Everyone please calm down. This is not YouTube.
Telling someone they are stupid or deceitful, is impolite. Regardless of if it is "true" or not.
If someone is wrong, then show them where they are wrong.
If someone is being deceitful, then show everyone where there is deceit.
You don't need to (either instead of, or in addition) say "you lie!" or "do your homework". The evidence-based refutation should speak for itself. Additional impoliteness serves only to distract away from debunking.
And remember this site is about debunking. It's about removing bunk. It's not about
debating the viability of particular theories. It's about
removing the underpinnings of those theories by demonstrating, one piece at a time, that the proposed underly evidence is bunk. This needs to be done in a conclusive manner. It's best if it's done in a systematic, repeatable, and authoritative manner.
A "Gish Gallop" is a long list of "evidence", the weight of which is supposed to demonstrate that a particular theory is likely correct (or even to "prove" the theory). Rezn8d has long lists of evidence that look like Gish Gallops. I want to dissuade people from posting Gish Gallops, but there's also two ways I suggest we debunkers approach a gallop, and debunking in general.
Firstly - Do not respond in kind. Point by point rebuttals don't work because the rebuttals get lost in long threads, never to be seen again, and because the Gish Gallop relies upon the perceived weight of evidence. And rebuttal in aggregate can simply be nullified by slight shifts in focus, and/or by saying it does not really matter because
look at the huge amount of other evidence.
Secondly - Divide and conquer, with focus. Vast amounts of debunker time is wasted by writing well-reasoned and well-researched rebuttals to a point because they are lost in the middle of a long thread where nobody will ever look again. Even if Google brings an interested reader to the correct sub-page of the thread, they are unlikely to read it if it's not the first post in the thread. So if you want the rebuttal to have any value at all, then
start a new thread for each point, and give a google-friendly title, preferably with "Debunked" at the start (if you have actually debunked it). Add a very brief summary at the start. Add and quote authoritative references. Use diagrams. But do it all in one place, so you don't have to do it again. Add a link in the original thread with something like "That issue is addressed here [...], briefly: [.......], please address it in that thread"
This does a number of things. It forces people (if they respond) to address actual points of science, and not slip past them into other areas of the vague theories. One can never conclusively demonstrate the falsity of "the PTB are controlling the weather" or "some might be spraying us if they have figured out how to do it undetectably", or "the illuminati controls everything". But one can certainly demonstrate the falsity of things like "contrails normally dissipate in 15 seconds", or "less sunlight is reaching the ground than 30 year ago", or "Obamacare mandates RFID implants in everyone". This also make the debunking instantly and forever re-useable, both as a reference, and to the casual googler.
Take the Obamacare RFID debunk for example. Had I simply responded with that same material in the middle of some digressing thread about the NWO, then it would have been lost in time, a drop in the ocean, seen by maybe five people. But because I made it into its own thread, it has been read by over 150,000 individual people. And had it started the rebuttal with "no, you obviously don't understand, and are stupid or lying, go do your homework, take a class in government", or suchlike, then a goodly portion of those 150,000 people would have stopped reading, or had their mental defenses activated, and the debunking would not take.
No once you've collected enough of these individual debunks, you can address the weight of the evidence. But here again you might want to start a new thread, one in which you list the evidence, and link to the individual rebuttals. Jay often does individual posts like this for things like Shasta chemical tests. And if you find yourself writing the same thing over and over again, perhaps that's a sign that you need to write it once, and just link to it (with maybe a small cut and paste of the condensed version).
So:
- Be polite. Even if they are not.
- Don't tell people they are stupid, or need to do research. Even if they are, or do. It's not polite.
- Don't join in a Gish Gallop.
- Divide and conquer, nail them down.
- Make your debunks useful by making them repeatable, and findable.
