tradcath surprise

i searched "nominalism" on youtube, hankering to listen to someone discuss it as i ate sultana bran.

i clicked on the first video and a man sitting in front of a shelf of leather bound books started talking to me.

i thought he seemed a bit like Philosophize This! in his manner, except his leading example was a joke about how it's impossible to answer simple questions like "what is a woman" without having a biology degree these days.

sus.

the video carried on and it became clear that wasn't just a bold example.

i don't think there's much point in going through the transcript and refuting arguments. he doesn't like nominalism because it's the ancestor of all the gay postmodern marxist poison that's ruining our society. he claims "nominalism can't be true" by strawmanning it with a lame thought experiment where literal labels at a supermarket get mixed up and then talks about how children are born realists until secular society crushes it out of their souls. it's unserious content mill chaff for converts.

going into any more detail than that would be like doing a wordfind, which i don't think is a good use of my time, nor is scattered & amateur tradcath sociology. the right move, in pursuit of cereal accompaniment, is to try and find a different video/book/text on the subject that can actually challenge my conceptions of nominalism's strengths and weaknesses.

but before then: i wonder if i'll ever stop being surprised to learn that other people think and say very different things from me. there are branches on the tree of beliefs that seem so far away from my own that it's truly difficult for me to imagine seeing the world from them.¹ are we seeing the same world? he might not like me saying this but i guess this is just another one of those things that's like evolution - our belief systems mutate and adapt to function in our environment until i'm a seagull and he's a moose.

at least i hope i'm a seagull.