Gish gallop

What it is

Overwhelms an opponent with a rapid stream of many weak or misleading points that take far longer to refute than to assert.

Related

• Cherry picking fallacy
  A flood of points usually includes only those that favour the speaker, which is cherry picking at speed.
• Shifting the burden of proof fallacy
  A Gish gallop exploits the asymmetry that asserting is cheap and refuting is costly, leaving the burden on the respondent.

References

• Wikipedia: Gish gallop en.wikipedia.org
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Fallacies iep.utm.edu
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Fallacies plato.stanford.edu
• Wikipedia: List of fallacies en.wikipedia.org
• Purdue OWL: Logical fallacies owl.purdue.edu

More in “Dodging or distorting the argument”