Thread by @SteppeWest

Google translation of thread...

Yesterday's bioweapons thread opened the door to parallel twitter and a lot of the reactions and comments... I don't know, got me thinking?

https://twitter.com/OlgaVPettersson/status/1502915399377203206

Twitter is the blogosphere, so I'll just jot down my thoughts. Just like a method of psychological relaxation.
How hard it must be to exist in the world when a person is convinced that there are only enemies around him.

The neighbor on the right is sharpening a knife, on the left he is assembling a machine gun, irradiating from above through a socket ... And why? Because they want to kill me and seize my living space.
Why is it always necessary to look for the enemy in everyone?

Where did the opinion come from that it is not only impossible for a neighboring country to have bacteriological laboratories, but also to work with dangerous organisms?

Why, if there is information that American organizations (including the military) are funding laboratories in another country, then the first thought people have is that they are making weapons?

I, born and raised in the USSR, a naive child of perestroika, left Latvia in the mid-90s at the time of the science funding crisis. Since then, I have been brewing in the European scientific community.

When I was doing PostDoc, my supervisor had a project to decipher the genome of the causative agent of tularemia, the military departments took part in the funding. Did she make weapons? No, she studied the evolution of the bacterial genome.

When I helped scientists from the Department of Clinical Microbiology at the Uppsala Academic Hospital plan experiments and decipher the genomes of multi-resistant, potentially deadly bacteria for patients, did we make weapons?

No, clinicians were looking for ways to treat patients.

When our center took part in planning a project with the microbiologists of the military department, did we develop weapons? No, the goal was to study the metabolism of potentially dangerous bioagents.

Why did people begin to take it for granted that if a neighbor is engaged in science, then he does it only with the intention of attack, and not protection?

Where do the theses come from that research on bird flu or anthrax should not be conducted in Ukraine?
Who gave another country the right to tell a sovereign nation what they can and cannot do at home?

People returned to the 37th, a direct road through Orwellian 1984th.
Those suffering from great-power chauvinism destroyed the reputation of a huge country in a couple of weeks.

The country of my mother's ancestors, who attacked the country of my father's ancestors.
/end

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