I almost forgot how dangerous philosophy is


I must say how much Florida looks like Russia. Russian academicians are proposing that it is necessary to disembowel philosophy.

Professor of the Department of Humanities at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation Dmitry Vinnik called for overcoming “the traits of comprador domestic philosophy.” To these features he included “the collective conviction that a philosopher must always be against the state and that a philosopher simply must be a pacifist,” “overt cosmopolitanism and intellectual snobbery.”

“Government assignments and curricula must be reviewed to ensure compliance with the values ​​of our society and the interests of our state. All gender, feminist, postmodern and pacifist topics and courses should simply be abolished,” Vinnik noted.

Also, according to the professor, it is necessary to abolish “the courses of so-called critical thinking and fact-checking imposed abroad, which have nothing to do with philosophical skepticism or logic.” “In fact, this is a course in applied Russophobia,” says Vinnik.

I guess pacifism isn’t a legit philosophical position any more — philosophers must be militant and opposed to heresies like feminism. Also, critical thinking is anti-Russian…also, probably, anti-Floridian and anti-Texan.

Comments

  1. raven says

    The current fascist Russia is making the old USSR look good.
    And the old USSR was a terrible place to live in.

    It’s all there, dictatorship, the Gulags, secret police, murders of people the government finds more useful dead than alive, the Thought Police.

  2. submoron says

    Somewhere in ‘The Dream of the Red Pavilion’ someone quotes a saying that ‘a philosopher dies protesting’ but I suspect that somebody here will know the Mandarin original.

  3. HidariMak says

    Back in 2008, wasn’t it the Texas Republicans who made the elimination of critical thinking skills part of their party platform? It’s certainly the national Republican party who have been carrying that on for the last 6 years or so. Trump’s leadership led to the Republicans doing worse than usual in every election from 2017 to 2023, and something like 11% of Republicans said that they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he’s convicted, but it’ll take being elected into irrelevance to force a change in the party.

  4. numerobis says

    Hemidactylus: apparently Dugin is largely unknown in Russia; mostly he cosplays a Russian thought leader in western fringe media and uses that to build his reputation in Russia.

  5. numerobis says

    Banning pacifism probably also means banning defense economics, which points out that war is expensive.

  6. robro says

    nomdeplume — I think the oligarchs…whether Russian, American, British, Chinese, Arab, Israeli, et al…have converged.

  7. jrkrideau says

    It reads a lot like US dreams. I have to admit it sounds just as silly. It is good to see Russia supports the same level of philosophy as the USA does.

  8. John Harshman says

    It used to be that “cosmopolitanism” was a Russian euphemism for “Jewish”. I wonder if that’s still the case.