When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. Witness the 18th-century English writer George Horne: It almost always takes more time to answer a question than it does to pose it, even if the question is reasonable and asked in good faith, so the Gish Gallop is always available to the unscrupulous. Gish’s goal was to present the pro-evolution folks as simply unable to deal with the staggering number of problems with their Godless views and flailing helplessly under an onslaught of unanswerable clinchers from the creationist side. Anyone who tried to deal with one as it shot past found themselves hit with yet another list. His method was to rapid-fire his list of objections, inconsistencies, and gotcha-style questions at a pace that precluded a thorough answer to any of them. When you experience these in real time, you are getting the good ol’ “ Gish Gallop”, named after the debating style of one of the big creationist nuisances of years past, Duane Gish. There’s a steady supply of “But what about.” type questions, and it apparently doesn’t matter how many of these are weird, unreasonable, or unsupported by actual data, because here come some more. The effort is high because of the hydra-style argumentation on the anti-vaccine front. That’s not to say that it might do some good, perhaps, but it’s not commensurate with the effort.
Going after-anti vaccine propaganda line by line is chasing diminishing returns. The first is that I think that a great number of people who are persuadable have actually gotten themselves vaccinated by now. Honestly, I’m tempted, but not tempted enough to actually do it. But I’ve had quite a few requests to do some thorough debunking on articles and interviews that are being handed around among anti-vaccine folks. I think we’ll stay at about where it is now - occasional updates and background pieces - and I very much hope never to get back to the days when it was all coronavirus all the time. Regular readers will have noticed that coronavirus content around here has been steadily decreasing.
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