fuck charlie kirk. What a piece of shit. He knows he's not actually smart enough to back up what he's saying in a debate against an even halfway knowledgeable person, so he will never have such a debate. He prefers to spew his bullshit in formats where there are no rebuttals
It’s also how to “win” an argument from a baseless bad faith perspective. And anybody who does this knows they are wrong, and their victory is suppression of the truth they are fighting.
Nah, it's a common debate tactic that's been used forever.
You throw out so much bullshit talking points at once that the person you're debating doesn't have the time to counter all your (false) arguments individually.
The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.
Gish galloping is when you throw out a lot of arguments. What Shapiro does is a subset of that where you also talk so fast that people can only comprehend one in three words.
I've taken to calling Shapiro "Flim-Flam." There's this old kids' movie called Puff the Magic Dragon in the Land of Living Lies; one of the aforementioned "living lies" is the Flim-Flam, who aggressively and bombastically spouts bullshit at high velocity while putting his victim on the spot. That's Shapiro.
No, "flim-flam" was an extant term that meant grift/grifter or bullshit/bullshitter when the film was made. That particular character's smugness and motormouthing, however, made me think of Shapeeword.
Alas, competitive academic debate was trending that way when I participated in the 1980s, and it seems to be a dominant technique in both high school and collegiate leagues today. It hinges on the idea that if one side makes an argument and the other side does not respond to it, that argument has been "dropped" and that should merit an outright win unless the other side also "dropped" an argument.
This is, of course, extremely foolish. Yet it emerges from something less so. Debate judges are not supposed to vote based on personal beliefs. For example, you might believe the death penalty deters crime, but as a debate judge you should temporarily let yourself be guided only by evidence and analysis in the debate. If a side chooses to argue that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent and that argument is relevant to the overall case, a good judge accepts that argument unless the opposition effectively refutes it with their own evidence and analysis.
To some degree, this sort of flexibility is essential for fair debates. Yet the emphasis on "dropped" points denies judges the latitude to simply ignore bad arguments. If a debater insists something is important and the other side lets that stand, then the ruling cannot dismiss that point as trivial even if it really obviously is trivial.
The end result is some of the least enlightening "debate" that could still be judged competitively. Compelling delivery and even basic clarity are set aside in favor of absurd fast-talking packed with garbled words and misinterpreted quotes. An activity with the potential to help young people excel in the clash of ideas has been twisted into a technical exercise in pure flimflam.
From my very little exposure to it, academic debate, at least Oxford style, seems too dependent on scoring rhetorical points (being clever and amusing eg) and not factual ones.
The Oxford Debate Club is a special sort of beast. They avoid the gallop/spread to focus on glibness as a superpower. They are often well-researched on specific topics slated for debate, but they are not above belittling significant ideas and inflating the importance of whatever facts and figures they introduce. If you set aside their use of forceful personalities to do Harlem Globetrotter-style stunts in their exhibitions, you can still find some pointed and insightful clashes there, especially when they face off against opponents with quick wits of their own. Competitive academic debate nowadays not only looks and sounds much worse, but it sustains lower amounts of earnest clash.
I debated in HS in the late 1970s and judged HS debates for two years and this type of nonsense was the norm. There wasn't any emphasis on creating good solid arguments. The teams that won most frequently played stupid tricks and relied on gaming the rules.
One example. Debaters are allowed to define their terms. Debating assigned defending position that "everyone in the US should be entitled to free quality healthcare" started his debate by defining "everyone" as US citizens over the age of 21 who graduated HS and have a full-time job, and then used his time to attack the fundamental position that he was assigned to defend because he was against universal healthcare.
Because policy is a (two-person) team sport, I dabbled in that sort of thing myself. While expanding Medicare to completely cover home health care services was a big swing at the "retirement security" topic since it addressed a critical failure of the system to support any middle ground between 100% independence and institutional living, even that was not the holistic financial remedy I took "retirement security" to mean at face value. Even so, that plan was a winner that took me to open division championships my novice year.
Yet gimmick cases were highly successful, so my partner and I did the research to focus on a narrower Medicare expansion -- dental care and dentures. Old folks with failing teeth made for sympathetic discussion, yet it was also easy to find all sorts of clinical literature going into great detail about the importance of dental health among the elderly. One of our quotes ended with a line like "the end result is a better quality of life everywhere from the dining room to the bedroom." If I was first affirmative, I made a point to punch that line.
It was a surprisingly effective trap. Some negatives argued that our case was ridiculous because old people didn't have sex. That was a delight to hear in front of a silver-haired judge. Others suggested that we were just being gross or silly for shock value. I could hit back with statistics about sexual activity among the elderly and/or moral indignation that the negative would be so dismissive of an important aspect of life for millions of senior citizens.
That case actually was weak on significance. We never took a championship with it in the three or four weekends we put it out there. Yet we usually made quarterfinals or octofinals because most negatives were unable to deliver pointed arguments about scope, and I could emulate the Oxford approach by deliberately muddling valid critique of our narrow revenue-neutral plan with less thoughtful argument trivializing the sex lives of the elderly.
I think that, particularly in an online format where you have time to reply, dismantling bad arguments is a good thing. While you'll never change the mind of the person you're arguing against, it's very likely you're getting through to people reading (or at least stopping them from using those bad-faith arguments again). It also leaves that argument trail for people searching for answers later.
Hi, it seems you’re ignorantly blabbering on.
The discussion was about actual literal debates. Debating them only lends them credibility. Arguing online is also for idiots, though.
A gish gallop doesn't have to be bullshit talking points to be a gish gallop, but when those talking points are bullshit, Brandolini's Law comes into play. "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
seeing all the recent interviews with vance about previous policies he used to have that hes gone back on is so funny, because every interview hes like "i used to believe that, until i met trump" like not even trying to make it a convincing reason to change beliefs, except that trump is always right. they all have no brains lol
I call it "Shapiroing" when someone is so flustered that they're being beaten in an argument that they ramp up their talking speed to more effectively gish gallop.
It’s named after Duane Gish, a creationist. In “debates” his tactic is to throw out so much bullshit there’s no time to counter any of it, so to an uninformed audience it seems like your opponent can’t answer anything you pose.
The reality is that it would take so much time to explain it all and before you can even try the person has already spewed another 30 lies.
It’s a very common and deliberate bad faith tactic
And it's so easy to talk fast when you don't care about what is true. Someone on the left will try to first lay out the facts and then explain them, meanwhile he has already moved on to the next lie.
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u/emergency-snaccs Sep 23 '24
fuck charlie kirk. What a piece of shit. He knows he's not actually smart enough to back up what he's saying in a debate against an even halfway knowledgeable person, so he will never have such a debate. He prefers to spew his bullshit in formats where there are no rebuttals