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I agree it’s a bad post for the reason you think it’s a bad post, but it’s not a gish gallop. Beyond that, even though the Gish Gallop proper is pointing at a real bad argument tactic , I hate it for the reasons demonstrated here. Incorrect accusations of Gish gallops are too common, and becomes its own bad argument itself.
Anyway, the problem with the bad post is that it is, as you point out a long post with multiple topics but no thesis or theme. Personally, post length is much less interesting as a heuristic of quality than having a strong thesis with some supporting material.
A pithy post with a strong thesis delivered in a few sentences or less is much better than some of the meandering mess of stream of consciousness. Unfortunately too many folks fancy themselves lil’ Scott Alexanders (who himself, while a great writer is overly long to his own detriment).
So you get people (1-2 who really over do it) writing cute little anecdotes and tedious stories with many words and little point beyond a vibe, and that’s treated wrongly as the gold standard.
Hot take but he's actually a mediocre writer [1], and this is what you get for organizing the forum around such a writer.
[1] Why is he so popular if he's mediocre? He's above average on one metric which is entertainment quality, but mediocre on logic, evidence, concision, and substance. I weight entertainment very low so he comes out as middling on my scale, but unsurprisingly most readers weight entertainment very highly. He also built his brand on a lot of volume and had a first mover advantage in that what he did was pretty fresh back in the early 2010s. Now there are copycats, many which are just as good, but they're less novel because he already did it, and usually have less volume.
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There's a clear througline; all three stories deal with Blue Team messaging that's playing fast and loose with the truth. A moderate governor of a Blue state nakedly lies in a way that denies the legitimacy of the Trump Admin. Blue MSM aggressively downplays the evidence/possibility that vandalism is at least partially to blame for exacerbating the Reflecting Pool debacle. Blue academia gives a (probably) grossly inflated casualty figures for the effect of Red policy.
I think it's useful/interesting as a little snapshot of some of the current media going-ons. The first two are unlikely to be remembered a few months down the line, the third will be one small piece of all the ink spilled about Red Team attempts to alter America's international status quo, but all three are examples of the kind of deception that's contributing to the break-down of consensus reality.
That’s hardly a very intriguing or incisive throughline, though. Take a snapshot of any day in the past century and you’ll find a bunch of political organs massaging the truth. If you want to prove the present is particularly egregious, you’ll need to step into the world of statistics.
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I always collapse all the multipage philosophical meanderings (especially the ones concerning AI) and navel-gazings,
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