The Alt-Right Playbook: The Reverse Gish Gallop

[AsiniusNaso]

“I see your nuanced argument has a spelling error in it, rendering me the victor”

[Heliopteryx]

A piece of advice I saw a short while ago was:

To counter a gish gallop, ask your opponent what their single strongest piece of evidence is. This can make it obvious that their argument only looks strong because it's made of many pieces, and each piece is weak.

[wormisjunkd]

when I was 6, this is how I played uno. id make up rules that allowed me to string together massive chains of cards, and refine the edges of those rules on the fly to stop my opponent from doing the same on a matter of “technicality” - to the point where the game would often start with me unloading an entire hand at once and then immediately criticising their turn however I imagined might suit me. i thought I was smart, cos I was “the best at uno”, but they were smarter - because they stopped playing uno with me.

[Clueman]

“A dishonest argument is Lego”

Um, actually the bricks you showed during that segment are not Lego, but are, in fact, Mega Blox. I will now ignore every argument you make for the rest of time and fixate on this single mistake.

Congrats, Mega Blox guy.

[taikan]

"Guy is super wrong, but also very loud... So who knows?" is a classic

[MisdirectedSasha]

I think the complexity of the Gish Gallop is both its greatest strength and greatest vulnerability. The strength is that, since an argument takes longer to refute than to make, your opponent is going to struggle to rebut every one. But the counterpoint to this is that all else being equal, a short argument is more persuasive than a long one (a rule I will not be following here, lol).

So if someone tries to Gish Gallop you, the audience likely won't remember most of the things they said. If you decide to focus on one of their arguments, the focus is likely to fall on that one for the same reasons highlighted here. You can use this by picking the argument that feels the most foundational to their position (as long as you know how to refute it) and rebutting only that one. But to make this work, you have to do a sort of parry/riposte; rebut their argument and then immediately make a related counter-argument.

Now, the audience has seen them say loads of shit to you that they mostly don't remember, but they will remember that you had a good response to one of those arguments *and also* put them on the back foot with a specific, memorable counterargument. You look better here, and the other guy will have to do some work to regain the initiative.

[lukemccann]

This is one of the biggest problems I have dealing with politicians as a labor ally, they keep expecting the other side to act in good faith and are confused on why I think they should take a more aggressive tack that gets directly to the heart of the issue.

[TalkingVidya]

This remainds me of Mark Fisher's Capitalism Realism, and how he says that "reactionaries always ask us for every little detail about our plan for post Capitalism, and if we don't have an outline for every step, then there's no reason to change. As if Capitalism was not a series of at the moment desitions"

[daviawyliefinch]

This is why I don't believe in the "marketplace of ideas." The market doesn't work if half the people in it have no interest in the truth.

[SuB-mtnv]

Wait, is this just a more complicated version of the "Minor spelling mistake, I win" meme?

[Daemonworks]

They're not trying to be right, they're trying to assert dominance.

So there's another aspect to gish strats: seizing the initiative.

They're largely playing to people who judge the vibes, not the content. There's a lot of folks who don't listen to the arguments at all, especially if they're long. And some who assume any long answer to a "simple" question is a lie.

If you play their game, and win, you may still lose because they got you to play their game in the first place. The vibe is that they controlled the debate and you just scrambled to keep up.

[LukeWarm]

This makes me think of Calculon on Futurama. He reads a script to see if he's interested in making the film but rejects it because he doesn't like the font it was written in.

[aramilalpha]

You don't respond to dishonest arguments and bad faith opponents, that's the trap. There is no debate.

Insist upon maintaining your argument or the topic at hand no matter what. A gish gallop is at its core merely another form of deflection.

[DanielleWhite]

My personal favorite version of it is the "each word has exactly one meaning and I decide which it is" where they focus on an alternate, even archaic definition of a pivotal word that was used by their opponent to claim that the statement was saying something it obviously was not.

[MissFoxification]

A very good example of this is why you should never talk to police. You might state that you couldn't have committed the crime because you were at lunch, the police ask where you ate and you make an honest mistake, that day you went somewhere else but you forgot. In court they suddenly state they have proof you lied about where you were, the cameras proved you didn't eat there.. so where were you? Suddenly you become a liar. You didn't commit the crime but you lied to police, you didn't mean to... but you did.. and now you can't be trusted, you must have lied for a reason, right? Guilty.
Sometimes the only way to win is to not play the game.

[LneSiPhn]

2:30 THANK YOU

I've been saying this for years.
Conservatives use rules as a way to limit the opposition. They don't believe in them nor follow them. They just use them as a leash.

You have no idea how much I felt my reasoning validated when I heard you say the same exact thing.

[bencoomer]

Paraphrase: The core principle of conservatism is "Rules protect, but do not bind me. They bind, but do not protect you."

[brutusmagnuson]

You can also do this in response to a gish gallop. As Shark3oZero called it, it’s a “choose your own adventure.” You can pick the easiest argument they throw at you to annihilate and make your interlocutor look as stupid as possible

[gaymare]

While I miss the longer alt right playbook, I understand why they're shorter now, and they're still insightful and helpful. Good stuff

[Dysiode]

I feel like surely it should be possible to derail the gallop by hyper focusing on one issue and not letting it go and/or bringing a mountain of receipts. Isn't it possible to gish gallop back but with actual facts?

Also, I swear to god, they would absolutely latch onto something like "old people receiving junk mail is abuse" and in the same breath say "old people actually LIKE working at Chik-fil-a"