Oh yes, that rant was written for LW consumption. I'm as yet undecided just what to say to cross the greater distance to a different audience. But I don't yet exclude that rant itself, with more arguments, but undiluted.
There are indeed arguments in favour of death -- the programme was full of them. But do you think there are good arguments in favour of death? Death of people in general, that is. It is good for us that every smallpox virus dies, there are people in dreadful situations for which there is nothing else to be done, and there are dreadful people whose death would make everyone whose lives they touch better off. But everyone wearing out by 100?
Part of the difficulty here is that opposing death doesn't necessarily equate to supporting life-extension research, as it does depend somewhat on the knock-on effects and the implementation of the latter.
For example, it strikes me as plausible that a life-extension treatment expensive or scarce enough that it could be applied to only N% of the population would leave the world in a worse condition than it is now, and I'm not at all confident of my estimates of N.
That said, my usual reply to the pro-death argument is some form of "If a rogue scientist ...
Last Wednesday (2010 Dec 01), BBC Radio 4 broadcast a studio discussion on the question: "should we actively try to extend life itself?" The programme can be listened to from the BBC here for one week from broadcast, and is also being repeated tomorrow (Saturday Dec 04) at 22:15 BST. (ETA: not BST, GMT.)
All of the dreadful arguments for why death is good came out. For uninteresting reasons I missed a few minutes here and there, but in what I heard, not one of the speakers on any side of the question said anything like, "This is a no-brainer! Death is evil. Disease is evil. The less of both we have, the better. There is nothing good about death, at all, and all the arguments to the contrary are moral imbecility."
Instead, I heard people saying that work on life extension is disrespectful to the old, that to prolong life would be like prolonging an opera, which has a certain natural size and shape, that the old are wise, so if we make them physically young then old people won't be old, so they won't be wise. Whatever cockeyed argument you can construct by scattering into a Deeply Wise template the words "old", "young", "wise", "decrepit", "healthy", "natural", "unnatural", "boredom", "inevitable", "denial", I heard worse.
If I can bear to listen again to the whole thing just to check I didn't miss anything important, I may write something on their discussion board.