Vote Regarding the Combination of the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party and the United States Longevity Party

January 19, 2020 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 5 comments

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The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party and the United States Longevity Party hereby open voting on two important matters regarding the forthcoming combination of these two organizations. Voting will remain open for a seven-day period until 12:01 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time on Sunday, January 26, 2020.

Background

During December 2019 and January 2020, the Officers of the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) and the United States Longevity Party (USLP) conferred on multiple occasions and determined unanimously that it would be in the best interests of both organizations for them to merge into one. The leadership of the USTP has already been expanded to include all current USLP Officers. Furthermore, the missions of the two organizations are closely aligned, especially considering that the first Core Ideal of the USTP is “significant life extension achieved through the progress of science and technology.”

The combination of the two organizations will take effect on February 1, 2020, at which time all members of the existing two organizations will be considered to be members of the combined single organization. A Constitution has been drafted with the approval of the USTP and USLP Officers, which combines the provisions of the two organizations’ existing Constitutions to the extent practicable and also formalizes some of the governance arrangements that had evolved within the USTP over time. The substantive provisions of the Platform in Article VI of the combined proposed Constitution are identical to those of the current USTP Platform.

Adoption of this Constitution would bring to a conclusion the current Transitional Period of the USTP and establish three-year terms in office for the current Officers of the USTP/USLP and would set the stage for Officer elections to be held in January 2023 for the subsequent Officers’ terms to take effect on February 1, 2023. This Constitution is hereby put to the members of both organizations for a binary acceptance/rejection vote.

There also remains the question of what the combined organization will be called. Several names have been proposed during the discussions among the Officers, including United States Longevity and Transhumanist Party (USLTP), United States Transhumanist and Longevity Party (USTLP), Party of Indefinite Longevity and Optimistic Transhumanism (PILOT), and United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party / Longevity Party (with the option for people to use any of the three terms to refer to the organization as they see fit).

Process

All USTP members who are eligible to vote will be sent a link to an electronic submission form whereby they will be able to cast their ballot. Because of the difficulty in ascertaining the e-mail addresses of all USLP members, voting on behalf of the USLP will be effectuated using the “Longevity Party United States” Facebook group.

Member voting on the name of the organization will be conducted via a ranked-preference method on individual name options. Members should keep in mind that the ranked-preference method eliminates the incentives for strategic voting – so members are encouraged to vote for the options that reflect their individual preferences as closely as possible, without regard for how other members might vote.

Results of the voting will be tabulated during late January 2020, with the intent to announce the results before February 1, 2020.

Ballot Questions

Voter Identification

E-mail address

Provide a valid e-mail address that will serve as your means of being contacted by the combined organization going forward. If you are a current member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, your ballot will be cross-referenced to our membership rolls, and only ballots with matching e-mail addresses will be counted. If you are a current member of the U.S. Longevity Party, your name will be checked for membership in the “Longevity Party United States” Facebook group.

What is your name?

At minimum, first and last name are required, unless you are publicly known by a single-name pseudonym which is not itself a common name. Your identity will not be publicly disclosed by the Transhumanist Party, the Longevity Party, or the combined organization, unless you choose and/or authorize its disclosure. The nature of the selections made by the members may be disclosed, but, if they are, each individual vote will not be associated with the identity of the voter but rather will be presented in an anonymized manner.

Navigate the Options

Question I. Name of the Combined Organization
Question II. Constitution of the Combined Organization
Proposed Constitution of the Combined Organization

Question I. Name of the Combined Organization

What shall be the name of the combined organization, effective February 1, 2020, subsequent to the merger of the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) and the United States Longevity Party (USLP)?

Rank-order the name options that you support. Choose “1” for your most highly favored option, “2” for your second-most highly favored option, etc. You may include the option for “None of the Above” in your rank-ordering, and it does not need to be your most favored option if you do so. (For instance, some voters might favor some options but think that no name is preferable to some of the other options.) If “None of the Above” wins, then the leadership of the combined organization will develop alternative possibilities for names and will propose them during a subsequent vote.

If you choose “Abstain”, then do not rank-order any options, as you will be considered to have skipped this question.

☐ United States Longevity and Transhumanist Party (USLTP)

☐ United States Transhumanist and Longevity Party (USTLP)

☐ Party of Indefinite Longevity and Optimistic Transhumanism (PILOT)

☐ United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party / Longevity Party (with the option for people to use any of the three terms to refer to the organization as they see fit – possibly abbreviated as USTP/LP or USTP/TP/LP)

☐ United States Transhumanist Party (USTP)

☐ None of the Above

Question II. Constitution of the Combined Organization

Shall the combined organization adopt the Constitution below?

NOTE: The bracketed term “Combined Organization” would be replaced in the adopted Constitution with the name selected by the voters as the outcome of Question I.

NOTE II: The substantive provisions of the Platform in Article VI of the combined proposed Constitution are identical to those of the current USTP Platform.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Proposed Constitution of the [Combined Organization]

Article I. Immutable Principles of the [Combined Organization]

The [Combined Organization] is defined at its core by the following principles. While the remainder of the Party’s platform, bylaws, and operations may in the future be subject to alterations by decisions of the membership, the statements below are considered immutable and may not be altered.

Section I. Core Ideals:

Ideal 1. The [Combined Organization] supports significant life extension achieved through the progress of science and technology.

Ideal 2. The [Combined Organization] supports a cultural, societal, and political atmosphere informed and animated by reason, science, and secular values.

Ideal 3. The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to use science, technology, and rational discourse to reduce and eliminate various existential risks to the human species.

Section II. Statements of Historical Fact:

Historical Fact 1. Zoltan Istvan was the founder of the United States Transhumanist Party on October 7, 2014. Zoltan Istvan was also the first Presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party during the 2016 United States Presidential Election.

Historical Fact 2. The person who has held the role of the first Chairman in the history of the Transhumanist Party is Zoltan Istvan.

Historical Fact 3. The person who has held the role of the second Chairman in the history of the Transhumanist Party is Gennady Stolyarov II.

Historical Fact 4. During the time period between December 30, 2018, and January 26, 2019, the Transhumanist Party merged with the Transhuman Party, a 25-member experimental splinter party founded in October 2017, which had become defunct due to lack of activity. After the merger, the combined organization adopted the name United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party.

Historical Fact 5. The United States Longevity Party was founded on January 1, 2012, by Hank Pellissier. The person who has held the role of the first Chairman in the history of the Longevity Party is Hank Pellissier.

Historical Fact 6. The person who has held the role of the second Chairman in the history of the Longevity Party is Brandon King.

Historical Fact 7. The person who has held the role of the third Chairman in the history of the Longevity Party is Johannon Ben Zion.

Historical Fact 8. On February 1, 2020, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party and the United States Longevity Party officially merged pursuant to affirmative votes of the members of both organizations, resulting in the adoption of this Constitution and the name [Combined Organization] for the combined organization. Gennady Stolyarov II became the Chairman of the combined organization, and Johannon Ben Zion became the Vice-Chairman of the combined organization.

Section III. Immutable Operating Principles:

Operating Principle 1. The [Combined Organization] shall respect the autonomy of State-level Transhumanist Parties to determine their internal bylaws, platforms, and activities. The [Combined Organization] encourages the formation of State-level Transhumanist Parties and desires to collaborate with State-level Transhumanist Parties and offer them guidance and advice. However, the [Combined Organization] shall not have the authority to impose involuntary constraints on State-level Transhumanist Parties that operate peacefully within the boundaries of applicable law.

Operating Principle 2. While the [Combined Organization] respects the autonomy of State-level Transhumanist Parties, the [Combined Organization] reserves the right to determine if a State-level Transhumanist Party has become inactive with no hope of restoring activity on the part of the current leadership of the State-level Transhumanist Party. In such a situation, the leadership of the [Combined Organization], subject to a final decision of the Chairman of the [Combined Organization], reserves the right to re-form the previously inactive State-level Transhumanist Party under new leadership.

Operating Principle 3. While the [Combined Organization] respects the autonomy of State-level Transhumanist Parties, any Officer or member of a State-level Transhumanist Party who makes physical or legal threats, or engages in cyberbullying or harassment, against the [Combined Organization] or any Officer thereof, thereby places himself or herself in opposition to the [Combined Organization] and thereby ceases to act in the role of Officer or member in that State-level Transhumanist Party. In such a situation, the leadership of the [Combined Organization], subject to a final decision of the Chairman of the [Combined Organization], reserves the right to designate a replacement for the vacant position within the State-level Transhumanist Party or to re-form the State-level Transhumanist Party under new leadership.

Operating Principle 4. The [Combined Organization] renounces all violence, except in self-defense against a clear, immediate act of physical aggression. In particular, the [Combined Organization] holds that violent political activism is never permissible or just. The [Combined Organization] commits to always pursuing its goals in a civil, law-abiding manner, respecting the legitimate rights of all persons. The [Combined Organization] shall not condone and shall necessarily and automatically disavow all violent criminal acts. Any person who commits a violent criminal act is automatically disassociated from the [Combined Organization] in all respects until and unless that person has made appropriate restitution or has fully undergone the appropriate penalties pursuant to applicable law. However, this commitment to exclusively peaceful action does not preclude the [Combined Organization] from criticizing any ideas or behavior which are contrary to reason, morality, common sense, or the principles and objectives of the [Combined Organization] Core Ideals and Platform.

Article II. Membership

Section I: Membership in the [Combined Organization] is open to all who meet the following criteria:

Either: (a) Express agreement with the Core Ideals of the [Combined Organization]; or (b) are otherwise granted membership at the discretion of the Chairman; and

Have not committed violent criminal activity, physical or online bullying, online harassment, or any other activity injurious to the physical or mental well-being of any individual, unless the Chairman, at the Chairman’s sole discretion, determines that the person who has committed any of the aforementioned activities has also undertaken appropriate reparations or efforts at personal reform.

Section II: Membership in the [Combined Organization] will be accepted at any time throughout the year.

Section III: Membership in the [Combined Organization] will be provided on a basis of equal opportunity, without regard to race, national or ethnic origin, religion, gender, age, disability, socioeconomic status, or other legally protected status.

Section IV: The Chairman shall have the full discretion to organize the membership and conduct of the [Combined Organization] so as to create a sustainable, self-perpetuating, and active organizational structure. This discretion shall include the enrollment of members, outreach to other individuals and organizations, and the appointment of other officers, advisors, and volunteers to undertake the work of the [Combined Organization]. The Chairman may issue and utilize Guidelines for Community Conduct to ensure that members behave in a manner that is constructive for advancing the purposes of the [Combined Organization].

Section V: The Chairman of the [Combined Organization] shall have the authority to delegate any authority of the Chairman to any member of the [Combined Organization] for any specified length of time, or indefinitely for the duration of the Transitional Period, until the delegation is revoked at the discretion of the Chairman. All such delegations of authority shall be in writing. A person receiving a delegation of authority by the Chairman shall be known as a Member Delegate.

Section VI: The [Combined Organization] shall not charge any fees for membership nor impose any other monetary requirements of its members.

Section VII: The [Combined Organization] shall have two categories of members: United States Members and Allied Members.

Section VIII: United States Members shall be those individuals who lawfully reside within the United States and are eligible to vote in United States elections. United States Members may participate in any activities of the [Combined Organization] and receive any delegations of authority at the discretion of the Chairman.

Section IX: Allied Members may be any individuals, of any age, nationality, and place of residence – with the exception of those persons eligible to be United States Members. Allied Members may participate in any activities of the [Combined Organization] and receive any delegations of authority at the discretion of the Chairman – provided, however, that Allied Members may not be eligible to vote in United States elections pursuant to applicable United States law. Allied Members may, however, vote in internal elections of the [Combined Organization].

Section X: Allied Membership in the [Combined Organization] is open to any being capable of logical reasoning and of the expression of political opinions. Specifically, if sentient artificial intellects or intelligent extraterrestrial life forms are discovered at any time after the founding of the [Combined Organization], such entities shall be eligible for Allied Membership.

Article III. Officers

Section I: The following set of Officers shall assume roles in the [Combined Organization] for a term of three years, beginning on February 1, 2020:

Chairman: Gennady Stolyarov II
Vice-Chairman: Johannon Ben Zion
Secretary: Pavel Ilin
Vice-Secretary: Caeus H. Antony
Director of Social Media: B.J. Murphy
Director of Scholarship: Dan Elton
Director of Admissions and Public Relations: Dinorah Delfin
Director of Marketing: Arin Vahanian
Director of Longevity Outreach: Charlie Kam
Director of Applied Innovation: David Shumaker
Director of Publication: Brent Logan Reitze
Director of Media Production: Tom Ross
Legislative Director: Justin Waters
Campaign Director: John J. Kerecz

Section II: During the interim period between triennial Officer elections, new Officer positions may be created, and vacancies in Officer positions may be filled in the event of an interim departure of any Officer. Any appointment of an Officer to a new or vacant position during the aforementioned interim period shall be effective upon a majority vote of those Officers who take active part in the deliberations regarding such an appointment at any time during a discussion period of three days, and with the subsequent approval of the Chairman.

Section III: Any current member of the [Combined Organization] is eligible either to run for office during a triennial Officer election – with the first such election to pertain to the set of Officers which shall begin their service on February 1, 2023 – or to apply for an Officer position that becomes vacant during the interim period between triennial Officer elections.

Section IV: For each Officer position, Officers will assemble and develop an agreement that will encompass the duties of the position, how to perform the duties of that position, and any information relevant to that position.

Section V: In February of each year, Officers shall set goals for implementation during the remainder of that year. In January of the subsequent year, Officers shall create an annual report that discusses the accomplishment of the objectives and goals established during the preceding year.

Section VI: The Officers shall, with the approval of the Chairman, establish committees as deemed necessary and shall be responsible for designating the membership and leadership structure of all such committees.

Section VII: The Chairman shall be the chief Officer of the [Combined Organization] and shall preside at all meetings of the organization, or else appoint a substitute for any meeting where the Chairman is absent. The Chairman shall have the chief executive authority within the [Combined Organization] and shall be responsible for the principal decision-making and organizational activities of the [Combined Organization], including the maintenance of the [Combined Organization] Platform, the periodic organization of elections and votes on provisions of the Platform, and the development of discussion and outreach events involving the general public. The Chairman shall have the authority to decide any matter affecting the course, conduct, and official positions of the [Combined Organization]. The Chairman shall have the authority, but not the obligation, to proclaim and determine the structure of any meeting, convention, assembly, or other forum for conducting the business of the [Combined Organization] at any time at the Chairman’s discretion. The Chairman may delegate any aspect of the Chairman’s responsibility to another Officer or Member of the [Combined Organization] at the Chairman’s discretion via a written delegation of authority. Such a written delegation of authority may be revocable at any time.

The Chairman shall appoint committees that are deemed necessary for the organization. Vacancies that occur for Vice-Chairman, Secretary, or Directors may be filled by appointment of the Chairman, preferably following a majority vote of those Officers who take active part in the deliberations regarding such an appointment at any time during a discussion period of three days.

Section VIII: The Vice-Chairman shall temporarily assume the duties of the Chairman in the event of the Chairman’s absence and the absence of a contrary delegation of authority from the Chairman. In the event of the resignation of the Chairman during the interim between triennial Officer elections, the Vice-Chairman shall assume the title of Chairman.

Section IX: The Secretary shall be responsible for the technical logistics pertaining to the enrollment of members and the functioning of the relevant technological infrastructure of the organization, including in relation to meetings and video broadcasts. The Vice-Secretary shall assist the Secretary with regard to technical and organizational aspects, as necessary, including activities such as taking minutes and creating official records of events.

Section X: The responsibilities of the Directors who oversee specific functional areas shall be specified in position descriptions issued by the [Combined Organization].

Section XI: By majority vote and with the approval of the Chairman, the Officers of the [Combined Organization] may place on probation an Officer who fails to fulfill the duties of his or her office as specified in the documents developed by the [Combined Organization] to describe such duties. The probation period shall last as long as the Officers deem appropriate by majority vote, and shall include a written contract with deadlines and criteria for the fulfillment of duties. In the event that the terms of the probation period and/or contract are violated, the subject Officer may be removed from office by a majority vote and with the approval of the Chairman. An Officer may also be removed from office if a majority vote, with the approval of the Chairman, determines that the subject Officer has been entirely inactive and non-responsive and would therefore not be able to abide by the terms of any probation period.

Article IV. Meetings

Section I: The [Combined Organization] may hold meetings at such time and place as designated by the Chairman. Meetings may be held in person or via teleconference or videoconference. A meeting may be categorized as one of two types of meetings: an Internal Organizational Meeting or a Public Meeting.

Section II: An Internal Organizational Meeting shall be limited to Officers of the [Combined Organization], Foreign Ambassadors, and any guests of the Officers whose presence and input are determined to be of value for such a meeting. An Internal Organizational Meeting may be conducted for the purpose of coordinating the day-to-day activities and projects of the [Combined Organization], discussing confidential or sensitive matters, and soliciting candid feedback from Officers or Foreign Ambassadors.

Section III: A Public Meeting shall be open to all members of the [Combined Organization] and invited guests and may either be broadcast publicly online, or, if the Public Meeting is held in person, subsequently followed by an online recording of that Public Meeting’s events and discussions. A Public Meeting may be conducted for the purposes of informing members of the activities of the [Combined Organization], soliciting member input, discussing ideas related to the Core Ideals, Platform, values, and goals of the [Combined Organization], hosting presentations, and expressing the messages of transhumanism, longevity, and technological advocacy to the general population.

Article V. Amendments

Section I: This Constitution, with the exception of immutable principles in Article I, may be amended by a majority of the votes of the actively voting membership of the [Combined Organization].

Section II: Any documents subordinate to this Constitution, such as bylaws or documents specifying the day-to-day operations of the [Combined Organization], may be adopted by a two-thirds (2/3) majority vote of all Officers present at any Internal Organizational Meeting called for that purpose, or submitting their consent via electronic written communication in lieu of such Internal Organizational Meeting.

Article VI. Platform of the [Combined Organization]

Section I [Adopted by a vote of the members during January 15-21, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] strongly supports individual privacy and liberty over how to apply technology to one’s personal life. The [Combined Organization] holds that each individual should remain completely sovereign in the choice to disclose or not disclose personal activities, preferences, and beliefs within the public sphere. As such, the [Combined Organization] opposes all forms of mass surveillance and any intrusion by governmental or private institutions upon non-coercive activities that an individual has chosen to retain within his, her, or its private sphere. However, the [Combined Organization] also recognizes that no individuals should be protected from peaceful criticism of any matters that those individuals have chosen to disclose within the sphere of public knowledge and discourse.

Section II [Adopted by a vote of the members during January 15-21, 2017; amended by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports all acceptance, tolerance, and inclusivity of individuals and groups of all races, genders, classes, religions, creeds, and ideologies. Accordingly, the [Combined Organization] condemns any hostile discrimination or legal restrictions on the basis of national origin, skin color, birthplace, ancestry, gender identity, or any manner of circumstantial attribute tied to a person’s lineage or accident of birth. Furthermore, the [Combined Organization] strongly opposes any efforts to enforce said restrictions regardless of cause or motivation thereof. Additionally, any institution that uses violence, suppression of free speech, or other unconstitutional or otherwise illegal methods will be disavowed and condemned by the [Combined Organization], with an efficient, non-violent alternative to said institution being offered to achieve its goals if they align with the Party’s interests.

Section III [Adopted by a vote of the members during January 15-21, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] holds that the vast majority of technologies are beneficial to human well-being and should be enthusiastically advocated for and developed further. However, a minority of technologies could be detrimental to human well-being and, as such, their application, when it results in detrimental consequences, should be opposed. Examples of such detrimental technologies include nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, mass-surveillance systems such as those deployed by the National Security Agency in the United States, and backscatter X-ray full-body scanners such as those used until 2013 by the Transportation Security Administration in the United States. Furthermore, the [Combined Organization] is opposed to the deliberate engineering of new active pathogens or the resurrection of once-existing pathogens, whose spread might not be able to be contained within laboratory settings. While it is impossible to un-learn the knowledge utilized in the creation of such technologies, the [Combined Organization] holds that all such knowledge should only be devoted toward peaceful, life-affirming, rights-respecting purposes, going forward.

Section IV [Adopted by a vote of the members during January 15-21, 2017]: In recognition of the dire existential threat that nuclear weapons pose to sapient life on Earth – including as a result of such weapons’ accidental deployment due to system failures or human misunderstanding – the [Combined Organization] advocates the complete dismantlement and abolition of all nuclear weapons everywhere, as rapidly as possible. If necessary for geopolitical stability, synchronized multilateral disarmament and non-proliferation treaties should be pursued, strengthened, and accelerated in the most expeditious manner. If, however, multilateral agreements among nations are not reached, then the [Combined Organization] advocates that all nuclear powers, especially the United States and Russia, should undertake unilateral nuclear disarmament at the earliest opportunity in order to preserve civilization from accidental annihilation.

Section V [Adopted by a vote of the members during January 15-21, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports concerted research in effort to eradicate disease and illness that wreak havoc upon and cause death of sapient beings. We strongly advocate the increase and redirection of research funds to conduct research and experiments and to explore life, science, technology, medicine, and extraterrestrial realms to improve all sentient entities.

Section VI [Adopted by a vote of the members during February 16-22, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] upholds morphological freedom—the right to do with one’s physical attributes or intelligence whatever one wants so long as it does not directly harm others.

The [Combined Organization] considers morphological freedom to include the prerogative for a sentient intelligence to set forth in advance provisions for how to handle its physical manifestation, should that intelligence enter into a vegetative, unconscious, or similarly inactive state, notwithstanding any legal definition of death. For instance, a cryonics patient should be entitled to determine in advance that the patient’s body shall be cryopreserved and kept under specified conditions, in spite of any legal definition of death that might apply to that patient under cryopreservation.

The [Combined Organization] also recognizes that morphological freedom entails the duty to treat all sapients as individuals instead of categorizing them into arbitrary subgroups or demographics, including as yet undefined subcategorizations that may arise as sapience evolves.

The [Combined Organization] is focused on the rights of all sapient individuals to do as they see fit with themselves and their own reproductive choices.

However, the [Combined Organization] holds that the proper exercise of morphological freedom must also ensure that any improvement of the self should not result in involuntary harms directly inflicted upon others. Furthermore, the [Combined Organization] recognizes any sentient entity to have the freedom not to modify itself without being subject to negative political repercussions, which include but are not limited to legal and/or socio-economic repercussions.

The [Combined Organization] recognizes the ethical obligations of sapient beings to be the purview of those individual beings, and holds that no other group, individual, or government has the right to limit those choices – including genetic manipulation or other biological manipulation or any other modifications up to and including biological manipulation, mechanical manipulation, life extension, reproductive choice, reproductive manipulation, cryonics, or other possible modifications, enhancements, or morphological freedoms. It is only when such choices directly infringe upon the rights of other sapient beings that the [Combined Organization] will work to develop policies to avoid potential infringements.

Section VII [Adopted by a vote of the members during February 16-22, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] strongly supports and emphasizes all values and organized efforts related to the cultivation of science, reason, intelligence, and rational thinking.

The [Combined Organization] places no reliance upon any and all sources of information that cannot stand up to rational scrutiny.

The [Combined Organization] places no reliance upon any individual, organization, or belief system that intentionally distorts empirically verifiable evidence, including but not limited to scientific and historical evidence, to serve its own agenda.

The [Combined Organization] places no reliance upon any position or belief system that contains arguments built upon logical fallacies (with exemption granted to arguments containing both fallacious and logically defensible premises).

Section VIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during February 16-22, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports maximum individual liberty to engage in scientific and technological innovation for the improvement of the self and the human species. In particular, the [Combined Organization] supports all rationally, scientifically grounded research efforts for curing diseases, lengthening lifespans, achieving functional, healthy augmentations of the body and brain, and increasing the durability and youthfulness of the human organism. The [Combined Organization] holds that all such research efforts should be rendered fully lawful and their products should be made fully available to the public, as long as no individual is physically harmed without that individual’s consent or defrauded by misrepresentation of the effects of a possible treatment or substance.

Section IX [Adopted by a vote of the members during February 16-22, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports all emerging technologies that have the potential to improve the human condition – including but not limited to autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, economical solar power, safe nuclear power, hydroelectricity, geothermal power, applications for the sharing of durable goods, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, rapid transit, 3D printing, vertical farming, electronic devices to detect and respond to trauma, and beneficial genetic modification of plants, animals, and human beings.

Section X [Adopted by a vote of the members during February 16-22, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] advocates the construction of a self-repairing, self-maintaining smart infrastructure which incorporates the distribution of energy, communications, and clean potable water to every building.

Section XI [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: In supporting peaceful uses of nuclear energy, the [Combined Organization] endorses the thorium fuel cycle, which provides for a safe and nearly limitless energy source in the absence of the development of practical thermonuclear fusion.

Section XII [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] holds that present and future societies should provide education systems accessible and available to all in pursuit of factual knowledge to increase intellectual acuity; promote critical thinking and logic; foster creativity; form an enlightened collective; attain health; secure the bounty of liberty for all sentient entities for our posterity; and forge new ideas, meanings, and values.

The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to reduce the cost of education while improving its access. In particular, the [Combined Organization] supports freely available, open-source, methods of learning, teaching, credentialing, and cultural creation that integrate emerging technologies into every facet of the learning process. The [Combined Organization] primarily advocates private innovation to deliver such educational improvements, but also advocates the application of these improvements to all publicly funded educational institutions. The [Combined Organization] holds that every person should aspire toward intellectual, moral, and esthetic enlightenment and sophistication and should contribute toward bringing about a new Age of Reason, where the highest reaches of intellectual activity are attainable and eagerly pursued by the majority of the population.

The United States has upheld basic education since the American Revolution. The [Combined Organization] believes, in keeping with what basic education was in the 1700s, relative to the state of technology given the advancement in society at the time, that ‘basic’ education should be defined as college, and that a key part of our agenda is to help encourage a more successful generation by paying for a ‘basic’ education up to and including college degrees.

Section XIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports the involvement of intelligent laypersons in the political process to counteract and neutralize the influence of politically connected special interests and their paid representatives. The [Combined Organization] supports all electronic and other technologies that can inform and empower intelligent laypersons to monitor and contribute to political discussions and decisions.

Section XIV [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports an end to the costly drug war, which is often an infringement upon the lives and liberties of innocent citizens who do not use drugs but fall victim to militant enforcement of drug prohibitions. The [Combined Organization] supports legalization of mild recreational drugs such as marijuana.

Section XV [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to significantly reduce the massive incarcerated population in America by using innovative technologies to monitor criminals outside of prison. All mandatory sentencing laws should be abolished, and each individual should be sentenced based solely on the consideration of the nature of that individual’s crime, its context, and its severity.

Section XVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017; amended by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: Irrespective of whether or not technology will eventually replace the need for the labor of sentient entities, the [Combined Organization] holds that all sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of an unconditional universal basic income, whereby the same minimum amount of money or other resources is provided irrespective of a sentient entity’s life circumstances, occupations, or other income sources, so as to provide a means for the basic requirements of existence and liberty to be met.

Section XVII [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] holds that present and future societies should take all reasonable measures to embrace and fund space travel, not only for the spirit of adventure and to gain knowledge by exploring the universe, but as an ultimate safeguard to its citizens and transhumanity should planet Earth become uninhabitable or be destroyed.

Section XVIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports work to use science and technology to be able to eliminate all disabilities in humans who have them.

Section XIX [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports an end to the two-party political system in the United States and a substantially greater inclusion of “third parties” in the political process through mechanisms such as proportional representation and the elimination of stringent ballot-access requirements. The [Combined Organization] also seeks to limit the influence of lobbying by politically connected special interests, while increasing the influence of advocacy by intelligent laypersons.

Section XX [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] strongly supports the freedom of peaceful speech; religious, non-religious, and anti-religious philosophical espousal; assembly; protest; petition; and expression of grievances. The [Combined Organization] therefore strongly opposes all censorship, including censorship that arises out of identity politics and the desire to avoid perceived offensive behavior.

Section XXI [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports a concerted effort by governments and by public opinion to eradicate police brutality against peaceful citizens, such that violent force is only utilized against individuals who actually pose an imminent threat to human lives.

Section XXII [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts at political, economic, and cultural experimentation in the form of seasteads and micronations. Specifically, the [Combined Organization] recognizes the existence and sovereignty of the Principality of Sealand, the Republic of Molossia, and the Free Republic of Liberland, and supports the recognition of these entities by all governments and political parties of the world.

Section XXIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports the rights of children to exercise liberty in proportion to their rational faculties and capacity for autonomous judgment. In particular, the [Combined Organization] strongly opposes all forms of bullying, child abuse, and censorship of intellectual self-development by children and teenagers.

Section XXIV [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports the promotion of animal welfare to the extent it does not conflict with human well-being. However, the [Combined Organization] opposes “animal liberation” movements that seek to return animals to the wilderness or espouse any attempts to separate domesticated animals from human influence. In particular, the [Combined Organization] supports the prohibition of cruelty to animals and a complete abolition of euthanasia of healthy animals by animal shelters. The [Combined Organization] supports a complete prohibition on the killing of non-contagious, non-aggressive dogs, cats, dolphins, whales, elephants, horses, tortoises, parrots, and primates. Furthermore, the [Combined Organization] supports the development and widespread consumption of artificially grown, biologically identical meat products that do not involve the killing of animals.

Section XXV [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] welcomes both religious and non-religious individuals who support life extension and emerging technologies. The [Combined Organization] recognizes that some religious individuals and interpretations may be receptive to technological progress and, if so, are valuable allies to the transhumanist movement. On the other hand, the [Combined Organization] is also opposed to any interpretation of a religious doctrine that results in the rejection of reason, censorship, violation of individual rights, suppression of technological advancement, and attempts to impose religious belief by force and/or by legal compulsion.

Section XXVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] holds that each of its members should vote or abstain from voting in accordance with that member’s own individual conscience and judgment. If an official or candidate of the [Combined Organization] expresses a preference for any particular non-transhumanist candidate for office, then no national or State-level [Combined Organization], nor any individual transhumanist, ought to be in any manner bound to support that same non-transhumanist candidate.

Section XXVII [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017; amended by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] advocates Constitutional reform to abolish the Electoral College in the United States Presidential elections and render the plurality of the popular vote the sole criterion for the election of President.

Section XXVIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] advocates greatly shortening the timeframe for electoral campaigns. The current two-year election season, combined with voters’ short memories, renders it possible for both genuine merits and egregious transgressions of candidates to be forgotten by the time of voting. Longer campaign seasons also perpetuate the “horse-race” mentality on the part of the media and result in the search for contrived election drama in order to drive views and campaign contributions. The ensuing acrimony, misinformation, and outright violence are detrimental to the fabric of a civilized society. Election seasons should be as short as possible, to enable all relevant information to be disseminated quickly and be considered by most voters within the same timeframe as their decisions are made.

Section XXIX [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] advocates abolishing all staggered party primaries and for all primary elections to be held on the same day across the entire country. With staggered party primaries, individuals voting later – solely because of the jurisdiction in which they reside – find their choices severely constrained due to the prior elimination of candidates they might have preferred. The staggered primary system tends to elevate the candidates who are least palatable to reasonable voters – but have the support of a vociferous, crass, and often violent fringe – toward frontrunner positions that create the pressure for other members of the political party to follow suit and reluctantly support the worst of the nominees.

Section XXX [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports replacing the current “winner-take-all” electoral system with proportional representation, ranked preference voting, and other devices to minimize the temptations by voters to favor a perceived “lesser evil” rather than the candidates closest to those voters’ own preferences.

Section XXXI [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports the right of any jurisdiction to secede from the United States specifically in opposition to policies that institutionalize racism, xenophobia, criminalization of dissent, and persecution of peaceful persons. The [Combined Organization] does not, however, condone any secession for the purposes of oppressing others. Therefore, the secession of the Confederate States in 1860 was illegitimate, but a future secession of a State may be justified in reaction to violent crackdowns by the federal government against individuals based on individuals’ national origin or ancestry.

Section XXXII [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] encourages every reasonable precaution to prevent existential risks that endanger sentient life. While some existential risks arise from certain technologies, many existential risks also stem from the unaltered “natural” circumstances in which humans and other life forms find themselves. For both technological and “natural” existential risks, the strongest safeguards can be achieved through responsible development of protective technologies that empower rational and moral beings.

Section XXXIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] stands for the rights of any sentient entities defined in the Preamble to the Transhumanist Bill of Rights as possessing Level 5 or more advanced information integration. Any such sentient entities, including new kinds of sentient entities that may be discovered or developed in the future, shall be considered to be autonomous beings with full rights, and shall not be made subservient to humans, unless they as individuals pose direct, empirically evident threats to the lives of others. The protections of full individual rights shall extend to Level 5 or higher-level artificial intelligences. However, Level 4 or lower-level entities – including domain-specific artificial intelligences that have not achieved sentience – may be utilized as part of the production systems of the future, in a similar manner to machines, algorithms, computer programs, and non-human animals today and based on similar ethical considerations.

Section XXXIV [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] holds that sousveillance laws should be enacted to ensure that all members of peaceful communities feel safe, to achieve governmental transparency, and to provide counter-balances to any surveillance state. For instance, law-enforcement officials, when interacting with the public, should be required to wear body cameras or similar devices continuously monitoring their activities.

The [Combined Organization] supports the use of technologies which increase monitoring of police action and policing activities, with expressed goals of increasing policing accountability.

The [Combined Organization] advocates for a requirement that data pertaining to recordings of police action be transmitted and recorded beyond police control, so as to be protected from falsification, deletion, and selective curation by police.

Section XXXV [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] considers it imperative to achieve reductions of the United States national debt in order to avoid calamitous scenarios of extreme inflation, default, and burdensome future tax increases on individuals. The [Combined Organization] supports the following measures to reduce the national debt:

Elimination of wasteful federal spending on programs, goods, and services where equivalent positive results could be obtained through lower expenditures.
Cessation of foreign military occupations and the return of American troops to be stationed exclusively on American territory. However, if a mutually appropriate defense treaty with another country requires the United States to station troops in that country, those troops would be allowed to remain there until the treaty obligations are fulfilled or reduced by mutual agreement with the affected country. If the United States continues to station troops in any country due to mutually appropriate defense treaties, the [Combined Organization] supports greater reciprocity in allowing military personnel from that country to be stationed in the United States for purposes of training and information exchange.
Removal of barriers to technological innovation and technologically driven economic growth, in order that a surge in such growth could increase federal revenues so as to generate increasing surpluses, as long as federal spending does not materially rise from current levels.
Elimination of the current cumbersome system of federal contracting, which favors politically connected incumbent firms whose advantage consists of navigating the system, rather than performing the best possible work. Instead, all federal agencies should be empowered to purchase supplies and equipment and to requisition projects from any entity capable of satisfying an immediate need at a reasonable cost. Exclusive and preferential contracts for particular entities should be prohibited, and all payments by federal agencies for work by non-employees should be determined on a case-by-case basis.
Digitization of as many federal services and functions as possible – to eliminate the waste and expense of paperwork, physical queues, and legacy information technology systems.

Section XXXVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports the elimination of graduated taxation and income taxation more generally. Instead, the [Combined Organization] advocates a flat percentage-of-sales tax applicable only to purchases from businesses whose combined nationwide revenues from all affiliates exceed a specified threshold. This tax should be built into the price of goods from such large businesses and should not impede transaction efficiency in any manner. Transactions pertaining to wages, salaries, gifts, donations, barter, employee benefits, and inheritances should remain completely untaxed, as should transactions involving solely individuals and/or small businesses, for whom the establishment of a tax-reporting infrastructure would be onerous. Furthermore, all taxes on land and property should be abolished.

Section XXXVII [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports more proportional representation of professions and occupations among legislative and executive government officials, instead of a system in which the plurality of political offices are held by attorneys. In particular, the [Combined Organization] holds that a greater proportion of politicians should possess training in mathematics, engineering, and the physical and biological sciences.

Section XXXVIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports emerging alternative energy sources and their technological implementations. However, the [Combined Organization] opposes government subsidies for any energy source – including fossil fuels. Instead, the [Combined Organization] holds that superior, cleaner, and more efficient energy sources will also tend to become less costly and more broadly adopted under a system of unfettered market competition and innovation.

Section XXXIX [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports the creation of a “Transhumanist Olympics” where augmentations and modifications of the human body would not disqualify persons from competing.

Section XL [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: In addition to its opposition to intolerant interpretations of religious doctrines, the [Combined Organization] is furthermore opposed to any interpretation of a secular, non-religious doctrine that results in the rejection of reason, censorship, violation of individual rights, suppression of technological advancement, and attempts to impose certain beliefs by force and/or by legal compulsion. Examples of such doctrines opposed by the [Combined Organization] include Stalinism, Maoism, Neo-Malthusianism or eco-primitivism, the death-acceptance movement, and the doctrine of censorship, now prevalent on many college campuses in the United States, in the name of “social justice”, combating “triggers” or “microaggressions”, or avoiding subjectively perceived offense.

Section XLI [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] understands that the role of President comes with great power and responsibility towards all citizens equally, regardless of ethnicity, race, sex, gender, religious conviction or lack thereof, political position, or societal class. It is the [Combined Organization]’s view that the President, as an authority figure and head of state, should lead by example. The function of the President is to oversee and support the improvement of well-being for all United States citizens, and the welfare of the nation as a whole.

The [Combined Organization] recognizes that the power of the Executive Branch of the federal government has expanded far beyond the originally conceived Constitutional framework, so as to predominate over the Legislative and Judicial Branches, as well as over the institutions of civil society and individuals. The [Combined Organization] supports greatly curtailing and restricting the role of the U.S. President so as to confine that role within parameters originally conceived by the framers of the U.S. Constitution – particularly with regard to eliminating the unacceptable current prerogatives to unilaterally launch nuclear strikes and conduct military attacks, and to imprison, spy on, and assassinate Americans and others without due process.

Section XLII [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to minimize conflicts of interest for government officials created by private businesses, religious institutions, not-for-profit organizations, special-interest groups, and certain individuals. However, the [Combined Organization] recognizes that the best way to minimize such conflicts of interest is not to micromanage the conduct of government officials – which can prevent petty improprieties but is inherently unable to avert the most damaging conflicts of interest among the highest echelons of power. Rather, the most promising solution is to reduce the scope of special economic privileges and protections that any government official would be capable of granting, thereby greatly diminishing the incentives of various special interests to even attempt to influence government officials.

Section XLIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: Irrespective of the means by which a government obtains its funds – be it from taxation or from other sources – the [Combined Organization] understands that a necessary function of government is to responsibly allocate such funds to protect the rights and increase the well-being of its citizens and other individuals within its jurisdiction. If a government requires the public to contribute to its funding, then the services, utilities, and research produced by that government should be easily and freely accessible to members of the public who have contributed such funds. Any government expenditure should be premised on the goal of increasing the well-being of citizens and other individuals within the government’s jurisdiction in the short, medium, and long terms, with the understanding that government exists to serve the people, and should allocate funds wisely with the intent of maximizing value per dollar for the purpose of protecting individuals’ rights and promoting their well-being.

Section XLIV [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to have proposed laws accompanied by projections of expected results, including short-term, medium-term, and long-term effects. Such analysis should be based on scientific research and evidence and supported by the scientific and/or academic community with relevant subject-matter expertise. The intent is to have laws proposed to be created for the present day, and for such laws to function or improve in the future.

Section XLV [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to depoliticize the appointment of Supreme Court Justices, and to further incentivize their impartiality toward political viewpoints.

Section XLVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during May 7-13, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to revisit, condense, and simplify the law, with a focus on resolving issues among conflicting laws and closing illogical loopholes within the law.

Section XLVII [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to have bills proposed without sub-sections or provisions unrelated to the main subject of the bill. A single-subject or germaneness rule for bills would:

Simplify bills, rendering them more accessible and less convoluted;
Enable a focused vote for or against a bill without the possibility of having to accept or reject an embedded unrelated provision; and
Prevent an unrelated provision from being buried within a bill as a possible tactic to have it passed.

Section XLVIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to limit protectionism and subsidization of an industry or group of companies. The exception to this would be that of extenuating circumstances, such as natural disasters or catastrophes, in which case a limited window of support could be approved. The [Combined Organization] understands that in a free-market society, private businesses, in order to continue their existence, ought to adapt to market changes instead of being shielded from such changes.

Section XLIX [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to increase autonomy of individuals to decide over their own bodies and holds that individuals should have the legal right to undertake procedures including gender reassignment, hysterectomies, vasectomies, technological augmentation, cosmetic alterations, genetic enhancements, and physical supplementation at or after the age of 18 years, as long as this does not create health hazards or threats to other individuals.

Section L [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports the autonomy of an individual to decide on the continuation of that individual’s own life, including the right to choose or not to choose life-extending medical treatments. The [Combined Organization] does not consider it practicable or desirable for suicide to be illegal but discourages suicide from a moral standpoint, and furthermore considers that the legal right of suicide should only pertain to the individual and should not extend to any euthanasia or direct administration of a life-ending substance or procedure by any other person. The [Combined Organization] has grave concerns with anybody but the individual acting to hasten the end of that individual’s life.

Although each individual should be free to decide upon the duration of his, her, or its own life, the [Combined Organization] supports cultural changes and discussions that would encourage all individuals to undertake life-prolonging choices and activities. Advances in medical technology would facilitate more open-ended lifespans and would enable individuals to choose either finite or indefinite lengths of their lives. However, if individuals are recognized as having this autonomy, the [Combined Organization] is interested in persuading as many people as possible to decide to preserve their irreplaceable lives instead of hastening their end.

With regard to any legalization of assisted suicide or measures to provide patients with life-ending prescriptions, the [Combined Organization] supports stringent legal safeguards to ensure that each individual patient’s choice with regard to such matters is entirely free and uncoerced, and that there is no steering of any particular individual toward a life-ending choice by family members, medical practitioners, health insurers, activists, or any other individual or organization standing to benefit financially from the end of a patient’s life. However, efforts to persuade an individual to prolong his, her, or its life should not be restricted.

The [Combined Organization] opposes the emergence of any financially motivated lobby or industry whose primary business model would be assisted suicide or euthanasia, as the existence of such a lobby could create incentives and policies to steer people toward life-ending choices, including through legislation that might favor such “choices” in not-quite-voluntary situations. Instead, any prescription for a life-ending substance should only be provided as an incidental service by a patient’s primary-care physician, with the express written consent of at least one other unaffiliated physician, and the substance in question should only be allowed to be self-administered by the patient directly after a pre-defined time period since the obtaining of the prescription. Once the substance is prescribed, no medical practitioner should be permitted to benefit financially based on any specific choice of the patient to self-administer the substance to end the patient’s life. This position should not be construed to restrict any non-financially motivated political advocacy on the subject of assisted suicide, which involves individuals expressing their views on this subject in a public forum, when those individuals do not stand to gain financially from others choosing to obtain a life-ending substance.

Section LI [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to establish a cross-border or international organ-donation system so that organ donors who wish to do so may donate their organs in a foreign country. This could pertain to Americans working or traveling in foreign countries, but also foreigners or travelers who pass away within U.S. borders. This system would be particularly useful for saving lives with organs that have a very short preservation duration, and would take too long to be sent to the country of the donor’s nationality.

Section LII [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to increase the ability for public sousveillance on the functioning of government officials, in particular those who may propose laws, during negotiations and deliberations on proposing bills and national and international trade agreements. Furthermore, the [Combined Organization] supports efforts to make the current hosting of live-streams from United States Congress more user-friendly and accessible to the public, accompanied by links to proposed bills where applicable.

Section LIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to have a mandatory standard clause or affidavit, affirming that a Representative, Senator, or other Legislative Branch lawmaker proposing a piece of legislation, such as a bill in Congress, has no conflict of interest between serving the public and serving other parties, such as special-interest groups. The clause would have to be signed and dated by the representative before the legislation is allowed to be proposed.

Section LIV [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports increasing broad accountability of Federal Government departments, agencies, and entities, especially those tasked with national security and / or criminal investigations, to the United States Congress. Currently some agencies may receive government funding without any accountability as to what the funding is used for, often based on arguments that this information is ‘classified’ or ‘may not be revealed in the interest of national security’. This is irresponsible use of taxpayer money.

The [Combined Organization] does acknowledge that such entities or agencies may have security concerns regarding the publication of details of their budget plans. As such, the [Combined Organization] supports setting up a special non-partisan security budgetary review committee where more details of budget plans would have to be provided before considering to provide funds to an agency or entity.

Section LV [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to consolidate and reduce some redundancies among agencies and entities tasked with national security and law enforcement, as well as to reduce the number of such agencies and entities currently in operation. However, while supporting the elimination of parallel redundancies which can create problems, the [Combined Organization] recognizes that certain types of hierarchical redundancies can help with quality control.

Section LVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to ensure that no United States Representative or Senator may be obstructed in their ability to vote on any piece of legislation, or be kept from the Senate or House of Representatives for intra- or extra-curricular political-party activities which interfere with their primary task as representatives of the people within government. For example, protections should exist to prevent situations where Representatives or Senators are forced by their political parties to do fundraising calls during a vote on a bill.

Section LVII [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to restrict and limit civil asset forfeiture laws, and other laws that assist law-enforcement agencies in circumventing the Fourth Amendment, such as asset seizure, or detainment or arrest in situations where no criminal charges have been filed, except as part of an active interrogation of a person suspected of a crime or unless the person detained or arrested poses a clear and probable danger of inflicting physical harm upon others or their property.

Section LVIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to investigate questionable, but currently legal, actions by law-enforcement agencies that have over time garnered critical attention by the public. The safety of the public could benefit from such actions being revisited or revised to limit abuse and to close legal loopholes.

Section LIX [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017; amended by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] considers it important for impartial, objective investigations of alleged police and other law-enforcement misconduct to be pursued. While law-enforcement agencies should not be prohibited from internally investigating potential abuses within their own ranks, such investigations should never be considered exclusive or conclusive, and further external checks and accountability should be instituted. As part of providing such checks and accountability, investigations regarding misconduct, negligence, abuse, criminal activity, felonies, and misdemeanors allegedly committed by police, district attorneys, and judges, should, in addition to any internal investigation, also be conducted by a civilian organization outside the justice system. The intent of this requirement is to limit the possibility of favorably biased or preferential treatment of a member of a given law-enforcement agency by that person’s colleagues, and to restore confidence by the public that an investigation into police misconduct is done as objectively as possible.

Section LX [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to limit the possibility for police, district attorneys, and judges to favor one another through mutual “back-scratching” accommodations which may cause a particular criminal matter to be resolved in a manner inconsistent with the true facts of the situation or the requirements of applicable law.

Section LXI [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to prevent members of Congress from receiving special benefits, subsidies, and tax breaks that other citizens do not receive, and that are not necessary to function as a member of Congress. This limitation would pertain, for example, to health-care subsidies that are inaccessible to other citizens. However, this limitation would not prevent members of Congress from obtaining working conditions and job-related benefits of the sort which are broadly available, without regard to rank or degree of influence, to other Americans working within the private or public sectors.

Section LXII [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The U.S. [Combined Organization] supports efforts to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and to uphold the Rights of the Child as prescribed therein. This would include abolishing the death penalty for minors federally.

The [Combined Organization], however, opposes restrictions on the rights of parents to choose to homeschool their children in any manner that respects the children’s basic freedom of conscience. Any ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child should not be construed to restrict any peaceful, rights-respecting practice of homeschooling.

Section LXIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during June 18-24, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] opposes those specific cultural, religious, and social practices that violate individual rights and bodily autonomy. Examples of such unacceptable practices are forced marriage (including child marriage), male and female genital mutilation, and honor killings.

Section LXIV [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to create a reasonable minimum timeframe between the proposal of a bill and the voting procedure. To ensure a reasonable timeframe is proportional to the number of pages of a proposed bill, a time period per each specified amount of pages could be adopted. For example, and without committing to specific numerical magnitudes, a 24-hour period within a working week per every 20 pages could be adopted to ensure all members of Congress involved have sufficient time to read through and study a proposed bill’s implications. Such measures would prevent a bill from being introduced shortly before the voting process. They would also have the added side effect that proposals might become more concise, as the length of a bill would influence the consideration time.

In addition to this, after the proposal has been submitted, any amendments must be explicitly discussed in a public forum with the same degree of thorough consideration and same rules pertaining to the timeframe of consideration as allowed for the original proposal.

Section LXV [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to ensure a jury is fully informed on its rights and responsibilities, including jury nullification. The [Combined Organization] also supports efforts to prevent false claims being made regarding the rights and responsibilities of the jury.

Section LXVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: As an intermediate step toward the goal of complete nuclear disarmament and a potential pragmatic compromise in any future negotiations for disarmament, the [Combined Organization] supports efforts to significantly reduce the United States nuclear stockpile, and to replace or transfer a small part (between 1 percent and 10 percent) of this stockpile, to mobile nuclear platforms such as submarines. An enemy may currently target the stationary nuclear bombs directly. Having a largely hidden mobile fleet of nuclear bombs would render it much more difficult for any enemy to target the nuclear arsenal, while still maintaining the nuclear deterrent option in sufficient capacity. This would further have the effect of lowering the budget required to maintain the nuclear stockpile, as it could be drastically downsized.

Section LXVII [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports the right for individuals to have autonomy over, and utilize their bodies to earn money, including through activities such as prostitution, as long as such activities arise from a person’s own free will (e.g., not under duress), and the person is not endangering the health or well-being of others, including but not limited to the communication of sexually transmissible diseases.

Legalization would give those who wish to engage in prostitution the safety and protection of the law – for example, so that they may report abuse and would be prone to being exploited. It would also open the possibility for such individuals to unionize if they wish to do so. Furthermore, legalization would decrease government spending on what is ultimately a ‘moral crusade’.

However, the [Combined Organization] unequivocally condemns any manner of human trafficking, child exploitation, and other abuse that involves a violation of the autonomy and consent of any individual. The legalization of prostitution should be combined with stronger efforts to combat these dangerous and exploitative practices.

The legalization of prostitution could furthermore enable more effective action against human trafficking and involuntary exploitation, as, when prostitution is legalized, employees in this industry would become subject to the protections of the law. Legalization would help focus resources on combating the trafficking of humans rather than catching workers who chose this profession voluntarily.

Section LXVIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] holds that any statement made by an elected official and/or public servant to members of the public in a public forum as part of that official’s or public servant’s job duties, and available to be heard, read, or otherwise understood in a public setting, physical or digital, should be considered a part of the public record and treated as an official statement of their office and position. This requirement does not extend to statements made by an elected official and/or public servant in the capacity of a private citizen or in the expression of a personal opinion or other position unrelated to the exercise of the official’s or public servant’s job duties.

Section LXIX [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] holds that state and federal governments should establish an artificial intelligence (AI) analysis system for measuring risk of proposed legislation. Such a system could provide an impartial look at what legislation could cause harm or unintended consequences. Submitted policies would receive a score from 0 to 100, and the AI system would state what possible negative impacts may result. This system should be publicly accessible for submissions and for security audit. This is not intended to create or enact laws, but simply to serve as a tool to measure risk versus reward.

Section LXX [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] strongly opposes the possibility for any political party to determine the boundaries and borders of any voting district. The [Combined Organization] supports measures that require any efforts to have the districts potentially redrawn, when necessary due to migration for example, to be left to an automated system such as an artificial intelligence (AI) designed for this task.

Section LXXI [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to remove the possibility for a President to sign an international agreement among two or more nations by executive order. This would prevent a President from engaging in international affairs without support from the Congress, and likewise would make it more difficult to exit an international agreement, as support from Congress would need to exist in order for such an exit to occur. This would furthermore ensure that the United States becomes a more trustworthy nation in the eyes of the international community.

Section LXXII [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to create a framework for an international or world passport. This framework could, for example, be administered through the United Nations, and the passport could be valid only for those countries who have proven to meet the standards, set by participating countries, required to ensure safety. Given that the European Union has an ID valid within its borders, and the United States has a similar agreement with Canada, imagining these forms of identification being combined shows that a world passport is not a farfetched or alien idea.

Section LXXIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to mandate that new firearms will be produced with an embedded registration chip, as well as the registration number engraved on the firearm. The chip would have a registration number, a ‘trace online’ code, and a ‘lost or stolen’ code. The firearm would be accompanied by a physical and digital certificate of ownership with a registration number, the ‘trace online’ number, and the ‘lost or stolen’ number. The embedded chip would render it much harder to make the firearm untraceable. The number and codes involved would have to be unique identifiers.

When a firearm would be lost or stolen, the owner of the firearm and holder of the certificate would report the firearm to the authorities as lost or stolen using the ‘lost or stolen’ number. The intent of having a separate reporting number is to ensure that, in the event that a firearm is stolen or taken without consent, the offender cannot report the firearm as stolen, or as found again. When a firearm owner suspects the firearm is simply mislocated – for example, in the car or in the house, or perhaps taken by a family member, the owner could trace the firearm online via GPS on an online map, using the ‘trace online’ code. The ‘trace online’ code would never be revealed to law enforcement.

Law enforcement would have a device that can confirm the registration number of a firearm in close proximity, similar to contactless payments. On the other hand the detection range would be greater when a firearm has been reported lost or stolen by the owner of the firearm in question with the ‘lost and stolen’ number. A firearm that would not have been reported lost or stolen to law enforcement by the owner of the firearm with the ‘lost or stolen’ number would not be traceable from a greater distance by law enforcement.

This would ensure the privacy, safety, and peace of mind of firearm owners who might otherwise feel law enforcement would trace firearms without legal justification. At the same time, this measure would decrease the probability of stolen firearms never being found, and possibly ending in the hands of people with ill intent.

Section LXXIV [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports the creation of an office of a Public Civil-Rights Prosecutor. Our current justice system is flawed. Only people with substantial wealth can afford lawyers to take legal action against those who attack a person’s rights. While there are organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which offer help for some cases, their ability to do so is severely limited and typically non-existent in the lower courts. A Public Civil-Rights Prosecutor’s office will help guarantee that, no matter who a person is or the position of the offending party, a person’s rights cannot be assailed without consequence.

Section LXXV [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports lowering spending by the Department of Defense and the U.S. Military, which amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars per year and includes unchecked wastefulness. Reducing military spending would free up money for more important goals, such as curing disease, which collectively kills many more people than military conflict or war by an exponential degree.

Section LXXVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to hold institutions, corporations, and states accountable for usage of federal money with a specific intended purpose. When an entity has been granted any form of funding with a specifically intended purpose, such as disaster relief or specific educational funds, and these funds are misappropriated or used for other purposes well outside of the scope of what they were intended for, the entity in question ought to restitute the funding that was made available.

Section LXXVII [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports increases in the budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Numerous biotech CEOs have recently made the case to increase the NIH budget, because the NIH conducts research that their companies would not be able to invest in, as investments not leading directly to a product would affect the bottom line. 33% of all the publications from NIH research are cited in corporate patents, so it stimulates new product development. A major driver for economic progress and reducing the suffering of those in pain, the NIH is essentially a public charity that brings us into the future. Whether one supports limited or expansive government, the NIH does not seek to regulate anything nor impose laws on anyone. It exclusively conducts medical research to help the sick.

Section LXXVIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The U.S. [Combined Organization] supports efforts to reinstate the rights to vote for convicted felons who have received and served their punishment, in order to present them the opportunity to participate in society as otherwise normal citizens.

Section LXXIX [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports repealing the current requirement in the United States that drugs or treatments may not be used, even on willing patients, unless approval for such drugs or treatments is received from the Food and Drug Administration. Such requirements are a profound violation of patient sovereignty; a person who is terminally ill is unable to choose to take a risk on an unapproved drug or treatment unless this person is fortunate enough to participate in a clinical trial. Even then, once the clinical trial ends, the treatment must be discontinued, even if it was actually successful at prolonging the person’s life. This is not only profoundly tragic, but morally unconscionable as well. The most critical reform needed is to allow unapproved drugs and treatments to be marketed and consumed. If the FDA wishes to strongly differentiate between approved and unapproved treatments, then a strongly worded warning label could be required for unapproved treatments, and patients could even be required to sign a consent form stating that they have been informed of the risks of an unapproved treatment. This reform to directly extend many lives and to redress a moral travesty should be the top political priority of advocates of indefinite life extension. Over the coming decades, its effect will be to allow cutting-edge treatments to reach a market sooner and thus to enable data about those treatments’ effects to be gathered more quickly and reliably. Because many treatments take 10-15 years to receive FDA approval, this reform could by itself speed up the real-world advent of indefinite life extension by over a decade.

Section LXXX [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to increase opportunities for entry into the medical profession. The current system for licensing doctors is highly monopolistic and protectionist – the result of efforts by the American Medical Association in the early 20th century to limit entry into the profession in order to artificially boost incomes for its members. The medical system suffers today from too few doctors and thus vastly inflated patient costs and unacceptable waiting times for appointments. Instead of prohibiting the practice of medicine by all except a select few who have completed an extremely rigorous and cost-prohibitive formal medical schooling, governments in the Western world should allow the market to determine different tiers of medical care for which competing private certifications would emerge. For the most specialized and intricate tasks, high standards of certification would continue to exist, and a practitioner’s credentials and reputation would remain absolutely essential to convincing consumers to put their lives in that practitioner’s hands. But, with regard to routine medical care (e.g., annual check-ups, vaccinations, basic wound treatment), it is not necessary to receive attention from a person with a full-fledged medical degree. Furthermore, competition among certification providers would increase quality of training and lower its price, as well as accelerate the time needed to complete the training. Such a system would allow many more young medical professionals to practice without undertaking enormous debt or serving for years (if not decades) in roles that offer very little remuneration while entailing a great deal of subservience to the hierarchy of an established institution. Ultimately, without sufficient doctors to affordably deliver life-extending treatments when they become available, it would not be feasible to extend these treatments to the majority of people.

Section LXXXI [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports reforms to the patent system that prevent the re-patenting of drugs and medical devices, or the acquisition of any exclusive or monopoly rights over those drugs and devices, once they have become generic or entered the public domain. Appallingly, many pharmaceutical companies today attempt to re-patent drugs that have already entered the public domain, simply because the drugs have been discovered to have effects on a disease different from the one for which they were originally patented. The result of this is that the price of the re-patented drug often spikes by orders of magnitude compared to the price level during the period the drug was subject to competition. Only a vibrant and competitive market, where numerous medical providers can experiment with how to improve particular treatments or create new ones, can allow for the rate of progress needed for the people alive today to benefit from radical life extension.

Section LXXXII [Adopted by a vote of the members during November 11-17, 2017]: The [Combined Organization] supports reforms to reduce the lengths of times over which medical patents could be effective. Medical patents – in essence, legal grants of monopoly for limited periods of time – greatly inflate the cost of drugs and other treatments. Especially in today’s world of rapidly advancing biotechnology, a patent term of 20 years essentially means that no party other than the patent holder (or someone paying royalties to the patent holder) may innovate upon the patented medicine for a generation, all while the technological potential for such innovation becomes glaringly obvious. As much innovation consists of incremental improvements on what already exists, the lack of an ability to create derivative drugs and treatments that tweak current approaches implies that the entire medical field is, for some time, stuck at the first stages of a treatment’s evolution – with all of the expense and unreliability this entails. Even with shortened patent terms, the original developer of an innovation will still always benefit from a first-mover advantage, as it takes time for competitors to catch on. If the original developer can maintain high-quality service and demonstrate the ability to sell a safe product, then the brand-name advantage alone can secure a consistent revenue stream without the need for a patent monopoly.

Section LXXXIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] opposes any development or deployment of weapons systems that are capable of killing or injuring human beings in the absence of an explicit command by a human being to take action in every specific instance. Autonomous drones, vehicles, or other combat systems may not be permitted to make life-or-death decisions on the basis of a program, algorithm, predictive model, or any other means other than a specific decision by a human being who is closely familiar with the circumstances surrounding any given military situation. Accordingly, the [Combined Organization] supports the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and other initiatives to abolish all autonomous weapons and preclude the development of such weapons.

Section LXXXIV [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports research into the process of ectogenesis, the ability of organisms to be incubated and to grow to the point of independent survival, within an artificial environment that provides such organisms with all the necessities of biological survival and development. Furthermore, the [Combined Organization] supports the widespread deployment and use of the technology of ectogenesis once such technology becomes safe and practical. Ectogenesis has the potential to benefit humans and other species alike, restoring extinct species and bolstering the numbers of endangered species, as well as alleviating the burdens of human pregnancy and rendering the divisive debate over abortion obsolete by reconciling the right to life of a fetus with the freedom of a woman to choose not to carry that fetus.

Section LXXXV [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports any relaxation or elimination on caps in the United States federal budget regarding spending on scientific and technological research, including research in medicine and public health. Funding for science that can improve the human condition should not be subject to the vagaries of partisan political standoffs over the federal budget. Accordingly, the [Combined Organization] supports the Raise the Caps initiative and any other elimination of artificial restrictions of the allocations of funding to scientific and technological projects.

Section LXXXVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to give citizens more accessible and safer ways to report misconduct, corruption, constitutional rights violations, international human rights violations, and other similar infractions by police, including local police departments, as well as by federal law-enforcement agencies, such as Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to an investigative organization, whether civilian in nature or a special investigative department within the judicial system.

Such efforts could, for example, involve having a mandate that every police department and federal law-enforcement agency website have a ‘banner’ on its website that allows citizens to report misbehavior by said police department or federal law-enforcement agency via a national reporting system. Reporting of misbehavior would not inhibit any constitutional rights, such as filing a lawsuit.

If a valid complaint is found after investigation, this could result in a fine, a reduction of funding, or a reduction of salary for the responsible officials as a means of punishment. Said money would be allocated back to the relevant level of government to increase the well-being of citizens.

A periodic report of all reported missteps by law-enforcement agencies should be made publicly available, including breakdowns of valid and invalid claims, as well as reports per region, among other useful breakdowns.

Section LXXXVII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports a requirement that any educational institution that receives federal funding must greatly reduce its expenditures on internal bureaucracy and administration, in part by eliminating the requirement for students to complete any hard-copy paperwork and by enabling ubiquitous free, electronic completion and submission of all required forms.

Section LXXXVIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports a requirement that any educational institution that receives federal funding must openly publish all even partially federally funded research produced by that institution in readily downloadable electronic format without any cost to the general public, including any paywalls or access fees from academic journals that feature such research. This requirement would not apply to research projects solely supported by private funds or which do not require funding altogether; in those circumstances, the direct authors of such research would retain copyright to it and the ability to publish it in the manner they see fit.

Section LXXXIX [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports a prohibition against police being equipped with military-grade hardware, including assault weapons, military armored vehicles, or any other offensive equipment primarily designed for battlefield use.

Section XC [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports a requirement for police to be equipped with rubber bullets as standard ammunition and only to use regular, lethal bullets in situations where there is an immediate and previously known threat to the safety of members of the general public. More generally, police should be trained to use every possible technique for non-lethal incapacitation of offenders, prior to any recourse to lethal force.

Section XCI [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to encourage police departments to use electric vehicles. This would have the advantages of reducing emissions of pollutants into the air, as well as moving police forces away from militarized vehicles, which are less likely to be electrically powered.

Section XCII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports the installment of monitoring systems in police vehicles to track whether the police are violating traffic laws, with the exception of situations where speeding or other technical infractions may be necessary to apprehend other known or suspected violators or criminal offenders. The ability of police to violate traffic laws with impunity is damaging to public perception, as law enforcement should first and foremost set an example for society to follow. By holding law enforcement accountable for minor infractions such as traffic violations, it will be possible to develop a police force that serves as an example to the public.

Section XCIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to provide a path to legalization for all current undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States, free of restrictions based on country of origin, economic status, education, length of residency, or any other criteria, other than history of violent criminal activity.

Section XCIV [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports efforts to end detention of all migrants for immigration violations not related to violent crimes. All current people serving jail terms for immigration issues with no additional crimes involved with the arrest must be released, and the path to citizenship started immediately. Those for whom an additional charge was involved would need to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, with serious infractions – such as any violent offenses – potentially justifying additional detainment.

Section XCV [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports measures to modernize and streamline the immigration process and eliminate the backlogs for those already in the queue. The [Combined Organization] advocates simplifying the documentation process, eliminating all requirements for filling out hard-copy paperwork, and utilizing technology to cut wait times and bureaucratic delays.

Section XCVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports the immediate abolition of all private prison facilities and the termination of arrangements with private contractors for detention or immigration and border enforcement. Punishment for crimes, expect for situations of self-defense from the immediate commission of a crime, should be a function reserved for government alone and should never involve a profit motive, which creates incentives to artificially inflate the appearance of criminal behavior and the punishment of lesser infractions. In order to preserve the capacity for inmates and detainees to be housed in humane conditions, the United States Federal Government, as well as State and local governments, should have the prerogative to appropriate the facilities previously used by private prisons and private detention contractors, after providing appropriate one-time compensation for the property involved.

Section XCVII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The [Combined Organization] supports the establishment of a federal land dividend, whereby currently unused federal lands, with the exception of national parks, national forests, and notable landmarks, will be leased to private corporations that agree to operate in an environmentally conscientious manner, with the proceeds of the lease funding a universal basic income for the United States population.

Why Aren’t We Afraid of Death?: The First Step Toward Defeating Aging – Article by Alex Kadet

January 13, 2020 Alex Kadet Comments 0 Comment

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Alex Kadet

The pain of those fighting to extend human life expectancy

Science articles frequently mention the search for the “elixir of eternal youth.” What a pleasant thought! While we are busy living our lives, the science of extending them is moving at a dizzying pace, and we need only to wait until the international science community plates the solution, ready to serve, right? This statement illustrates how perceptions of reality are skewed toward desired outcomes.

Ask any reputable scientist, activist, or entrepreneur interested in extending human life about the subject, however, and you will learn that the reality is very different. For instance, here is a quotation from Aubrey de Grey, founder of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Research Foundation and pioneering researcher in the science of aging:

“. . . if I got a billion dollars today, we would probably bring forward the defeat of aging by about ten years. And it’s a lot of lives, maybe four hundred million.”

I suppose we all understand how insignificant one billion dollars is compared with the global annual expenditures on health care and science. The cost of health care in the United States alone exceeded 3.3 trillion dollars in 2016 and is growing rapidly.

What do these numbers mean? That, without a doubt, humanity is not even close to curing aging, even in the twenty-first century.

Longevity advocacy

At a glance, it seems odd that the idea of extending human life needs advocacy, but longevity scientists and advocates understand that the only obstacle to the development of a cure for aging is a lack of resources: time and money. The dollar has strong voting power, and human lifespan extension is not at the top of the ballot.

For some reason, not enough people are willing to do what objectively seems rational, to overcome the obstacles and diseases that aging causes. What appears to transhumanists, scientists, and researchers to be an undeniable benefit for humankind seems unimportant or even detrimental to others. Dying of old age seems dignified to some people, but in truth it is honorable only in the movies. Therefore, advocacy needs to be prioritized over seemingly more practical immediate problems.

Many people who work in the field of longevity studies are tormented by a fundamental question: If one acknowledges one’s mortality, isn’t working toward radical life extension a most rational use of one’s time? After all, millions of people, with trillions of dollars combined, have a nonzero chance of radically extending life expectancy within the next ten years.

A primary goal of longevity advocates is to attract investments and endorsements from international organizations, including scientific foundations and businesses, and increase the visibility and appeal of research on anti-aging therapy. We aim to market anti-aging science effectively, and raise the prestige of working in our industry to that of working for a venture-capital or tech startup.

Large-scale work must begin now, for a simple reason.

The population of the planet is rapidly aging.

The average age of the world populace is increasing at an alarming pace. Globally, the demographic comprising people aged sixty years or older is growing faster than any other group. If this trend continues, by 2050 the number of seniors in the world will more than double, from 962 million to 2.1 billion. Such a significant change in the composition of the population will inevitably affect economies and societies.

Throughout the history of humankind, aging has been viewed as an inevitable process, leading not so much to illness and suffering (which have always been treated as if separate from aging) but rather to physical death.

Let me draw your attention to the importance of distinguishing between improving the quality of life of the rapidly aging population and developing a treatment for aging.

It is also important to understand that when we talk about defeating aging, we do not put it as equal to immortality. Extending longevity will largely take the form of increasing productive life span and preventing suffering — not only fatigue, reduced physical strength, and impaired memory, but also the internal conflict of remaining young at heart and full of ambition in an aging body. Longevity specialists believe that victory over suffering is achievable and will be a victory over an absolute evil.

Why do we work so hard to treat the effects of aging while doing almost nothing to slow aging itself? Aging is literally a matter of life and death, and yet it commands almost no attention.

Life-Extension Myths

The vast majority of people and organizations (including the World Health Organization, billionaire entrepreneurs, the United Nations, and entire nations) do not include addressing the problems of aging in their short- or long-term agendas. They do not consider aging to be a real and distinct problem. Why not?

Maybe extending human life would be unnatural?

The answer is no.

Self-preservation is characteristic of all organisms and is one of the so-called “basic instincts” [1]. All organisms achieve self-preservation by purposefully reducing their own entropy (that is, using external resources to compensate for inevitable energy loss) and maintaining homeostasis (steady internal conditions).
People tend to consider aging and age-related diseases to be separate and distinct phenomena, as if aging is different from other abnormalities of the human body. Such thinking is fundamentally flawed. Most people do not have ethical problems with using medicine to treat suffering, but cognitive dissonance often produces ethical objections to therapies designed to treat aging, which is widely treated with dignity and respect, even viewed as sacred.
As the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote in his Ethics, “The mind, both in so far as it has clear and distinct ideas, and also in so far as it has confused ideas, endeavors to persist in its being for an indefinite period, and of this endeavor it is conscious” [2]. It is human nature to attempt to survive as long as possible.

[For the interested reader: philosophical and ethical issues that inevitably arise in the fight against aging are discussed in detail in Steven Horrobin’s The Future of Aging, chapter three, “Towards Naturalistic Transcendence: The Value of Life and Life Extension to Persons as Conative Processes.”]

Perhaps the problem is that it is simply impossible to stop the human body from aging?

I don’t think so.

Gerontologists (people who study the science of aging) agree that slowing or preventing aging (that is, eliminating the faults of and repairing the accumulated damage to the body) is a purely technological problem and can be solved. Additionally, the existence of several animal species that are closely evolutionarily related to humans but live much longer than we do demonstrates that extended longevity is possible.

A “road map” for achieving longevity escape velocity has already been developed in the form of a series of specific steps and studies [4], [5]. We cannot predict which research will result in the elongation of the human life span, as there are multiple hypotheses to be tested, but if any current or future research yields actionable results, our most daring imaginings could be surpassed.

But what if we succeed in extending longevity and the resulting future is undesirable?

No, we will not die due to overpopulation.

The world’s human population has increased almost fourfold in the past one hundred years, and far from suffering as a result, we now live longer and enjoy greater quality of life than ever before. In fact, natural population decline is causing its own problems in several countries. In the 1970s, adherents of Thomas Malthus’s belief that unchecked population growth inevitably exhausts resources and yields poverty and degradation predicted a worldwide famine and demographic catastrophe by the year 2000. Their predictions did not come true, as they hadn’t taken into account the rapid expansion of agriculture and food production that did occur [6].

Decades will pass before the demographic consequences of victory over aging begin to impact our lives significantly. We will have enough time to adapt to the new circumstances [7].

No, the secret world elite cannot capture the “philosopher’s stone” and enslave the rest of us.

In the first years after antibiotics were discovered, they were available only to the rich. Similarly, today such complex and expensive medical interventions as organ transplantation are not widely available, but this is not a reason to ban them [7]. The treatment of aging will likely be very expensive initially, but as soon as the technology becomes known, endeavors to optimize it and expand its availability will inevitably begin. This is an axiom in modern society. It is already impossible (sometimes frighteningly) to keep significant information secret, and in the case of longevity studies, humanity will benefit.

In view of the preceding, we have no reason to doubt that victory over aging is achievable and will be favorable for humanity.

[For the interested reader: you can find more debunked myths here.]

Scientists and science advocates are working to dispel the above myths, but unfortunately their work has not yet produced the desired outcomes. Although it would seem that the possibility of a cure for aging would attract large amounts of resources and greatly impact human worldview and actions, we simply haven’t seen such an effect.

What if the motivation for our inaction doesn’t come from a rational place?

I believe that the general lack of interest in treating aging comes from a lack of fear of aging, as humans tend not to be consciously afraid of death. Where there is no fear of a phenomenon, there is no aim to eliminate it.

So, why aren’t we afraid of death?

Fear is a basic emotion based on the self-preservation instinct. It precipitates as a sudden cognitive and behavioral change stimulated by imminent danger [8].
Fear can reinforce social connections, such as when an escape for help calls for collective defense [9]. There are many threats in the world, and fear encourages us to change our behavior and unite in order to protect ourselves against them.

Cancer, terrorism, war, air crashes, environmental degradation, global climate change: these and many other dangers have been accounted for in the multibillion-dollar budgets of individual countries, international organizations, private foundations, and nonprofits. Aging is not on the list. I believe I know why.

In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker explored the hypothesis that civilization is based not on the suppression of sexuality, as Sigmund Freud believed, but on the suppression of the inherent human fear of death.

Becker argued that at one extreme, civilization is a way for humankind to contain the anxiety of death, and at the other extreme, an individual’s character can be viewed as a complex of defenses against fear of death. In other words, all of our motivation, the whole set of human cognitive attitudes and emotional experiences, is aimed at avoiding the awareness of our own mortality [10].

Despite the fact that we will die someday, few of us think about mortality on a regular basis. In one way or another we become acquainted with death while still children, but our psyche is unable to process the phenomenon fully. Consequently, according to Becker, the unconscious mind forms a complex of balances and defenses that prevent contact with the horror of death.

The existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom holds a similar point of view on the structure of the human psyche. In his book Existential Psychotherapy, he explores in detail how fear of death permeates the whole being, and how much of human activity implicitly results from this fear.

Mental defenses allow us to maintain mental health and keep from sliding into madness. On the other hand, the same defenses limit our freedom and program our reactions. Dependencies, workaholism, daily rituals, narcissism, anxiety, depression . . . The list of such defenses is long, and we utilize them to reduce our fear of death [11]. Becoming aware of one’s own defense strategies is the first step toward freedom from the limitations of the psyche and cognitive distortions.

Ernest Becker’s theory has been further developed and experimentally confirmed in the framework of terror management theory (TMT) [12]. For the first time in psychology, the horror of death has been studied as an experimental variable. In one study, researchers effected a horror of death in participants, activated their awareness of the inevitability of death, and studied the resulting defense mechanisms. Having experienced the anxiety of facing their own mortality, participants were asked to evaluate punishments for violators of cultural norms; these participants chose far more severe punishments than did the control group [13].

After thirty years of research, terror management theory maintains that the most basic reason death is upsetting and motivating is because it undermines the most basic motive of all, which is a prerequisite for all other need satisfaction — staying alive. More specifically, death is a unique motivator because (1) most of an organism’s biological systems function to keep the organism alive, thus averting death; (2) death must be avoided to enhance opportunities for reproduction and care of offspring, both of which are essential for gene perpetuation; (3) death is the only absolutely inevitable future event; and (4) death threatens to undermine all desires, whether for pleasure, belonging, certainty, meaning, control, competence, self-actualization, or growth [14]. I will discuss these facts in more detail in forthcoming articles.

Cultural worldview (religion, nationalism, etc.) and self-esteem are two common buffers that protect our unconscious from the anxiety of death. Almost every religion is predicated on a belief in an afterlife, thereby allowing adherents to control fear by ignoring or denying death. Also, self-esteem and culture fill life with value, helping us to surpass death symbolically by creating the illusion of continuing to exist through the contributions we make that will outlive us or because the community we identify with will continue to exist after our personal death [15].

Cognitive distortions, such as magical thinking or the denying to believe in our own mortality, push out existential questions from our conscious mind, gently urging us to concentrate on the less painful questions of being [12].

To begin truly active work on increasing human life expectancy and defeating age-related diseases, humankind needs to realize the finiteness of life.

Demystifying common defense mechanisms and the tricks our minds play to make us disregard our own mortality will be necessary in the fight against aging. Increasing awareness is often enough to motivate people to examine their defense mechanisms and resolve the cognitive distortions that make work on aging so unapproachable.

Right now, with modern science making possible technologies that had not even been imaginable before, it’s time to face our fear — to recognize the problem of human aging, and frame it not as a philosophical question of being but as an engineering challenge.

Readers of this article will probably not instantly become gerontologists (scientists specializing in the biology of aging) or sponsors of fundamental scientific research; however, an awareness that aging and death are real can only increase mindfulness for anyone who dares to face it, thus making them happier in the long run [16].

P.S.: Become a Radical Life Extension Hero! Support my research on the Patreon!

I am open to any discussion on the topic of longevity studies. Also, I am preparing a speech on the psychological effects of suppressing the fear of death. Experience shows that even a brief overview of this topic stimulates interest in the treatment of aging.

Furthermore, I am beginning research in the field of experimental social psychology and plan to use TMT techniques to identify optimal ways for delivering the message of longevity activists. If you are interested in collaboration of any kind, feel free to contact me here.

I’d like to thank Ekaterina Gorbacheva and Zachary Vigna for their editorial help.

Alex Kadet is a transhumanist, longevity activist, entrepreneur, and expert in death studies. He is also a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party.

Sources:

[1] Pavlov I. P. “Twenty years of experience in the objective research of the higher nervous activity.” Science, Moscow, 1973: p. 237.

[2] Spinoza, B. Ethics. Part 3, proposition 9. 1677.

[3] Vishnevsky, A. G. “Reproduction of the population and society.” Мoscow, 1982: p. 110.

[4] https://www.lifespan.io/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/

[5] https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging

[6] Trewavas, A. “Malthus foiled again and again.” Nature, 418 (6898), September 2002: pp. 668–670

[7] Sethe, S. & de Magalhaes, J. P. “Ethical Perspectives in Biogerontology.” In: Ethics, Health Policy and (Anti-) Aging: Mixed Blessings, ed. Schermer, M. & Pinxten, W. Springer, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 2013: pp. 173–188.

[8] Izard, I. The Emotions of Humans. Мoscow, 1980: p. 52–71.

[9] Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. Ethology: The biology of behavior. Oxford, England, 1970

[10] Becker, E. The Denial of Death. Simon & Schuster, New York, 1973.

[11] Yalom, I. D. Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books, New York”, 1980.

[12] Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T. & Solomon, S. “The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory.” In: Public Self and Private Self, ed. R. F. Baumeister. Springer-Verlag, New York, 1986: pp. 189–212.

[13] Rosenblatt, A., Greenberg, J., Solomon S., Pyszczynski, T. & Lyon, D. “Evidence for terror management theory: I. The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who violate or uphold cultural values.” J. Pers. Soc. Psychol., Vol. 57, 1989: pp. 681–90.

[14] Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. L. “Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory: From Genesis to Revelation.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 52, 2015: pp. 1–70.

[15] Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. L. (2015). Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory: From Genesis to Revelation. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 52, pp. 1–70): Psychological Mechanisms Through Which Thoughts of Death Affect Behavior

[16] Killingsworth, M. A. & Gilbert, D. T.. “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.” Science, Vol. 330, issue 6006, 2010: p. 932.

2020 New Year’s and New Decade’s Message by Victor Bjoerk

January 12, 2020 Victor Bjoerk Comments 0 Comment

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Victor Bjoerk

Picture of the M87 Black Hole – First-ever image of a black hole and a major accomplishment of the 2010s

Happy New Year and Decade, everyone!

I celebrated it this year in San Francisco, as I managed to get an opportunity in aging research here. I’ve always celebrated in Sweden before, with relatives or friends, and the last years’ celebrations have been with AI researcher Anders Sandberg. However, I’m certainly not stuck to any routine to mark it, and who knows where one may be in the future, if one may celebrate it in space even!

I still recall thinking about what would happen in the future back in 1999. Although, of course, our time calculation is completely arbitrary and not rooted in anything the universe cares about, we nonetheless like to set certain dates of when X event will happen when writing the history of humanity.

Back then I was a small child, and while I lacked a particular interest in aging research, I certainly read a lot of popular science and liked to think about what would happen during the upcoming millennia. Certainly, genetic enhancement of humans was high on that list and its happening now! Look, for example, at Luxturna and Zolgensma, the 2 approved gene therapies so far.

We should all be very happy to be alive now instead of during the previous 4 billion years life has existed. It’s been the best decade in history, ever. We have not only the basic logistics for keeping most people alive on a day-to-day basis with a good quality of life, but this also leads to a lot of spare time to develop technology.

Back in about 2008, when working in a nursing home as a teenager, I realized that I did not want to end up in that state within the next few decades. I did not feel that age-related disease belonged in an otherwise advanced high-tech society that respected human rights reasonably well. Since then, on most days, I’ve probably read new scientific papers on the topic, I went to university and studied molecular biology, I became director of Heales – which is a scientific think tank in Brussels – and set up the biannual EHA (Eurosymposium on Healthy Aging) conference series together with Sven Bulterijs.

I never intended to become a scientist for the sake of it; I just want to get the biggest problem in the history of humanity solved.

There are a lot of reasons for optimism. The 2010s saw unprecedented investment in this area, and many therapeutic aging interventions emerged. Among the ones most well-known are innovations in clearing senescent cells with senolytic drugs, leading to aging reversal.

So I just hope this trajectory of advancement continues as the public also becomes more informed. I’ve learnt that hype comes in cycles; lots of buzzwords and overoptimistic speculation flow around, but eventually also real products come out of the research (yes, even in biotechnology). The question is when enough therapies can be put together into an old person and systemically bring that person back to youth.

So I wish everyone a happy new year and decade, whatever your pursuits are, hoping that at the end of this decade we can summarize it, saying that we did what was possible.

I hope everyone had a fun celebration!

Victor Bjoerk has worked for the Gerontology Research Group, the Longevity Reporter, and the Fraunhofer-Institut für Zelltherapie und Immunologie. He has promoted awareness throughout Europe of emerging biomedical research and the efforts to reverse biological aging. He is now a molecular biologist and working for BioAge in San Francisco.

Results of Platform Vote #7 and Adopted Sections

January 5, 2020 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

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Gennady Stolyarov II

The U.S. Transhumanist Party conducted its twelfth vote of the members and the seventh vote on its platform planks between December 25, 2019, and January 1, 2020. Official ballot options can be found here.

Detailed results of the voting have been tabulated here. In one instance, where no majority was reached in the first round of voting, options were selected based on the ranked-preference method with instant runoffs.

As a result, the following new or amended sections of Article III of the U.S. Transhumanist Party Constitution were adopted.

Section LXXXIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party opposes any development or deployment of weapons systems that are capable of killing or injuring human beings in the absence of an explicit command by a human being to take action in every specific instance. Autonomous drones, vehicles, or other combat systems may not be permitted to make life-or-death decisions on the basis of a program, algorithm, predictive model, or any other means other than a specific decision by a human being who is closely familiar with the circumstances surrounding any given military situation. Accordingly, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and other initiatives to abolish all autonomous weapons and preclude the development of such weapons.

Section LXXXIV [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports research into the process of ectogenesis, the ability of organisms to be incubated and to grow to the point of independent survival, within an artificial environment that provides such organisms with all the necessities of biological survival and development. Furthermore, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the widespread deployment and use of the technology of ectogenesis once such technology becomes safe and practical. Ectogenesis has the potential to benefit humans and other species alike, restoring extinct species and bolstering the numbers of endangered species, as well as alleviating the burdens of human pregnancy and rendering the divisive debate over abortion obsolete by reconciling the right to life of a fetus with the freedom of a woman to choose not to carry that fetus.

Section LXXXV [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports any relaxation or elimination on caps in the United States federal budget regarding spending on scientific and technological research, including research in medicine and public health. Funding for science that can improve the human condition should not be subject to the vagaries of partisan political standoffs over the federal budget. Accordingly, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the Raise the Caps initiative and any other elimination of artificial restrictions of the allocations of funding to scientific and technological projects.

Section LXXXVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to give citizens more accessible and safer ways to report misconduct, corruption, constitutional rights violations, international human rights violations, and other similar infractions by police, including local police departments, as well as by federal law-enforcement agencies, such as Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to an investigative organization, whether civilian in nature or a special investigative department within the judicial system.

Section LXXXVII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a requirement that any educational institution that receives federal funding must greatly reduce its expenditures on internal bureaucracy and administration, in part by eliminating the requirement for students to complete any hard-copy paperwork and by enabling ubiquitous free, electronic completion and submission of all required forms.

Section LXXXVIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a requirement that any educational institution that receives federal funding must openly publish all even partially federally funded research produced by that institution in readily downloadable electronic format without any cost to the general public, including any paywalls or access fees from academic journals that feature such research. This requirement would not apply to research projects solely supported by private funds or which do not require funding altogether; in those circumstances, the direct authors of such research would retain copyright to it and the ability to publish it in the manner they see fit.

Section LXXXIX [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a prohibition against police being equipped with military-grade hardware, including assault weapons, military armored vehicles, or any other offensive equipment primarily designed for battlefield use.

Section XC [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a requirement for police to be equipped with rubber bullets as standard ammunition and only to use regular, lethal bullets in situations where there is an immediate and previously known threat to the safety of members of the general public. More generally, police should be trained to use every possible technique for non-lethal incapacitation of offenders, prior to any recourse to lethal force.

Section XCI [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to encourage police departments to use electric vehicles. This would have the advantages of reducing emissions of pollutants into the air, as well as moving police forces away from militarized vehicles, which are less likely to be electrically powered.

Section XCII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the installment of monitoring systems in police vehicles to track whether the police are violating traffic laws, with the exception of situations where speeding or other technical infractions may be necessary to apprehend other known or suspected violators or criminal offenders. The ability of police to violate traffic laws with impunity is damaging to public perception, as law enforcement should first and foremost set an example for society to follow. By holding law enforcement accountable for minor infractions such as traffic violations, it will be possible to develop a police force that serves as an example to the public.

Section XCIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to provide a path to legalization for all current undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States, free of restrictions based on country of origin, economic status, education, length of residency, or any other criteria, other than history of violent criminal activity.

Section XCIV [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to end detention of all migrants for immigration violations not related to violent crimes. All current people serving jail terms for immigration issues with no additional crimes involved with the arrest must be released, and the path to citizenship started immediately. Those for whom an additional charge was involved would need to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, with serious infractions – such as any violent offenses – potentially justifying additional detainment.

Section XCV [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports measures to modernize and streamline the immigration process and eliminate the backlogs for those already in the queue. The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party advocates simplifying the documentation process, eliminating all requirements for filling out hard-copy paperwork, and utilizing technology to cut wait times and bureaucratic delays.

Section XCVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the immediate abolition of all private prison facilities and the termination of arrangements with private contractors for detention or immigration and border enforcement. Punishment for crimes, expect for situations of self-defense from the immediate commission of a crime, should be a function reserved for government alone and should never involve a profit motive, which creates incentives to artificially inflate the appearance of criminal behavior and the punishment of lesser infractions. In order to preserve the capacity for inmates and detainees to be housed in humane conditions, the United States Federal Government, as well as State and local governments, should have the prerogative to appropriate the facilities previously used by private prisons and private detention contractors, after providing appropriate one-time compensation for the property involved.

Section XCVII [Adopted by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the establishment of a federal land dividend, whereby currently unused federal lands, with the exception of national parks, national forests, and notable landmarks, will be leased to private corporations that agree to operate in an environmentally conscientious manner, with the proceeds of the lease funding a universal basic income for the United States population.

Moreover, Section XVI has been amended to read as follows:

Section XVI [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 26 – April 1, 2017; amended by a vote of the members during December 25, 2019 – January 1, 2020]: Irrespective of whether or not technology will eventually replace the need for the labor of sentient entities, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party holds that all sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of an unconditional universal basic income, whereby the same minimum amount of money or other resources is provided irrespective of a sentient entity’s life circumstances, occupations, or other income sources, so as to provide a means for the basic requirements of existence and liberty to be met.

New Decade’s Message for the 2020s by USTP Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II

January 4, 2020 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

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Gennady Stolyarov II

As 2019 draws to a close, Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, expresses hope that humankind will emerge from the “Crazy Years” and offers ten concrete resolutions for human achievement during the 2020s. This message was recorded on December 31, 2019, and is available for viewing here.

As 2019 draws to a close, let us bid farewell and good riddance to a decade which could, in retrospect be referred to using the prophetic Robert Heinlein term, “The Crazy Years” – a turbulent, conflicted decade during which, while glimmers of hope appeared on multiple fronts of technological advancement, society and culture have clearly declined due to the rise of incivility, tribalism, authoritarianism, identity politics, and mass breakdowns of sanity. It is no secret that I had hoped for humankind to have been farther along the path of advancement by now than it has actually come. The great conflict of our decade – between the marvels that have been built by the creative and rational higher faculties of the human mind and the biases, fallacies, vulnerabilities, and atrocities spawned by its darkest evolved recesses – between the Apollonian heights and the Dionysian depths of human nature – will carry on into the 2020s and perhaps beyond. To win this conflict, those of us who desire a brighter future need to advocate for more progress, faster innovation, greater rationality, higher standards of civility and morality, and a long-term outlook that seeks to cultivate the best in human beings.

As the winds of fortune shift, some of us individually will rise, and others will fall. This certainly was the case this past decade. In so many respects, for me, it has been marked by colossal achievements and improvements, but also tectonic shifts in my own life which were not of my initiative – to which I needed to respond and adapt and preserve what I valued in the aftermath. Reflecting back on the end of 2009, and comparing it to today, I realize that absolutely everything about the circumstances of my life is now different… and yet I myself am essentially the same. I believe that it is this core of myself, this fundamentally constant and consistent identity, which has carried me through the crises and enabled me to defy adversity and arise stronger every time – to pursue new endeavors and take on new roles while remaining the same essential individual, to learn from the empirical evidence before me while maintaining the same convictions and understanding of the good. The events of the 2010s have illustrated for me that, indeed, peace and stability in life must ultimately come from within – although it is not a matter of withdrawal into the self or mere self-affirmation, as some popular creeds would claim. Rather, it is the self that must devise and implement solutions to the crises of the day while pursuing consistent improvement in as many dimensions as possible, and preserving that essential core intact.

It is beyond our power to live a decade over again, but we can harness the best of its aftermath and turn the coming decade into a superior and more rational one. Some of us will create resolutions as individuals, and then pursue plans of varying degrees of specificity and likelihood of success. But perhaps it is best to consider the resolutions we would wish to have for humankind as a whole. It is all well and good, of course, to wish for progress and prosperity, but it is also well-known that the resolutions which have the greatest likelihood of succeeding are those which are accompanied by concrete indicators of fulfillment. Therefore, I propose the following ten resolutions for humankind during the decade of the 2020s, which will enable us to empirically identify whether or not they have been fulfilled at the decade’s end.

Construct the next world’s tallest building – because humankind must always reach higher.
Build a base on the Moon – because it is time to colonize other worlds.
Land a human on Mars – because it is time to expand beyond our orbit.
Establish the first fully operational seastead communities – because it is time for human habitation to expand beyond land and for jurisdictional experimentation to resume in earnest.
Have at least one person live beyond 120 years again – mathematically possible given that 10 of today’s supercentenarians are 114 or older; it is time to begin to approach Jeanne Calment’s longevity record of 122 years once more.
Cut all world nuclear-weapon stockpiles in half – more than this has been done before, and so this is really quite a modest goal, but it is imperative to reverse the trajectory of the current arms race. Complete nuclear disarmament by all powers would, of course, be preferable, to finally dispel the “MAD” cloud of annihilation looming over our species.
Compose 100 tonal symphonies – because it is time to rediscover beauty.
Develop medically effective cures for every type of cancer – because, really, it is decades past time.
End the decade with 50 percent of all vehicles on the road at level 2 autonomy or greater – because road deaths are a travesty and should become a relic of a barbaric past.
Experience at least one year in which no country is at war with any other, with “war” including armed insurgencies and terrorist attacks – because national, ethnic, religious, and ideological warfare needs to be relegated to the past.

Of course, there are many worthwhile objectives not encompassed above, and it is my hope that efforts to reach those goals will also advance in parallel. You may have a list of ten resolutions for humankind that differs from mine, but they may be compatible nonetheless. The overarching aim, however, is to restore humanity’s much-needed confidence in progress, to emerge from the postmodern swamp of self-doubt and deconstruction and return to the heights of ennobling ambition and creation. Concrete benchmarks to track our progress can also serve the dual purpose of motivating people everywhere to undertake great tasks. A certain President has expressed the desire to make America great again, but I would venture to say that he has not selected the proper means for doing so. I challenge everyone during the next decade to make the world great again and demonstrate that the most impressive achievements and the most lasting solutions to our age-old problems are still to come. This is the message of transhumanism, and I hope that it can become the theme of the next decade – so that when I speak to you again at the decade’s end, we can reflect upon the wonders that have been built.

Join the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party for free, no matter where you reside. Apply here in less than a minute.

U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party General Discussion Thread for the First Quarter of 2020

January 3, 2020 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

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The purpose of this post is to facilitate member comments pertaining to transhumanism and the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP), which might not specifically fit the subjects of any other post or article on the USTP website. This is the place for members to offer suggestions or converse about any areas of emerging technologies and their political, moral, societal, cultural, and esthetic implications. The general discussion thread is also an ideal location to suggest or propose platform planks that may be considered for future platform voting, and/or bring our attention to emerging legislative and societal developments that may affect the course and impact of emerging technologies.

The USTP will endeavor to open one of these general comment threads per quarter. This comment thread pertains to the months of January, February, and March 2020.

Type in your comments below. Please note that, to protect against spambots, the first comment by any individual will be moderated. After passing moderation, a civil commenter should be able to post comments without future moderation – although we cannot guarantee that the technical aspect of this functionality will work as intended 100% of the time.

Official Ballot Options for Platform Vote #7

December 25, 2019 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 7 comments

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The 7-day electronic voting period on the seventh set of proposed platform planks of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (15 potential planks and 1 potential amendment in total) will occur from 1:01 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time on December 25, 2019, to 1:01 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time on January 1, 2020. All members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) who have applied before 1:01 a.m. on December 25, 2019, will be eligible to vote, as long as they have expressed agreement with the three Core Ideals of the USTP or have otherwise been rendered eligible to vote at the discretion of the Chairman.

All members who are eligible to vote will be sent a link to an electronic submission form whereby they will be able to cast their ballot.

When you are voting, it is strongly recommended that you keep this page of official ballot options and the submission form open simultaneously in different windows so that you can reference the relevant options as you vote on them. Due to space limitations, the submission form does not list the entire text of all the options.

It is also recommended that you set aside at least thirty minutes to consider and vote on all of the options and read their text closely, as some of the options contain minor variations upon other options.

For some questions, electronic voting is conducted by a ranked-preference method on individual articles where more options are possible than would be accommodated by a simple “Yes” or “No” vote. Members should keep in mind that the ranked-preference method eliminates the incentives for strategic voting – so members are encouraged to vote for the options that reflect their individual preferences as closely as possible, without regard for how other members might vote.

Results of the voting will be tabulated during early January 2020, with the intent to announce the results approximately 7 days after all votes have been submitted.

NOTE: The titles of the questions and potential Sections are descriptive and informational only and will not appear in the final adopted platform planks (which will be incorporated into Article III of the U.S. Transhumanist Party Constitution). They are intended as concise guides to the subject matter of the questions and potential Sections. Likewise, the letters assigned to Sections within this ballot will not reflect the numbering of the final adopted provisions, which will depend on which Sections are selected by the membership.

NOTE II: The inclusion of any proposals on this ballot does not indicate any manner of endorsement for those proposals by the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party at this time – except to place those proposals before the members to determine the will of the members with regard to whether or not the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform should incorporate any given proposal.

Voter Identification

E-mail address

Provide the same e-mail address you used to register for U.S. Transhumanist Party membership. Your ballot will be cross-referenced to our membership rolls, and only ballots with matching e-mail addresses will be counted.

What is your name?

At minimum, first and last name are required, unless you are publicly known by a single-name pseudonym which is not itself a common name. Your identity will not be publicly disclosed by the Transhumanist Party, unless you choose and/or authorize its disclosure. The nature of the selections made by the members may be disclosed, but, if they are, each individual vote will not be associated with the identity of the voter but rather will be presented in an anonymized manner.

Navigate the Options

Proposed Platform Sections

Question I. Section E7-A. Opposition to Autonomous Weapons
Question II. Section E7-B. Ectogenesis
Question III. Section E7-C. Elimination of Caps on Scientific Expenditures
Question IV. Section E7-D. Improved Reporting of Law-Enforcement Misconduct
Question V. Section E7-E. Requirement for Educational Institutions That Receive Federal Funding to Reduce Administrative Costs
Question VI. Section E7-F. Requirement for Educational Institutions That Receive Federal Funding to Publish Research Free of Charge to the General Public
Question VII. Section E7-G. Prohibition of Police from Carrying Military-Grade Hardware
Question VIII. Section E7-H. Requirement for Police to Use Rubber Bullets as Standard Ammunition
Question IX. Section E7-I. Encouragement for Police to Use Electric Vehicles
Question X. Section E7-J. Tracking of Police Violations of Traffic Laws
Question XI. Section E7-K. Path to Legalization of Current Immigrants
Question XII. Section E7-L. Elimination of Detention of Immigrants for Non-Violent Infractions
Question XIII. Section E7-M. Streamlining of Immigration Process
Question XIV. Section E7-N. Abolition of Private Prisons and Detention Facilities
Question XV. Section E7-O. Federal Land Dividend

Proposed Amendments to Existing Planks

Question XVI. Amendment to Section XVI on Universal Basic Income to Align with Version 3.0 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights

Proposed Platform Sections

Question I. Section E7-A. Opposition to Autonomous Weapons

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party opposes any development or deployment of weapons systems that are capable of killing or injuring human beings in the absence of an explicit command by a human being to take action in every specific instance. Autonomous drones, vehicles, or other combat systems may not be permitted to make life-or-death decisions on the basis of a program, algorithm, predictive model, or any other means other than a specific decision by a human being who is closely familiar with the circumstances surrounding any given military situation. Accordingly, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and other initiatives to abolish all autonomous weapons and preclude the development of such weapons.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question II. Section E7-B. Ectogenesis

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports research into the process of ectogenesis, the ability of organisms to be incubated and to grow to the point of independent survival, within an artificial environment that provides such organisms with all the necessities of biological survival and development. Furthermore, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the widespread deployment and use of the technology of ectogenesis once such technology becomes safe and practical. Ectogenesis has the potential to benefit humans and other species alike, restoring extinct species and bolstering the numbers of endangered species, as well as alleviating the burdens of human pregnancy and rendering the divisive debate over abortion obsolete by reconciling the right to life of a fetus with the freedom of a woman to choose not to carry that fetus.”

Select one of the following options.

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question III. Section E7-C. Elimination of Caps on Scientific Expenditures

Rank-order the Section E7-C Options that you support. Choose “1” for your most highly favored option, “2” for your second-most highly favored option, etc. You may include the option for “No Section of this sort” in your rank-ordering, and it does not need to be your most favored option if you do so. (For instance, some voters might favor some options but think that no language is preferable to some of the other options.)

If you choose “Abstain”, then do not rank-order any options, as you will be considered to have skipped this question.

☐ Option E7-C-1. [Based on Suggestion by John Marlowe] The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports any relaxation or elimination on caps in the United States federal budget regarding spending on peaceful scientific and technological research, including research in medicine and public health. Funding for science that can improve the human condition should not be subject to the vagaries of partisan political standoffs over the federal budget. Accordingly, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the Raise the Caps initiative and any other elimination of artificial restrictions of the allocations of funding to peaceful scientific and technological projects.

☐ Option E7-C-2. [Modification by Jared V to Remove the Adjective “Peaceful” in Reference to Scientific and Technological Projects] The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports any relaxation or elimination on caps in the United States federal budget regarding spending on scientific and technological research, including research in medicine and public health. Funding for science that can improve the human condition should not be subject to the vagaries of partisan political standoffs over the federal budget. Accordingly, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the Raise the Caps initiative and any other elimination of artificial restrictions of the allocations of funding to scientific and technological projects.

☐ Option E7-C-NO. No Section of this sort.

Question IV. Section E7-D. Improved Reporting of Law-Enforcement Misconduct

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to give citizens more accessible and safer ways to report misconduct, corruption, constitutional rights violations, international human rights violations, and other similar infractions by police, including local police departments, as well as by federal law-enforcement agencies, such as Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to an investigative organization, whether civilian in nature or a special investigative department within the judicial system.

“Such efforts could, for example, involve having a mandate that every police department and federal law-enforcement agency website have a ‘banner’ on its website that allows citizens to report misbehavior by said police department or federal law-enforcement agency via a national reporting system. Reporting of misbehavior would not inhibit any constitutional rights, such as filing a lawsuit.

“If a valid complaint is found after investigation, this could result in a fine, a reduction of funding, or a reduction of salary for the responsible officials as a means of punishment. Said money would be allocated back to the relevant level of government to increase the well-being of citizens.

“A periodic report of all reported missteps by law-enforcement agencies should be made publicly available, including breakdowns of valid and invalid claims, as well as reports per region, among other useful breakdowns.”

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question V. Section E7-E. Requirement for Educational Institutions That Receive Federal Funding to Reduce Administrative Costs

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a requirement that any educational institution that receives federal funding must greatly reduce its expenditures on internal bureaucracy and administration, in part by eliminating the requirement for students to complete any hard-copy paperwork and by enabling ubiquitous free, electronic completion and submission of all required forms.”

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question VI. Section E7-F. Requirement for Educational Institutions That Receive Federal Funding to Publish Research Free of Charge to the General Public

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a requirement that any educational institution that receives federal funding must openly publish all even partially federally funded research produced by that institution in readily downloadable electronic format without any cost to the general public, including any paywalls or access fees from academic journals that feature such research. This requirement would not apply to research projects solely supported by private funds or which do not require funding altogether; in those circumstances, the direct authors of such research would retain copyright to it and the ability to publish it in the manner they see fit.”

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question VII. Section E7-G. Prohibition of Police from Carrying Military-Grade Hardware

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a prohibition against police being equipped with military-grade hardware, including assault weapons, military armored vehicles, or any other offensive equipment primarily designed for battlefield use.”

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question VIII. Section E7-H. Requirement for Police to Use Rubber Bullets as Standard Ammunition

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a requirement for police to be equipped with rubber bullets as standard ammunition and only to use regular, lethal bullets in situations where there is an immediate and previously known threat to the safety of members of the general public. More generally, police should be trained to use every possible technique for non-lethal incapacitation of offenders, prior to any recourse to lethal force.”

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question IX. Section E7-I. Encouragement for Police to Use Electric Vehicles

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to encourage police departments to use electric vehicles. This would have the advantages of reducing emissions of pollutants into the air, as well as moving police forces away from militarized vehicles, which are less likely to be electrically powered.”

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question X. Section E7-J. Tracking of Police Violations of Traffic Laws

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the installment of monitoring systems in police vehicles to track whether the police are violating traffic laws, with the exception of situations where speeding or other technical infractions may be necessary to apprehend other known or suspected violators or criminal offenders. The ability of police to violate traffic laws with impunity is damaging to public perception, as law enforcement should first and foremost set an example for society to follow. By holding law enforcement accountable for minor infractions such as traffic violations, it will be possible to develop a police force that serves as an example to the public.”

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question XI. Section E7-K. Path to Legalization of Current Immigrants

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to provide a path to legalization for all current undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States, free of restrictions based on country of origin, economic status, education, length of residency, or any other criteria, other than history of violent criminal activity.”

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question XII. Section E7-L. Elimination of Detention of Immigrants for Non-Violent Infractions

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to end detention of all migrants for immigration violations not related to violent crimes. All current people serving jail terms for immigration issues with no additional crimes involved with the arrest must be released, and the path to citizenship started immediately. Those for whom an additional charge was involved would need to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, with serious infractions – such as any violent offenses – potentially justifying additional detainment.”

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question XIII. Section E7-M. Streamlining of Immigration Process

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports measures to modernize and streamline the immigration process and eliminate the backlogs for those already in the queue. The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party advocates simplifying the documentation process, eliminating all requirements for filling out hard-copy paperwork, and utilizing technology to cut wait times and bureaucratic delays.”

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question XIV. Section E7-N. Abolition of Private Prisons and Detention Facilities

Shall the following language be adopted as a new Section within the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform?

“The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the immediate abolition of all private prison facilities and the termination of arrangements with private contractors for detention or immigration and border enforcement. Punishment for crimes, expect for situations of self-defense from the immediate commission of a crime, should be a function reserved for government alone and should never involve a profit motive, which creates incentives to artificially inflate the appearance of criminal behavior and the punishment of lesser infractions. In order to preserve the capacity for inmates and detainees to be housed in humane conditions, the United States Federal Government, as well as State and local governments, should have the prerogative to appropriate the facilities previously used by private prisons and private detention contractors, after providing appropriate one-time compensation for the property involved.”

☐ Yes.

☐ No.

☐ Abstain.

Question XV. Section E7-O. Federal Land Dividend

Rank-order the Section E7-O Options that you support. Choose “1” for your most highly favored option, “2” for your second-most highly favored option, etc. You may include the option for “No Section of this sort” in your rank-ordering, and it does not need to be your most favored option if you do so. (For instance, some voters might favor some options but think that no language is preferable to some of the other options.)

If you choose “Abstain”, then do not rank-order any options, as you will be considered to have skipped this question.

☐ Option E7-O-1. The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the establishment of a federal land dividend, whereby currently unused federal lands, with the exception of national parks and notable landmarks, will be leased to private corporations that agree to operate in an environmentally conscientious manner, with the proceeds of the lease funding a universal basic income for the United States population.

☐ Option E7-O-2. [Modification by Jared V to Include National Forests as Protected Lands] The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the establishment of a federal land dividend, whereby currently unused federal lands, with the exception of national parks, national forests, and notable landmarks, will be leased to private corporations that agree to operate in an environmentally conscientious manner, with the proceeds of the lease funding a universal basic income for the United States population.

☐ Option E7-O-NO. No Section of this sort.

Proposed Amendments to Existing Planks

Question XVI. Amendment to Section XVI on Universal Basic Income to Align with Version 3.0 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights

Shall the current version of Section XVI be retained in the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Platform, or shall Section XVI be amended as stated in Amendment XVI-1 below?

Select one of the following options.

☐ Current Version of Section XVI. Given the inevitability of technology eventually replacing the need for the labor of sentient entities, the United States Transhumanist Party holds that all sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of an unconditional universal basic income, whereby the same minimum amount of money or other resources is provided irrespective of a sentient entity’s life circumstances, occupations, or other income sources, so as to provide a means for the basic requirements of existence and liberty to be met.

☐ Amendment XVI-1. [Revision to Align with Article XIX Version 3.0 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights]

Irrespective of whether or not technology will eventually replace the need for the labor of sentient entities, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party holds that all sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of an unconditional universal basic income, whereby the same minimum amount of money or other resources is provided irrespective of a sentient entity’s life circumstances, occupations, or other income sources, so as to provide a means for the basic requirements of existence and liberty to be met.

☐ Abstain.

USTP Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II Interviewed by Roen Horn of the Eternal Life Fan Club

December 25, 2019 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

Gennady Stolyarov II
Roen Horn

Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, was interviewed on December 14, 2019, by Roen Horn of the Eternal Life Fan Club. Topics discussed included recent developments in transhumanist politics, the Presidential campaign of Johannon Ben Zion, transhumanist elements in the candidacies of Zoltan Istvan and Andrew Yang, how to persuade religious individuals to be more receptive to the ideas of transhumanism and life extension, prospects for the transhumanist movement to find a spokesperson regarding life extension as influential as Greta Thunberg has been regarding climate-change activism, preservation of the self and “I-ness”, existential risks, and longevity themes in film and literature.

References

– Ben Zion 2020 Campaign Website
– Johannon Ben Zion Candidate Profile

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24-Day Exposure Period for Platform Vote #7

December 2, 2019 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 23 comments

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Gennady Stolyarov II

For its upcoming seventh Platform vote, the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) has received a large volume of suggestions from members. This exposure period is intended to encompass the most salient of these suggestions. The forthcoming Platform vote is intended to “catch up” on the processing of suggestions that could not be immediately addressed due to limited resources in the course of the 2019 Presidential Primary season. It is likely that additional Platform votes will follow in early 2020 to address remaining items of interest to the USTP membership.

A vote will be scheduled on some or all of these items once they have been exposed for at least 24 days. For each item, a 7-day voting period is expected to be opened at the earliest on Wednesday, December 25, 2019.

During the exposure period, please post your comments on this thread. If you post comments intended to be considered in voting and/or amending any of these planks in any other electronic medium, please note that you thereby give your consent to have your comments reproduced with attribution or linked within this discussion thread, in order to direct members’ attention and consideration to them.

After the exposure period, a 7-day electronic voting period will occur. Instructions for electronic voting will be sent to members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party via e-mail at that time. All individuals who are members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party as of the end of the exposure period and who have expressed agreement with its three Core Ideals will be eligible to vote thereafter. You can still vote if you become a member during the exposure period, so please apply here if you are interested. During the 7-day electronic voting period, you will still be able to become a member – but you will only be able to vote in subsequent elections, since we seek for voting on any given issue to be done by those members who have had an opportunity to thoroughly consider that issue and be involved in deliberations regarding it.

Electronic voting will be conducted by a ranked-preference method if more than a single option is presented for the wording of a particular plank or segment of a plank. Members will be able to rank-order their preferred selections on each individual Platform Section. The original text of each Section will be available for selection, as well as any reasonable amendments proposed by any member. Leadership of the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party reserves the right to edit any proposed amendment for correctness of spelling and grammar. “No Section of this sort” will also be a choice, and any Section where a majority of votes favors this option will be not be adopted. Members will also be able to abstain from voting on any given Section.

The ranked-preference method has the advantage of eliminating a “winner-take-all” or “first-past-the-post” mentality and preventing people from being channeled into voting for sub-optimal choices (in their view) just because they fear an even less palatable alternative prevailing. Within the ranked-preference methodology, if no option obtains a clear majority as voters’ first choice, the option having the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated from consideration, and all those who voted for that option will have their votes assigned to their second-choice options. This process of elimination continues until one particular option has a clear majority of votes.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party encourages all members to participate in this process and for other transhumanists to sign up for membership during the exposure period.

The Section titles below are provisional and will be replaced with official numbers for each plank that is adopted. The Section titles are informational only and will not be included in the adopted versions of the platform planks.

Section E7-A. Opposition to Autonomous Weapons

Option E7-A-1. [Based on Suggestion by Mike DiVerde and Dan Elton] The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party opposes any development or deployment of weapons systems that are capable of killing or injuring human beings in the absence of an explicit command by a human being to take action in every specific instance. Autonomous drones, vehicles, or other combat systems may not be permitted to make life-or-death decisions on the basis of a program, algorithm, predictive model, or any other means other than a specific decision by a human being who is closely familiar with the circumstances surrounding any given military situation. Accordingly, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and other initiatives to abolish all autonomous weapons and preclude the development of such weapons.

Section E7-B. Ectogenesis

Option E7-B-1. The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports research into the process of ectogenesis, the ability of organisms to be incubated and to grow to the point of independent survival, within an artificial environment that provides such organisms with all the necessities of biological survival and development. Furthermore, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the widespread deployment and use of the technology of ectogenesis once such technology becomes safe and practical. Ectogenesis has the potential to benefit humans and other species alike, restoring extinct species and bolstering the numbers of endangered species, as well as alleviating the burdens of human pregnancy and rendering the divisive debate over abortion obsolete by reconciling the right to life of a fetus with the freedom of a woman to choose not to carry that fetus.

Section E7-C. Elimination of Caps on Scientific Expenditures

Option E7-C-1. [Based on Suggestion by John Marlowe] The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports any relaxation or elimination on caps in the United States federal budget regarding spending on peaceful scientific and technological research, including research in medicine and public health. Funding for science that can improve the human condition should not be subject to the vagaries of partisan political standoffs over the federal budget. Accordingly, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the Raise the Caps initiative and any other elimination of artificial restrictions of the allocations of funding to peaceful scientific and technological projects.

Option E7-C-2. [Modification by Jared V to Remove the Adjective “Peaceful” in Reference to Scientific and Technological Projects] The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports any relaxation or elimination on caps in the United States federal budget regarding spending on scientific and technological research, including research in medicine and public health. Funding for science that can improve the human condition should not be subject to the vagaries of partisan political standoffs over the federal budget. Accordingly, the United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the Raise the Caps initiative and any other elimination of artificial restrictions of the allocations of funding to scientific and technological projects.

Section E7-D. Improved Reporting of Law-Enforcement Misconduct

Option E7-D-1. [Based on Suggestion by Martin van der Kroon]

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to give citizens more accessible and safer ways to report misconduct, corruption, constitutional rights violations, international human rights violations, and other similar infractions by police, including local police departments, as well as by federal law-enforcement agencies, such as Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to an investigative organization, whether civilian in nature or a special investigative department within the judicial system.

Section E7-E. Requirement for Educational Institutions That Receive Federal Funding to Reduce Administrative Costs

Option E7-E-1. [Based on Suggestion by Martin van der Kroon]

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a requirement that any educational institution that receives federal funding must greatly reduce its expenditures on internal bureaucracy and administration, in part by eliminating the requirement for students to complete any hard-copy paperwork and by enabling ubiquitous free, electronic completion and submission of all required forms.

Section E7-F. Requirement for Educational Institutions That Receive Federal Funding to Publish Research Free of Charge to the General Public

Option E7-F-1. The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a requirement that any educational institution that receives federal funding must openly publish all even partially federally funded research produced by that institution in readily downloadable electronic format without any cost to the general public, including any paywalls or access fees from academic journals that feature such research. This requirement would not apply to research projects solely supported by private funds or which do not require funding altogether; in those circumstances, the direct authors of such research would retain copyright to it and the ability to publish it in the manner they see fit.

Section E7-G. Prohibition of Police from Carrying Military-Grade Hardware

Option E7-G-1. [Based on Suggestion by Martin van der Kroon]

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a prohibition against police being equipped with military-grade hardware, including assault weapons, military armored vehicles, or any other offensive equipment primarily designed for battlefield use.

Section E7-H. Requirement for Police to Use Rubber Bullets as Standard Ammunition

Option E7-H-1. [Based on Suggestion by Martin van der Kroon]

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports a requirement for police to be equipped with rubber bullets as standard ammunition and only to use regular, lethal bullets in situations where there is an immediate and previously known threat to the safety of members of the general public. More generally, police should be trained to use every possible technique for non-lethal incapacitation of offenders, prior to any recourse to lethal force.

Section E7-I. Encouragement for Police to Use Electric Vehicles

Option E7-I-1. [Based on Suggestion by R. Nicholas Starr]

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to encourage police departments to use electric vehicles. This would have the advantages of reducing emissions of pollutants into the air, as well as moving police forces away from militarized vehicles, which are less likely to be electrically powered.

Section E7-J. Tracking of Police Violations of Traffic Laws

Option E7-J-1. [Based on Suggestion by Martin van der Kroon]

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the installment of monitoring systems in police vehicles to track whether the police are violating traffic laws, with the exception of situations where speeding or other technical infractions may be necessary to apprehend other known or suspected violators or criminal offenders. The ability of police to violate traffic laws with impunity is damaging to public perception, as law enforcement should first and foremost set an example for society to follow. By holding law enforcement accountable for minor infractions such as traffic violations, it will be possible to develop a police force that serves as an example to the public.

Section E7-K. Path to Legalization of Current Immigrants

Option E7-K-1. [Based on Suggestion by Jennifer Huse]

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to provide a path to legalization for all current undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States, free of restrictions based on country of origin, economic status, education, length of residency, or any other criteria, other than history of violent criminal activity.

Section E7-L. Elimination of Detention of Immigrants for Non-Violent Infractions

Option E7-L-1. [Based on Suggestion by Jennifer Huse]

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports efforts to end detention of all migrants for immigration violations not related to violent crimes. All current people serving jail terms for immigration issues with no additional crimes involved with the arrest must be released, and the path to citizenship started immediately. Those for whom an additional charge was involved would need to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, with serious infractions – such as any violent offenses – potentially justifying additional detainment.

Section E7-M. Streamlining of Immigration Process

Option E7-M-1. [Based on Suggestion by Jennifer Huse]

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports measures to modernize and streamline the immigration process and eliminate the backlogs for those already in the queue. The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party advocates simplifying the documentation process, eliminating all requirements for filling out hard-copy paperwork, and utilizing technology to cut wait times and bureaucratic delays.

Section E7-N. Abolition of Private Prisons and Detention Facilities

Option E7-N-1. [Based on Suggestion by Jennifer Huse, with Expansions]

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the immediate abolition of all private prison facilities and the termination of arrangements with private contractors for detention or immigration and border enforcement. Punishment for crimes, expect for situations of self-defense from the immediate commission of a crime, should be a function reserved for government alone and should never involve a profit motive, which creates incentives to artificially inflate the appearance of criminal behavior and the punishment of lesser infractions. In order to preserve the capacity for inmates and detainees to be housed in humane conditions, the United States Federal Government, as well as State and local governments, should have the prerogative to appropriate the facilities previously used by private prisons and private detention contractors, after providing appropriate one-time compensation for the property involved.

Section E7-O. Federal Land Dividend

Option E7-O-1.

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the establishment of a federal land dividend, whereby currently unused federal lands, with the exception of national parks and notable landmarks, will be leased to private corporations that agree to operate in an environmentally conscientious manner, with the proceeds of the lease funding a universal basic income for the United States population.

Option E7-O-2. [Modification by Jared V to Include National Forests as Protected Lands]

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party supports the establishment of a federal land dividend, whereby currently unused federal lands, with the exception of national parks, national forests, and notable landmarks, will be leased to private corporations that agree to operate in an environmentally conscientious manner, with the proceeds of the lease funding a universal basic income for the United States population.

Proposed Amendments to Existing Planks

Members will be given the option to either retain existing language of a plank or to adopt any of the listed proposed amendments. Ranked-preference voting will be conducted for any Section for which more than one amendment has been proposed. Members will also be able to abstain from each vote.

1. Amendments to Section XVI on Universal Basic Income to Align with Version 3.0 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights

Current Version of Section XVI. Given the inevitability of technology eventually replacing the need for the labor of sentient entities, the United States Transhumanist Party holds that all sentient entities should be the beneficiaries of an unconditional universal basic income, whereby the same minimum amount of money or other resources is provided irrespective of a sentient entity’s life circumstances, occupations, or other income sources, so as to provide a means for the basic requirements of existence and liberty to be met.

Amendment XVI-1. [Revision to Align with Article XIX Version 3.0 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights]

How 2020 Can Be the Year of Transhumanist Politics in America: USTP Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II Interviewed by Steele Archer on the Debt Nation Show

November 26, 2019 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

Gennady Stolyarov II
Steele Archer

On November 24, 2019, U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II spoke extensively with Steele Archer on the Debt Nation show regarding recent transhumanist political developments and possibilities to come in 2020, including how 2020 can shape up to become the year of transhumanism in American politics, across the conventional spectrum, with Zoltan Istvan running as a Republican, Andrew Yang running as a Democrat, several Libertarian candidates sympathetic to a highly technological future – with their supporters having the potential to be drawn to the Transhumanist Presidential campaign of Johannon Ben Zion, who will remain in the race all the way to the general election, long after all the other parties’ primaries have concluded.

Watch this conversation here.

Also discussed were subjects such as how transhumanism can give a new sense of purpose and rekindle the belief in progress among Americans, how transhumanism can inaugurate a more rational politics, which seeks creative solutions to replace wedge issues with win-win outcomes, and the key points from the USTP Chairman’s Third Anniversary Message and how they will be implemented so as to further enhance and grow the USTP.

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