🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2qbd6i$m3a@ysics.physics.sunysb.edu>, mhollowa@epo.som.sunysb.edu
says:
>When you're dealing with rarely occurring anatomical gifts, rare
>enough that the majority of the public needs to support donation  in
>order for it to succeed, and that are necessary to save the lives of
>critically ill people, then fiction and rumor that portrays organ
>and tissue transplantation in a negative, horrible, fashion is the
>worst kind of criminal irresponsibility.  The people who propagate
>this trash are contributing to the death of thousands of people.

Wrong.  I don't believe that pornography should be outlawed because it _might_
cause violence, I don't think newsgroups like alt.2600 should be censored
because they _might_ cause system security violations, and I don't think that
sci-fi and open discussion should be cut up because you make the unsupported
statement that you THINK that it will decrease organ donation.  For instance,
I happen to believe the contrary:  that it will actually INCREASE organ
donation, because airing of the issue, even in the most sensationalistic and
far-fetched ways, only draws attention to the shortage of organs, which is
something most people don't even think about.  Organ donation sticker?  Hell,
I haven't even seen my driver's license in the past month!  I doubt I'm unusual
in this regard.
   The fact is that responsibility for the organ shortage does not rest on me.
It does not even rest on the great majority of people who don't donate organs
because they didn't see or notice where the little stickers were, and didn't
stop to think about it till 3 months later when they noticed there was a little
space for one on the back of the card, and mean to stop back to get one,
eventually.  It rests on the people who will come and arrest you if you try to
take a perfectly good kidney out of a perfectly dead piece of biohazardous
waste, unless there's some mark on some silly piece of paper.  And nobody else!
   P.S.  I think it's pretty arrogant of you to casually discount the belief of
what is apparently a substantial number of people in poor countries, that they
are being hunted for this purpose, based on a *very* indirect argument and your
notions of plausibility, which have yet to be established as correct in debate
here.  There have already been a number of misallocations of samples taken for
"drug tests", the most glaring being the case of the General Electric workers
who were tested for AIDS without their knowledge, *fired* on that basis, and
were left to figure out that they had AIDS on their own (by conferring...).
They won a lawsuit:  this is not an UL.  Similarly, workers in a "third world"
plant could be tested secretly for HLA, permitted to remain alive to preserve
the organs for use, and sacrificed as needed.  You'd need a fairly large number
of workers, a secret operating room in a "third world" U.S. satellite country
with a dictator and death squads (so _many_ to choose from!), and a con game to
extort the money from the recipient without it getting publicized...But none of
these should be insurmountable for a large organized crime organization or
secret government agency (overlapping by personnel and by definition!).
Nor do any of these things have the least to do with the donation of organs by
DEAD people to random recipients at no cost.