Centrism: Like Strontium-90 In The Milk, Ctd

On the subject of "once you start to notice how automatically every water-cooler Cicero and two-bit Tom Friedman uses Fake Centrism to prop up their lazy arguments, it's really creepy",  it's everywhere people!

Cass Sunstein (Harvard law professor and author of “Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide,” was until last month the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) embarrassing himself by rolling in the Centrist midden pile in the New York Times?  

Hell, Cass, that's David Brooks' job!

Breaking Up the Echo

By CASS R. SUNSTEIN

Published: September 17, 2012

It is well known that when like-minded people get together, they tend to end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. The same kind of echo-chamber effect can happen as people get news from various media. Liberals viewing MSNBC or reading left-of-center blogs may well end up embracing liberal talking points even more firmly; conservative fans of Fox News may well react in similar fashion on the right.

The result can be a situation in which beliefs do not merely harden but migrate toward the extreme ends of the political spectrum. As current events in the Middle East demonstrate, discussions among like-minded people can ultimately produce violence...

And so forth.

It goes on like that for quite a ways, citing academic studies of differences created or tweaked under laboratory circumstances and making sweeping statements about human nature lke this one:

This natural human tendency explains why it’s so hard to dislodge false rumors and factual errors. Corrections can even be self-defeating, leading people to stronger commitment to their erroneous beliefs.

The thing is, the only example Mr. Sunstein provides from the real, here-and-now world in which you and I live is this:

A few years ago, for example, both liberals and conservatives were provided with correct and apparently credible information showing that the George W. Bush administration was wrong to think that Iraq had an active unconventional weapons program. After receiving the correct information, conservatives became even more likely to believe that Iraq had such weapons and was seeking to develop more.

Which, if you'll pardon my smutty, low-born, "biased assimilation" Liberal opinion, was entirely predictable.