Defeating death just feels larger than human politics, it reaches into the entirety of biology unlike who The Favorite Person is at the moment.
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.
>> 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.
It's a lot easier for "truly powerful person" to keep "his subjects [from] actively resisting" than you seem to think.
>> 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.
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.
And what was Zelenskyi's crime again? Putin's is genocide.
I'm not defending Putin, but how is the Ukraine war genocide? Not all wars are genocides.
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 don't know which authority you might believe as substitute of your own eyes, but here's the pope: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/05/03/pope-seeks...
Here's CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/27/europe/russia-ukraine-gen...
I don't think either of these are recognized by the DSM-5.
Is it though? Who wants to live forever? Even Lestat got bored.
You mean the fictional vampire character?
It's like saying "even the tooth fairy got bored".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).