Tell us, UK, how did you do it? » « I don’t understand it, therefore nobody does

An addendum to the previous two posts

This, exactly.

The far-right conservatives and the deeply stupid (but I repeat myself) have mastered one art of discourse: regurgitating nonsense so rapidly that more sensible people can’t keep up.

Tell us, UK, how did you do it? » « I don’t understand it, therefore nobody does

Comments

  1. lumipuna says

    I took this to mean a less intellectually pretentious version of Gish Gallop, where you focus on quality rather than quantity of wrongness.

    A la “How can this so-called RAINforest be burning, huh?”

  5. blf says

    Eh? “Winning” an argument? I suppose so… in the sense some debate / rhetoric encourages(? requires?) every “point” raised to be addressed, as-if arguments are decided by jurists scoring performance, like a gymnastics competition: The “winner” is the side which has the most unrefuted “points”, regardless of the reason for not being refuted (a true or evidenced point scores as much as a Shapiro / Gish “point”).

  9. wzrd1 says

    @8, approximately precise. ;)
    A sporting equivalent would be bringing a bat to a football game.

  11. DanDare says

    People “out there” do often see arguments as being “won” by a points weight system. 1 point for unrefuted and 1 point for unanswerable rebuttal.
    That’s why argument and debate do not serve us as well as we may hope.
    The alternative is exploration which is powerful when people cooperate and hard work at other times.
    Exploration requires different tools to logic and reason alone. It needs attention direction such as questions or attention frameworks like 6 hats, and it needs provocation and movement.

  14. ck, the Irate Lump says

    Shapiro evolved the Gish Gallop by adding “talk very quickly” to it, thereby making it more useful for time limited segments like TV “News” panels.