IN 2011 Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini coined what would become known as Brandolini’s law, or the asymmetry principle. He contrasted the considerable effort of debunking misinformation with the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The adage states:

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

The challenge of refuting bullshit does not come just from its time-consuming nature, but also from the challenge of defying the ‘proof by intimidation’ and other rhetorical tactics that often accompany such tactics.

Take the Gish gallop, a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate “attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, without regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality.”

Many readers will immediately recognise the exact same phenomenon associated with those who profess a superior understanding of the Palestine-Israel conflict.

The term “Gish gallop” was coined in 1994 by the anthropologist Eugenie Scott who named it after the creationist Duane Gish, whom she described as the technique’s “most avid practitioner”.

One could similarly refer here to the ‘Lorgatianism’ inherent to a yet another piece published by IOL, in which Hassan Lorgat is once again given free reign to ‘appeal to a mystical ethos’ contra the Jewish Report, by citing his own reading habits to establish his supposed intellectual rigorousness and impartiality — a classic rhetorical move in which he attempts to situate himself as widely read on a diverse and complex subject by citing a list of ‘authorities’ including both historian Ilan Pappe and the politician Benjamin Netanyahu, who are themselves of dubious origin when it comes to academic writing on the subject.

This without actually touching on any of the texts that inform his supposed opinion.

His deployment of ‘rhetorical questioning’ (Erotesis), is meant to lull the reader into a false sense that it is the reader not the writer who is arriving at the concluding set of rationalisations, which in the end, arise from his immediate disqualifaction of anyone with a different perspective or point of view.

I therefore direct readers to my earlier piece on the subject matter.

Tag: fiction