could easily settle that. But if minus such, then Hopkins' claim that he has changed from the person she knew, combined with his age qualifying for the possibility of "senior tendencies", would warrant readers withholding 100% judgement. Even if Tribunals Without Due Process Or Contingent Exemptions humping for a big score of points in their social justice ratings cannot hold back the eagerness.
Racial prejudice and the elderly
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati...story.html
EXCERPT: Von Hippel, a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, has found that as the brain's frontal lobe begins to atrophy with age, elderly adults exhibit greater social inappropriateness and increased stereotyping and prejudice. And it happens despite their best intentions.
"At some level, I would say we should not hold older adults responsible for their racist attitudes," von Hippel said. "We call it 'prejudice against your will,' because we think it's not something they can control."
Obama himself noted this phenomenon last March, in his frank Philadelphia speech on race.
Referring to his elderly white grandmother, Obama said she is "a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
Sociologists have found that racial bias pervades the subconscious of most Americans and that the elderly hold more such prejudices than those who are younger.
For example, 35 percent of Americans age 60 and older believe it's unacceptable for whites to date blacks, according to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Yet just 16 percent of Baby Boomers disapprove of interracial dating—and among Americans age 30 and younger, the disapproval figure is only 6 percent.
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Jan 13, 2019 07:31 PM
