IIRC, there are ongoing experiments with organs are being grown in cloned animals; the animal is slaughtered, and the organ is harvested. Maybe someday they’ll be more readily available and renewable than they are now.

…At least for the wealthy that can afford to have farms of cloned animals.

As someone else already pointed out, if the transplant from the living donor failed or had complications, now you have two people that need livers. It puts a healthy person at risk for a very low chance of a positive outcome. If they were paying out of their own pocket, then I’d say sure, go ahead, blow your own money on it, risk your own life and health. But they aren’t.

I’ve known entirely too many alcoholics that have had too many wake-up and come-to-Jesus moments, only to go back to drinking as soon as the immediate crisis is over. Change only comes when the alcoholic wants to change for their own reasons, not due to external factors.

Livers are a limited resource. Wasting a donor’s liver on a person that us is unlikely to stop drinking–despite their protestations–means that another person doesn’t get one. It may seem like a cruel calculus, but it’s the only reasonable way to ration a scarce resource. It doesn’t matter if alcoholism is a disease, or you think that it’s a moral failing; the end result is the same.

He’s a christian nationalist, has called all trans people pedophiles, is homophobic, and is generally a shitbag. He surrounds himself with people that are overtly fascists.

You can still get kopi luwak that’s solely from wild civets–rather than captive–but the price is astronomical. I think that the last time I looked it up–more than a decade ago–it was something like $150+/pound.

Religion is not a choice in most instances where religious persecution actually becomes relevant.

That’s not a realistic issue in England though; honor killings, etc. aren’t really a practical fear there, any more than getting murdered by Mormon Danites was for me when I left the Mormons. Yeah, you def. lose your family and friends, but that would also be the results I would have if I defected from rational thought to MAGA.

The difference between all of the others–excepting religion–and hunting, is that the other statuses are ones that you have by virtue of being born, rather than through choices you make, or the way you’re raised. That is, you can’t choose the family that you’re born to, nor can you choose your sexual orientation. You choose to be a hunter though, and you can choose to not hunt. (Religion is much the same, but for some reason we’ve put religion on a different moral pedestal, even though it’s clearly a choice rather than inherent.)

Interestingly enough, that concept is coming full circle.

[What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Some men, you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week – which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it.}(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=452XjnaHr1A)

Sure, you can decide when you’re done.

But in my experience, most people on the spectrum say that they’re putting in effort, but they’re not even putting in the bare minimum. They–by which I mean we–have skewed perceptions, because we lack a certain type of effective empathy. We have a hard time seeing ourselves the way other people might, and assume that people are able to see what we intend, rather than the results.

You can decide that you’re done. You can’t create a false, bullshit narrative, and then expect everyone to accept your “truth” as some kind of universally correct thing. Like, “Likewise, some of us just aren’t destined for love, be it for any myriad constellations of internal and external factors,” because, hey, there’s no such fucking thing as “destiny”. There’s no predetermination like that; having a successful relationship isn’t determined by physical–or even mental–standards that are absolute. Every single potential partner has different standards and needs, so if you can’t meet one person’s needs, you move on. All the shit you talk about is not unique to ND people.

…Because everyone has to change and compromise in any romantic relationship.

I’m on the autism spectrum too. I’m on my second marriage. My current partner knows I’m n the spectrum, and (mostly) accepts it. We’ve been married for eight years. My prior partner and I married before I was tested; they kept expecting me to change.

And now, knowing what I do, I’d not put effort towards something as hard to find and keep as love.

Here’s the secret: NT people also have to put in effort to find and keep love. There are no fairy tales for anyone, and it requires effort from everyone. If you’re not willing to put in that effort, then no, you’re never going to find and keep love. And there aren’t guarantees, because you’re talking about another person, one that has their own internal life, and is making their own choices. When I practice shooting, my improvement in that area is entirely on me; my gun doesn’t have it’s own will. It is an extension of me. When I’m working on connecting to my partner, they still have their own agency. So if I don’t seem to be making progress, that may not be me at all, but due to their choices.

Absolutely. If we didn’t have this feedback loop in our brains, humanity as a species would die out in a generation. Psychopathy is super-bad for species survival.

I mean, yes?

No one ever does anything for truly selfless reasons; so-called selfless actions receive some kind of positive reinforcement. Yes, when I’m nice to my spouse, they’re more likely to want to be nice to me. When I donate money anonymously to a good cause, I feel good because brain chemicals are telling me that I’m a good person. If you removed that positive feedback loop, then people would quickly start acting solely in selfish ways.

If you aren’t training people–publicly–to meet the minimums of humanity, people aren’t going to learn it. This is the entire emotional labor argument, writ large. People will say, “I don’t owe you the emotional labor to explain this”, or “you need to educate yourself”, but the reality is that if you don’t, no one will.

No, it’s not fair. But life isn’t fair. If you want thing to get better, then you need to be better, and you need to keep working to make shit change, instead of expecting everyone to be better on their own. The people that are intrinsically motivated need to motivate all of the people that are extrinsically motivated.

Yeah, all of these deserve accolades, because we want to encourage empathetic behaviours. Minimizing someone’s actions when they do the right thing implicitly sends the message that it’s not important or valued to do the right thing.

rather bloodlessly, around 50k deaths overall,

Wut.

50,000 deaths is ‘rather bloodlessly’? And since that’s comparable to oppression within the USSR, it’s not that bad?

while outright invasions may not be justified,

Correct. That, right there, is the most important point you’ve made. They collaborated with Nazis to carve up territories, and were then shocked when the Nazis turned on them. As far as the appeasement pacts made with Nazi Germany by France, England, et al., there’s very, very good reasons why the Vichy gov’t and Quisling are viewed so negatively by everyone that isn’t an apologist.

The other ended up defeating the Nazis. I’d say the Bolsheviks did a better job, didn’t they?

Uh. The Bolsheviks actively collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis, right up until Operation Barbarossa. The Soviets carved up Poland between themselves and Germany, and tried to invade Finland (Winter War, Continuation War), which is why the Finns ended up allying with the Nazis after Operation Barbarossa.

the only beneficent quality of republicans is supporting the NRA,

Look, I like guns far, far more than most people, but I draw the line at the NRA, and Wayne LaPierre’s suit-fetish. Most people that work on 2A issues at a local level will tell you that the NRA will swoop in after a deal has already been made, and fuck everything up. If you look at the history of Heller v. D.C., you’ll find that the NRA tried to kill the suit before it even got off the ground, because they were afraid it would hurt their funding.

If you want to support 2A causes, the Firearms Policy Coalition is on of the few right now that’s both effective, and appears to avoid other ‘culture wars’ (e.g., “anti-wokeism”) nonsense. At a non-policy level, the various John Brown Gun Clubs are doing good work, the Liberal Gun Club is helping create a space for people that are both pro-gun and generally identify as left of center, and the SRA is pretty okay once you get past the tankies.