Yeah but Ahmed is a prick
Highly recommended for a dissenting view, against the greatness of Sidgwick, is from another great (and personal fave) Bernard Williams, who has a longish essay criticising Sidgwick in particular (his critiques of utilitarianism and kantianism in general are much better known)
It’s very easy to get the impression reading the more surface material that Sidgwick is universally admired, even where his reasoning may go awry. Williams corrects that misapprehension.
There’s nothing ipso facto wrong with thinking that a country to which you don’t belong should adopt a particular policy, whether it regards rights for pastafarians, the promotion of secular society, or more aptly rights for gay people. Gay people are the obvious point: I would hope that you think on some important level that Russian law should not discriminate against gay people. To be authentically in favour of democracy is to be in favour of democracy’s good, not to reify democratic process as an end in itself - and indeed one should want Russia to be democratic, which is not the case as things currently stand, but only on grounds of democratic good, not of process as an end in itself.
One reason to limit one’s criticisms of a country’s internal democratic politics is lack of understanding, and that seems to be the closest thing to what you’re shooting for here that isn’t what I would bluntly call an inauthentic pro-democracy stance. That’s a reason for being cautious, and it’s closely related to good arguments against particular interventions by outsiders in the internal affairs of a polity: a bunch of Westerners get up in arms that Indonesia, for example, introduces a law which negatively affects or appears to negatively affect gay people, but their failure to understand Indonesia’s highly complex politics means that their outraged arguments don’t even touch on what the effects of the new law actually are. Their hearts were, so to speak, “in the right place”, but in the worst way, and they only ended up making things worse.
In a sense these situations do touch on a right that members of a polity have which outsiders don’t, which is the right to “have a say” in the management of their affairs. If outsiders begin to “have a say” and the polity begins to lose some of its democratic character as a consequence, then there is a genuine concern that self-determination is at risk, not to mention the intelligent management of things by people who actually understand how things work locally. But this is not absolute, and indeed cannot be absolute, otherwise we would be left with a political world in which the only rights we gave people were those they got from the polity of which they happen to be a member, and Russia would be off the hook - there is clearly another order beyond the locally political by which people deserve morally good treatment, and outsiders to a polity cannot be denied a say in the nature of that order.
If I may refer you back to the book cited, the (made up) fears of that time in fact incorporated the difficulty of obtaining fissile material during that period, when amongst the worries was that obtaining fissile material would not actually be that difficult. To simply state that biological and chemical warfare bear no resemblance is to depart from the lesson being related here to making excuses for that object of which you happen to be afraid. In each case the fear being constructed will make its own allowances for the real or supposed facts on the ground, and in this case there was no need to assume that a bombmaker would have to make his own plutonium - you’re drawing attention to an irrelevant distraction.
Another point which you’re glibly avoiding, with tellingly unnecessary recourse to insulting language, is that “CBRN” the construct cannot be so easily distinguished from the “practical and technical application” that the real enterprise has. Indeed the existence of the real enterprise is often driven in part by the made-up fears (which does not licence the fears) - this happened, for example, with security protocols around the management of fissile material. I refer you back to the same book and to the rather famous data point about Bill Clinton’s interest in manufactured diseases.
For more on stuff like this, although again not on the subject of bioterrorism because I don’t have that material in front of me, I recommend the confluence of two chapters in The Merger of Knowledge with Power by Rabitz (as well as the whole book), namely “Recombinant DNA Research: Whose Risks?” and “Hardware and Fantasy in Military Technology”. This isn’t paranoid soapboxing from a teenage Chomsky fan, it’s just part of the fabric of industrial science and technology as a social phenomenon.
No, there were any two really great mods
I don’t really get the sneer here, he mentions population control at a time when it was widely believed that overpopulation was a looming problem
I would have thought anyone who regularly posted on the sub in the last 7 years or so would be well aware that there were effectively two active moderators, only one of whom - the founder and head mod /u/completely-ineffable - is still on reddit, and who made the first new post (being “The EA Case for Trump”)
Two further moderators were added shortly before the AI reddit fuckaround which spawned this place, with one of them being David Gerard (who formally spawned this place)
A conclusion I am genuinely surprised to see nobody drawing is obvious: a mod just decided to post something, and turned on comments on for the sake of comments. What’s the deal with trying to figure that out as if it’s some kind of high level management decision?