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[Meta] The gish gallops need to end
There’s a post below discussing Governor Shapiro and his state booth, Reflecting Pool liner need, and USAID funding death estimates. I think there’s a temptation here to look at all the upvotes (24, solidly above average), the length of the piece, etc and call this a good post. It isn’t. This is just the conservative equivalent of one of those gish gallop posts with dozens of news links pointing out every bad thing Trump has done, with the veneer of thoughtful debate. For those not familiar, Wikipedia here but all you really need to know is that the idea is asymmetry: drop a lot of stuff all at once that can’t possibly be responded to comprehensively. The live debate equivalent is perhaps Spreading? To the credit of the poster, the arguments aren’t necessarily weak per se, but the end impact is like a firehose, and that’s what I take issue with.
Functionally, I think these posts are bad for the community. There is no through thread at all that I can see beyond cute one sentence transitions like “it’s not a question with millions of lives on the line” which is the type of transition I’d be super impressed to see in a high school essay for its fluidity, but am super disappointed to see in a place like this.
Not only is there no common thread between three full length posts slapped together beyond perhaps a trivial thematic “my team is right and yours is full of liars”, there is not even a concluding paragraph that attempts to tie them together.
Why is that bad? The length is not healthy for discussion and debate; the whole point of a thread setup is for somewhat distinct topics to be somewhat distinct. Set up and packaged like this, it incentivizes a “war of worldviews” which might be fine if the point of the post is to discuss worldviews, but it isn’t - the post is all object level or one step up on the topic ladder. So I feel like this goes against the spirit of the site.
If you have three different topics with something substantive to say, you should post three different comments.
No. We can't simultaneously have a rule that say we should "proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be" and then cry about Gish Gallops.
Not to mention, this isn't even a Gish Gallop. The tactic Duane Gish perfected was citing many studies out of context, in a way that make it seem they agree with his point to people who haven't read them, and it turning out that they don't once you look into them. The reason the Gish Gallop was effective in stage debates was that it takes more effort to research and refute the claims, then it is to make them. It was also trivially countered - because Gish's repertoire was actually quite limited, one of his opponents prepared for a debate, and was actually pre-bunking all his claims in real time, making him look like an idiot. Things like this don't tend to happen on this forum, and definitely not from Gattsuru.
Be honest about what this is: you being upset that your side does actually look bad, and being unable to provide counter arguments.
Yes, I'm sure you will be less upset when you have 3 top level Gattsuru comments instead of one.
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