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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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[X] Action Plan: Thousand Sunny
Velorien said:
Yes, that's correct, with the one exception that, according to SV, you voted for a plan before it came into existence. Time travel is frowned upon within voting procedure.
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I didn't expect that you would think that. After all, the plan is officially based on the post of whoever shows up first in the tally for that vote, and if there's no plan the QM can do whatever they want. Think of all the evil you can do if someone's time travel gives you a blank cheque for the next chapter!
 
Well, the easiest way to drum up support for such a project would be the same as in the real world- demonstrate suspended animation followed by successful reanimation. If death were provably no longer inevitable and those approaching it could be credibly preserved until they could be restored even if they could not at present there would be an awfully large surge in investment towards curing the various conditions which tend to force people on ice up to and including general senescence.


MMKII said:
My problem is mostly that FMPOV, Yuno and Noburi must be married within 7 days, and it is expected that a Hagoromo officiates.

How do we thread the needle on this, then?
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The only option likely to work in that timeframe is to either tear or at least temporarily disrupt Hag public authority enough to get away with one or no side of a schism and/or scandal officiating at the moment.

So, potential assistance to reformist elements within the Hags to drive a wedge. That's unlikely to be fast enough, but the beautiful thing is that we don't need an actual insurrection, just the leadership to credibly believe that one has been cultivated to be imminent. They know that four clans, including the spooky thinker clan and the one they are gravely indebted to have been cross with them since the vote and may well have been exploring their internal divisions the whole time. It's a lot easier to make them think that a more liberal element has been systematically organized and turned than to actually do it, then allow (or in turn, fake) their overreaction to make it at least publicly appear to be a reality.

Then there's the potential to make them think that this was a Hyuuga trap to get them back into debt bondage, or a Minami trap to split off a portion of the clan, or to suspect both while the sky falls around them.

All it takes is one single associated priest being fooled into officiating in the hopes that it will make the chaos stop, or the general public doubting any current Hag faction having the legitimacy to do it at all.

We have Mari, Ami, ISC, and Jiraiya's notes. It seems as if they might be able to provide quite a few grenades to toss into intraclan politics.


-or, we just murder Neji and frame the Minami.

Asking Hidan to officiate remains an option. He's technically not an enemy of Leaf, and while it's not quite the message we want to send, it's quite a powerful one.
 
Y'know, what clan could properly call themselves noble without patronizing the arts? The Gouketsu should find something novel to enhance the common populace with. Say, perhaps an overwhelming stream of Punch and Judy shows subverting hypocritical social conventions?
 
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eaglejarl said:
It's pretty much impossible not to. Dumbledore was used to lay out the actual positions that 99% of actual people actually hold about why defeating death should not be attempted. The only one he didn't mention AFAICR was "Because God."

I've got an informal game that I play whenever it seems appropriate in which I ask people:

"Imagine that I have a pill that will let you live forever. It's free and completely safe. Would you take it?"

In order to get anyone to say yes I typically end up having to pile restrictions on so it becomes: Free, safe, no side effects, available to anyone who wants it, eliminates aging and disease but you still die if hit by a truck, and sets your physical age to whatever you want (which might be your current age).

Even with all that, about 50% of people will not take the imaginary pill. They also will not acknowledge that "I do not want to live forever" is the same thing as "I want to die at some point."
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Defeating death is the entire job description of doctors. Immortality would be the logical extension.

On a personal level I think death is important and critical for the proper functioning of a society. At least, equalized death. Cancer cells comes to mind if immortality pills existed but unequally. That thought, of course, would not prevent me from taking the pill.

Have you considered asking the same question, but instead structured as such?

"Imagine that you could make all humans perfectly healthy and biologically immortal (implying the curing of all diseases incl cancer, etc). Would you do so?"
 
Adhoc vote count started by Velorien on Oct 21, 2020 at 7:22 AM, finished with 69 posts and 10 votes.
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Voting is closed.
 
Shard said:
On a personal level I think death is important and critical for the proper functioning of a society.
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Why? In what way does society function better because I will never again hear my father tell his favorite joke? Or do a KenKen puzzle with him? Or sit and struggle over a MindYourDecisions math puzzle with him?


In his honor: Why are so many companies investing in Ireland these days? Because their capital is always Dublin!
 
eaglejarl said:
Why? In what way does society function better because I will never again hear my father tell his favorite joke? Or do a KenKen puzzle with him? Or sit and struggle over a MindYourDecisions math puzzle with him?
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Unequal death could well mean scenarios like an Immortal Genghis Khan, etc. Stagnation or worse are possibilities. It's desirable to live forever. But is it desirable for society for a a subfraction of people to live forever? If all the cells in your body, or most of them (because they would crowd out out any non-immortal cells), were immortal, you wouldn't have an issue.

But if some cells were immortal, and some were not, then you might be facing some serious issues soon.

That's why I put in the caveat of equalized death. Either everyone should be immortal, or no one should be.
 
Shard said:
Unequal death could well mean scenarios like an Immortal Genghis Khan, etc. Stagnation or worse are possibilities. It's desirable to live forever. But is it desirable for society for a a subfraction of people to live forever? If all the cells in your body, or most of them (because they would crowd out out any non-immortal cells), were immortal, you wouldn't have an issue.

But if some cells were immortal, and some were not, then you might be facing some serious issues soon.

That's why I put in the caveat of equalized death. Either everyone should be immortal, or no one should be.
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It would be a mistake to assume that universal death function as a cleansing system for the health of society. It all depends on context and historical situations.

It would also be a mistake to assume that such technology that enables longevity wouldn't be widespread. Such technology are an economic boost to any economic systems in the world that it would be foolish not to advocate for the widest adoption possible.
 
There's a little trick I like to use when I'm thinking of immortality. In general I'm a big fan of not privileging inaction/the present state of affairs when choosing between two options, so when a topic of immortality comes up I like to flip the script:

"Immortality may introduce this problem into society. Now, tell me, is the appropriate response to this problem murdering everyone involved?"

If you're faced with a choice between two different worlds, and someone is alive in one and dead in the other, you're choosing whether they live or die just as if you were pointing a gun at them. As a society, we've generally come to agree that choosing the world with dead people should be avoided whenever possible, as can be seen with our rejection of the death penalty, and I don't see why we should privilege death here.

There may be problems to face, severe problems even, but if you want to argue that the best solution to those problems is to kill people until the problem goes away, you'd best bring a very compelling argument.
 
Kiba said:
Such technology are an economic boost to any economic systems in the world that it would be foolish not to advocate for the widest adoption possible.
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Economically? Absolutely.
Politically? Not necessarily.

Hypothetically, if you were part of a political party who recognized that certain groups of people were highly unlikely to vote for you (especially if those groups are marginalized and thus easier to deny things from), you might be tempted to try and prevent them from gaining immortality in order to prevent their population from going through the explosion one would expect from everyone gaining immortality.

On the other hand, that would probably bite such a political party in the butt if immortality decreases birth rates in the same way that increased life expectancy and birth control did in real life. But politicians don't exactly think too hard about the far future, they're too busy trying to stay in power in the moment.

Not to mention, our current economic system is not very good at making sure everyone gets a given good/service. Even right now there's some doubt as to whether a Covid-19 vaccine will be available to everyone once its made, and we're in the middle of a pandemic. It's fully possible (though not guaranteed) that governments would use the free market to determine who gets immortality, and as such many people would not.

As a side note, dictatorships that get their wealth from low skill labor like gold mines, and who otherwise don't really need their populations to be reasonably healthy/happy in order to keep generating wealth would have little reason to make their citizens immortal. The person in charge (and their important supporters) on the other hand...

The point is that in order for an immortality pill to work out well for society, we would need to make sure we first take a hard look at our current economic and political systems and fix any problems that would make immortality unequal. I would suggest fixing those problems before we get the pills, since political problems tend to do everything they can to stick around, and making the people causing those problems immortal would make it easier for those problems to persist.
 
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Velorien said:
Adhoc vote count started by Velorien on Oct 21, 2020 at 7:22 AM, finished with 69 posts and 10 votes.
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Voting is closed.
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Wait - people can vote for multiple plans at once? How does that work?
 
Supersuslik said:
Wait - people can vote for multiple plans at once? How does that work?
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You can vote more multiple plans once, but you cannot vote for the same plan twice. It's less "pick which plan you like the most" and more "whichever plan the most people like the most wins."

Occasionally there have been ties, which the authors then pick their favorite of the two or just mesh the two together.
 
Altered Carbon (which I'll admit I did not finish) kind of explored the idea of unequal immortality. Death is the only thing that is guaranteed to remove our tyrants from us at the moment, but if they're the only ones with access to immortality even that isn't enough anymore, so I can see the hesitation from that standpoint. It turns a dynasty into one eternal reign, instead.

That said, I still overwhelmingly support the research of immortality anyways.
 
I still think that the most likely fast route is hacking a summoning scroll. They clearly merge the summoner with the clan at an irrevocable metaphysical level, which suggests residual linkage even after we foolishly allowed the current summoner to be overwritten and which might be used to at least summon a chakra construct of the target.

"Jiraiya, I choose you!"
 
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