Gish gallop
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Trollery
JC’s guide to the rhetorical art of winding people up.™
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Gish gallop
/ɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/ (n.)
AGish galloper confronts her opponent with a rapid-fire series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies, hosing the theatre of conflict with them so thoroughly as to be impossible to respond, let alone rebut all of them within the format of the debate, at least without looking massively defensive.
Coined by anthropologist Eugenie Scott after the American creationist Duane Gish, in a Gish gallop:
The creationist is allowed to run on for 45 minutes or an hour, spewing forth torrents of error that the evolutionist hasn’t a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate.
To be fair we should note that Gish accused evolutionists of the same tactic. This may have been gaslighting.
The ideal point for the gallopiste is much easier to say than to refute — broad, inflammatory vacuities are perfect — and to an earnest debater who feels obliged to address these several outrages, the technique wastes time, casts doubt and makes an opponent look uninformed or defensive, especially where the subject matter is arcane, complicated or not easily checked.