Idea: Instead of trying to convince everyone that their continued existence is immoral, work on reducing the water needed for various daily activities.
Have decided to post the badwrong thing: http://fusion.net/story/309831/life-extension-silicon-valley-dystopian-future/
(Note: I’m going to use <angle brackets> for my paraphrasing. “Quotation marks” will be reserved for direct quotes.)
Stuff that starts with <Man, wouldn’t it be better if the outgroup, who disagreed with me, would just die?> is incredibly distasteful. Someone should write this author a letter starting with nostalgia for the days when everyone thought queer people would all die of AIDS, or pieces about how malaria is nature’s punishment for people with a different ethnicity from the letter-writer having too many kids, or something.
His behavior seemed eccentric and harmless at the time, but as more members of our country’s .01%—almost always male, and almost always white—become engaged in the attempt to draw out life spans, the potential dystopian consequences are harder to ignore.
<Your continued existence is inherently harmful to me> is a very strong and aggressive statement. Honestly, if my continued existence is inherently harmful to her, screw her, I’m not suicidal and I’m not obligated to be.
There aren’t many futures more chilling to me than one in which not even the march of time can free us from our oligarchs.
How about the futures where everyone keeps having to die, indefinitely?
But establishing a much longer life expectancy, whether that means a life that lasts 120 years or 500 years, would demand solutions to many fresh problems: Who pays for the treatments that make prolonged life possible? How would people afford basic expenses during their extra decades when they’re already struggling to provide for themselves now? Would we be living more years only so we could work more years and if so, is the longer life bargain worth it?
You just said that billionaires would buy the treatments for themselves. And, sure, living longer might be unpleasant, but if so, (assuming people get less ridiculous about suicide) you can just not do that? Do you want access to life extension tech or not? Pick one. How is providing more options inherently bad?
Maybe it’s just me, but the tone of this article seems to be <~it’s dystopian when my enemies aren’t dead uwu~>.
This cavalier vapidity led Packer to summarize Thiel’s vision of an ideal future as one in which “a few thousand Americans … live to a hundred and fifty, while millions of others … perish at sixty.”
Imagine playing so many zero-sum and negative-sum games that you stop being able to believe that benefits for some people can only be achieved by hurting other people at minimum an equivalent amount.
Most Americans aren’t interested in clinging to life at all costs, and most of us don’t want to live much longer than we already do. We (rightly) suspect that our quality of life will diminish as time passes, and feel guilty about further taxing the environment and finances of those left to care for us. That’s not a “pro-ageing trance”—that’s common sense and basic decency.
Look, part of anti-aging is about making sure quality of life doesn’t drop that much. Also, stop feeling suicidal because of environmentalism, that’s wrong, and regarding the environmentalists who did that to you: SCORN DEM.
And as Silicon Valley titans ignore their own water crisis while trying to devise ways for their individual, water-consuming selves to stick around for an extra century on top of all the new lives we’ll be welcoming onto the planet, we’re equally justified in withholding the good Samaritan status they try to claim.
Apparently we don’t deserve to live because some of us take baths and go swimming, then? How about we improve water efficiency and look at non-lethal methods of reducing population-growth-induced harms?
It’s disconcerting to see intelligent people treat aging as a “fundamental unsolved problem” or a “side-effect” instead of an elegant solution to an ecosystem that entails living beings using limited resources.
List of people who think my grandfather’s death is an “elegant solution” to their concerns:
- Nazis
- This author, apparently
Life needs to be recycled so more life is perpetuated; just give a listen to “The Circle of Life” if you need refreshing on that point.
So, I need to die so you can have 20 kids, is that it? I’m already here and your kids aren’t. For someone who seems like a feminist, you sure seem to value the creation of new humans over the individual rights of existing ones.
When I think about the nightmarish possibility of a world in which health care inequalities are even further exacerbated, two things come to mind. … The second is of one of my favorite bell hooks quotes: “Women and children all over the world want men to die so they can live.”
STOP PLAYING ZERO-SUM GAMES, STOP TELLING ME I’M OBLIGATED TO LET YOU WIN ZERO-SUM GAMES
Give me a world in which oligarchs and politicians are biologically incapable of staying in power for centuries or else, please, give me an early death.
Local discourse norms prevent me from actually giving the response this statement seems to merit.
Aaaand that’s the lowlights of the article. Ugh. Thank you, Amelia, for showing this to me.
This is an excellent snark on a terribly and extremely shitty zero-sum person.
and yeah, I’m also thinking of a very deserved response which is totally against all discourse norms worth having in public (reverse-engineering the response from this information shouldn’t be that hard for the people who really want to know; it’s cheap, it’s a classic, and it’s very terrible in this context)
(via ilzolende)
1 week ago · tagged #death cw #bad sj cw · 143 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink