by Jerky » Fri Dec 02, 2016 2:49 am
Op Ed, do you know what a Gish Gallop is?
Here's Rational Wiki's definition:
The Gish Gallop (also known as proof by verbosity[1] or the Trump tirade[2]) is the fallacious debating tactic of simply drowning your opponent in a torrent of small, interlocking arguments intended to prevent your opponent from being able to rebut your conclusions in real time. The Gish Gallop is thus essentially a belt-fed cousin of the on the spot fallacy, as it's unreasonable for anyone to have an answer immediately available to every single argument presented in the gallop. It is named after creationist Duane Gish.
Although it takes a trivial amount of effort on the galloper's part to make each individual point before skipping on to the next (especially if they cite from a pre-concocted list of gallop arguments), a refutation of the same gallop may likely take much longer and require significantly more effort (per the basic principle that it's always easier to make a mess than to clean it back up again).
The tedium inherent in untangling a gish gallop typically allows for very little "creative license" or vivid rhetoric (in deliberate contrast to the exciting point-dashing central to the galloping), which in turn risks boring the audience or readers, further loosening the refuter's grip on the crowd.
This is especially true in that the galloper need only win a single one out of all his component arguments in order to be able to cast doubt on the entire refutation attempt. For this reason, the refuter must achieve a 100% success ratio (with all the yawn-inducing elaboration that goes with such precision). Thus, Gish galloping is frequently employed (with particularly devastating results) in timed debates. The same is true for any time- or character-limited debate medium, including Twitter and newspaper editorials.
Examples of Gish gallops are commonly found online, in crank "list" articles that claim to show "[X] hundred reasons for (or against) [Y]". At the highest levels of verbosity, with dozens upon dozens or even hundreds of minor arguments interlocking, each individual "reason" is — upon closer inspection — likely to consist of a few sentences at best.
Gish gallops are almost always performed with numerous other logical fallacies baked in. The myriad of component arguments constituting the gallop may typically intersperse a few perfectly uncontroversial claims — the basic validity of which are intended to lend undue credence to the gallop at large — with a devious hodgepodge of half-truths, outright lies, red herrings and straw men — which, if not rebutted as the fallacies they are, pile up into egregious problems for the refuter.
There may also be escape hatches or "gotcha" arguments present in the gallop, which are — like the Gish gallop itself — specifically designed to be brief to pose, yet take a long time to unravel and refute.
***
This thread (and all Pizzagate threads) are a prime example of Gish Gallop. I don't think I have to engage in the tedious exercise of pulling out examples from the thread to prove this, as the thread itself serves as Exhibit A. It is damning, and I hope that those who have engaged in this practice (those who have yet to put me on IGNORE anyway) will endeavor to avoid a repeat performance of this annoying and unproductive, obstructionist, even destructive-to-actual-investigation True Believer tactic.
As for Silsby, I have yet to look into it, therefore I have no opinion yet. I have suspicions that a great many of the claims made against her are out of context BS (going by the fact that that is pretty much what 100 percent of PizzaGate "evidence" has proven to be after even the barest modicum of actual investigation), but unlike the True Believers here, I don't make up my mind about something before I've looked deeper into it and weighed the evidence using a variety of factors, including the past reliability of those making the claims, the quality of the primary materials used by those making the claims, etc, etc, etc...
Yer old pal Jerky
