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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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By the way, Locklin asserts, fairly or not

Scott Locklin is always worth to read, add his blog to your links, if it already isn't there.

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/

OFC, like everyone, he has major blind spots (in his case it is, amusingly, Russia - he goes full on "big manly Russkies are REAL MEN who ride bears while Americans are gay, Russia is the future, what is left of real American men should move there ASAP")

in a century, pretty much nobody gave a rat's ass about cryopreserving people at scale (like me, EY is very angry about it).

Failure of cryonics to take up is not due to civilizational failure, it is fault of cryonicists themselves.

These nerds have no idea about marketing and PR and struggle to sell cryonics to anyone than (minuscule number of) other nerds, failing to persuade even their own families.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090511124543/http://depressedmetabolism.com/is-that-what-love-is-the-hostile-wife-phenomenon-in-cryonics

Imagine if they targeted at first Hollywood celebrities and oligarch types, people with giant piles of cash and even bigger ego, people who do not doubt even for a moment they deserve to live forever.

Imagine alternate world, where every new rich type is showing up at fancy parties:

"Yes, this is my keychain. Here, key of mountain house in Alps, here key of seaside house on Azure Coast, here, key of my Lamborghini. And this metal tag? This means I get to live forever, while you will die and rot like dogs."

In this world, cryonics will be major political issue.

"Why should only the millionaires live forever? Cryonics is human right! Tax the rich to freeze all!"

"Shut up, commie! Why should hard working tax payers pay for eternal life of lazy losers like you?"

Seeing as cryonics is taken to be extremely cringe but wealthy people do want to live forever despite cringe (and are ruthlessly mocked for this in OP's link to Unherd, and from the left too, and from whichever other side, and in fact tend to pay lip service to the idea of death being good), I find your assessment lacking. There is some powerful ideological pressure against personal long-termism. Explaining it away with nerds being lame and inept is not good enough. EA is nerdy too, but they're already operating on a much bigger scale.

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