It’s like people are robots who mechanically reproduce the same list of assertions.
Permanence = bad. Moving around = good.
Borders = bad. Nationalism = bad. Transnational = good.
Tradition = bad. Norms = bad. Breaking down norms = good.
Marriage = bad. Single life = good.
For people who keep on about the evil of binary thinking, this sounds pretty damn binary. And for some mysterious reason, what’s “good” is always useful and convenient to neoliberalism.
Also, I would hope that a childish turn of phrase such as “society makes us think” might be avoided in academic discussions but no such luck.
These are all US academics, so the robotic uniformity is not surprising.
Clarissa's Blog 
It actually makes sense if you look at it through the lens of what does the Bible say. If you look at it through that, then every single response fits into what the world, what the devil preaches. Its not really pro anything, its anti God.
The Lord our God separated humanity into tribes and nations and scattered us across the face of the Earth.
We are told in his word about the various nations, heck even the Sheep and the Goats prophecy for after the Time of Jacob’s Troubles end mentions the surviving nations, well not by name, but it does mention that some nations will survive the Great Tribulation. We are told that borders do exist, granted that this mostly mentions the borders of Israel and the land it was promised by God, but if borders are there for one nation so too are borders there for others. We are told about peoples and tribes, again separate, not unified. Our traditions for the most part are based on Christianity and Judaism at least in the West and Western influenced world. Marriage should be sacred, children are not to be harmed, you are to worship the Lord your God. Our culture our traditions are based from this.
We are told that the world will hate us because it hated Jesus first, and we follow him. We are further told we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with powers and principalities of darkness. What you are seeing is not people being influenced in the physical realm, but by the spiritual. Something that ties in quite well here is that old saying. The best trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he wasn’t real. Which brings us to the cornerstone of all of this. If you believe in God. If you believe that the Bible is his word, if you believe he cannot lie and that his word is Truth. Then you need to start considering that evil is real, that demons and fallen angels are real, that they do influence the world as we are told. The Bible, the word of God makes it quite clear that this goes on even today and will continue to do so until the Battle of Armageddon is concluded and the Millennium Kingdom begins.
Those folks are not coming to this conclusion by themselves, they are being influenced spiritually. That is why you can see so many of the same thoughts coming from the most random of groups, groups you would have sworn would never and could never sit together without spilling blood. This isn’t a US academic issue, its a we are seeing this happening everywhere across the earth and at every level of society issue. Its why you are seeing the creation of the one world religion in Rome today, as in they literally have kicked it off in the last 15 days or so. It is why you are seeing an unfortunate number of churches turn their backs on the Lord preaching that good is evil and evil is good.
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“a childish turn of phrase such as “society makes us think” ”
What about “we live a society…..” that’s the best, it just flat out tells you the speaker has nothing to say.
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I was really into TED talks. They seemed so cool and interesting to my naive college brain. Then I saw the TED talk about how TED talk presentations are formulated, and it absolutely shattered my world. Suddenly, all I could see were the same patterns repeated over ad nauseam across all TED videos and talks my “leadership club” presented. Tones of voices made to make ideas sound intelligent. Then all the people would take back the “talking points” and repeat them back to their groups, imitating without understanding.
I’ve since come to the conclusion that conferences exist solely as a marketing tool, not as means to actually talk about anything in a meaningful way. It’s like listening to a pundit – they crank out exactly the same commentary they’ve had for the past five years.
“ It’s like people are robots who mechanically reproduce the same list of assertions.”
Indeed
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