I can't imagine the frame of mind wherein when i'm told that there is a way to stave off dying (a gross over-simplification of the article) -- our number one problem for the entirety of our existence -- and I am compelled to sour the news with a reverse "I wish they were dead" statement about my political enemies.
Defeating death just feels larger than human politics, it reaches into the entirety of biology unlike who The Favorite Person is at the moment.
Well then you have weak imagination. No large dictator went out willingly, all who killed tens of millions thought they are on some holy mission for greater good and just squashing the enemies of this greater good.
Death is great, frees up limited resources, removes old farts who think they know how future for everybody should look like without actually having a good reason why.
Lets expand reasonably at least around out solar system first (meaning say >50% of human population not on earth), and then start looming into immortality.
Show me 1 truly powerful person in the past who wasnt an arrogant self centered a-hole.
We talk about enslavement of whole human race potentially forever in worst possible case. If that is something you can ignore, well I can't.
>>> Show me one truly powerful person who could have survived 30% of his subjects actively resisting.
>> Syria is at 40% opposition, 40% pro-government, and Assad has been hanging on during an active civil war for 11 years:
> This illustrates my point
How so? The implication of your GGP comment was that any powerful person with that much opposition should not be able to survive, but the example shows a powerful person with more opposition surviving.
>>> Show me one truly powerful person who could have survived 30% of his subjects actively resisting.
>> It's a lot easier for "truly powerful person" to keep "his subjects [from] actively resisting" than you seem to think.
> Depends completely on the people.
Not really, unless you have a fictitious people that isn't subject to social coordination problems.
However, real populations are subject to those problems, which is why we've seen dynasties of awful dictators survive for generations (e.g. North Korea). The lesson of those dynasties is also probably "don't let up on the oppression or you'll lose power," which might be easier to keep up if the immortal leader doesn't doesn't have to be replaced by a naive successor.
> You have a mental virus that wants to believe everything is doomed.
LOL. Comments like that are totally unpersuasive, and also against the rules.
Well, you do. Lots of people do. I’ve never seen one become self aware though. But anyway, no, not all people are the same. Some populations of people create, initiate, prop up and then perpetuate evil cults of dogma as is the case with North Korea. Some populations never even let it get to step one. Make no mistake, the waves of political dogma lap on every shore. It’s always ready to take over. Some populations are less inclined to group think, save the children and etc. because that’s always what fuels it. I have read a couple of books about North Korea and you can believe me that North Korea was not held at gunpoint to create the regime. I also read “nothing to envy” which is a collection of memoirs written by defectors. They absolutely do it to themselves. And the multi-generational lifespan of that regime makes your point rather moot.
And Assad illustrates my point because I was watching the Syrian civil war and he very nearly did not survive. He was relegated to a bunker and when he emerged he was clearly deeply shaken and a different man. That 40 percent gave him his full moneys worth. To say that this is an example of dictators being invulnerable to dissent is incorrect. If it were 50 or 60 the scale would have tipped. It is an example of my point.
Putin and Trump are not political enemies though, they are criminals. No dietary supplement can offset the premature deaths caused by Putin in Ukraine.
Wow... I'm not equally blaming the Ukrainian president as he is not equally guilty. This is a fact morally (attacking is worse than defending) as well as practically (surrendering would not stop Putin from killing).
And what was Zelenskyi's crime again? Putin's is genocide.
I'm also not defending Putin, but simply as a matter of killing people, Ukraine has the power to prevent that by not fighting, even if it comes at the cost of losing their existence as a country separate from Russia. That could certainly be a bad thing in other ways, but you expressed concern for people killed in the war, not grander moral rights and wrongs.
I don't know if you're missing facts about what is happening in Ukraine, or if you don't see how those events fit the concept of genocide. In short: what is happening in Ukraine is not a normal war.
Putin says his motive is to protect Russian-speakers, create a Russian empire of a single ethnicity and "undo" Ukraine as a nation. He dehumanizes Ukrainians. He removes the Ukrainian language from the areas he captures such as Donbas. He has abducted hundreds of Ukrainian children. While he "protects" Russian speakers, he commands his troops to kill Ukrainian civilians in masses.
I'm not sure if you realize, but you are getting a highly framed version of events.
Just be aware how biased your sources are. Imagine if Canada decided to get out of NATO to join up with China. Overthrew a pro US friendly democratic government. Chinese BioLabs started popping up all over. Made it public that they want Chinese missiles within firing rang of US cities. And ethnic cleansing of US citizens was going on for a few years. Judging by the "Shock and Awe" strategy employed on Iraq, I don't think America would be anywhere near as constrained under same circumstances. My bet is they America would bomb the shit out of Canada. Putin has been somewhat restrained, willing to sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers to spare the cities from bombing.
This is not a pro Russia post. More like "War is a Racket" and there are people that want to prolong this conflict. And it goes deeper than that. Ever since Putin imprisoned some US connected oligarchs, the US strategy has been to get rid of Putin. This war is culminating result of years of wrong headed US foreign policy. "Wrong headed" in the sense that Russians will not become some economic neo-colonial state of the West.
In addition to Trump Derangement Syndrome there is also a Democrat Derangement Syndrome, and many others. Tribalistic news feeds tempt many of our brains into seeing all of life along these lines. Even food ican be political
My point was more that someone saying "even a vampire got bored" is less than helpful, as they're using a literally fictional character as their example.
It's like saying "even the tooth fairy got bored".
Aging is quite a sad prospect overall, but as long as everyone is subject to the same process it is a great equalizer of sorts. An unforeseen consequence that is often brought up regarding the philosophy of unlimited or greatly extended human age is that it would exacerbate all inequalities in a society. As it’s well-known, time is the biggest pyramid scheme of them all.
On the day of Tiananmen massacre, it occurred to me that it would have even stronger repercussions at country scale.
Taking democratic countries’ shift to the policy of non-involvement and combining it with hypothetical advancements that continuously extend Supreme Leaders’ ages essentially sentences generations of dictatorships’ subjects to hardship, exploitation and gaslit life under a kleptocracy.
Add to that increased existential threat to democracy, since such a dictator never would have to deal with inefficiencies of internal power and knowledge transfer or spending resources on facilitating an honest voting process, infinitely building connections and spinning its webs around the remaining parts of the free world.
One wicked old man interminably learning new ways to turn the world into a zero-sum game and win at it, as generations of servants come and go around him they are even easier to control.
Yea I think of the Elves in Lord of the Rings. If a person has lived 200 years then they have lived long enough to see and understand the true costs of war.
That’s like saying that one person will dominate the tv show survivor. In reality new cliques and alliances form all the time, power shifts and swirls as alliances coalesce and disperse. We will still have wars and disasters and things that no one person can control. Plus, people will still die just not necessarily from the disease of aging. I often notice that people resist something they are afraid of by thinking it will cause a disaster to change how things are. I think you are subconsciously afraid that it’s too good to be true. In reality it will be like penicillin or vaccines — massive improvement and not much else.
You may be thinking that this tech will automatically trickle down. There is infinite incentive to withhold it, whether by controlling access to it outright in a dictatorship or by letting it naturally be exorbitantly expensive in a market economy.
Note that in thought experiments I mentioned it is considered to exacerbate inequalities even if it is distributed equally to all. A thought experiment that reflects reality a bit better would be one where the rich not only get more rich thanks to money dynamics (plus a vicious circle of theft and violence in case of dictators, who are the bigger concern) but also never die.
> There are precisely zero things that were deliberately made to be more expensive than their intrinsic cost by a small group of “rich people and dictators”
Setting aside the fact that 0) US healthcare is pretty much all “things being made more expensive than their intrinsic cost”, believing 1) the market in a democracy is not affected by information asymmetry and 2) a dictator-kleptocrat elsewhere even needs to manipulate prices hints at immense naivety on your part.
> shut up
If it’s my mention of the June 4th incident that triggered such reaction, I hope the Party pays you well enough to justify the stress that reading Western media must be to you.
> you have no right to pose as some kind of intellectual
And you have clearly run out of substance to present.
Surprised to see this take from you. We could also have your parents, grandparents, siblings, kids, grandkids not get sick and suffer terribly before being discarded like garbage. And we can keep all the amazing people who fight for good. Oh wait, that would mean we can’t stick it to some bad people, never mind.
> Surprised to see this take from you. We could also have your parents, grandparents, siblings, kids, grandkids not get sick and suffer terribly before being discarded like garbage. And we can keep all the amazing people who fight for good. Oh wait, that would mean we can’t stick it to some bad people, never mind.
I don't think you're thinking this through. Immortality plus "kids, grandkids" (without sci-fi spaceships or suicide/euthanasia) will pretty quickly lead to overpopulation and a lot of obvious problems.
If it leads to decades more time of fertile reproduction and productivity, it needn't do so. We'll still have some rapid diseases not related to age, and of course accidents. If some of our brightest minds have another 40 years at the peak of their scientific and engineering careers, maybe we'll have seasteading and urban hydronic/aquaponic/aeroponic food supplies figured out and affordable. Convincing people not to have another generation at 20 years of age would of course be the hard part.
Let’s establish the fact. Nobody knows what the consequences will be. But overpopulation won’t be The outcome. Developed countries have a population die-off problem. In the US the birth rate has plummeted since the 70s and we are way below replacement. We desperately need more people.
Tens of thousands of people die in car accidents alone every year. The geriatric population is exploding and we can’t take care of all of them. We need a cure for the disease of aging.
So you're solving the overpopulation problem by hoping the "kids, grandkids" don't exist or are small enough in number that death via accidents creates the space for them. OK.
The corollary of immortality for everyone (without sci-fi spaceships or suicide/euthanasia) is either stagnation (more or less the same set of people existing until resources run out) or overpopulation (and prompt resource exhaustion).
