History Main / GoldenMeanFallacy

* [[TheDailyShow Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity]] could be seen as this. The premise implies that both the far left and far right are full of crazies and those in the center are sane.

* People who demand that schools "teach both sides" in the evolution vs. creationism debate are invoking this. See the Flying Spaghetti Monster for details.

* Similarly, HonorHarrington is a good crown centrist who has to put up with the idiocies of conservatives and liberals alike.
** The irony of this is that Honor Harrington's position is on the extremes of the pro-military and pretty much any conservative issue that comes up that the author is a fan of. In fact, the Conservatives and Liberals are all close to [[StrawmanPolitical strawman]] "liberals" as far as can be told, considering that the most we know about them is that they're cowardly, evil, and corrupt. Oh, and they hate the military.
*** The Conservatives are straw Libertarians (big L), not liberals in the American sense. They hate the military because they'd have to pay taxes to support it. The reason that the Conservatives that we see on screen act like Liberals is because they're all, without exception, corrupt, supporting Liberal programs to pad their own pockets and buy votes through socialism; [[BrokenAesop we never see any Conservatives who are dedicated to their party platform]].
*** Also, Honor's position is only on 'the extremes of the pro-military' to the extent that she believes that politics should not outweigh competence as a factor in selecting senior officers, defense policy should be based on objective reality, and military budgets should not be cut in wartime or during imminent threat of same. That ''is'' the median position, isn't it?
*** The Conservatives are also part of the original form of Conservatives, that is those in favor of the status quo. Remembering it's HoratioHornblower InSpace they correspond to the Tories. Part of the plot is using the equivalent of Rotten Bourghs of 1800.

* A lot of people found Martin Luther King Jr. threatening... Until they started listening to Malcolm X. Malcolm X pointed this out himself.

* Scott Adams, author of ''{{Dilbert}}'', thinks that creationists and people who believe in evolution are equally stupid and wrong. Since he admits himself that [[YouFailBiologyForever he doesn't know enough about evolution to evaluate the arguments on their merit,]] his reasons for believing that can be assumed to consist pretty much entirely of this trope, coupled with Adams' [[SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism usual knee-jerk assumption that pretty much everyone but him is an idiot.]] The articles where he expressed those views are no longer available, but [[http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/ScottAdams.HTM see here]] for a (badly formatted, but otherwise excellent) rebuttal from someone who ''does'' understand the theory of evolution.

* BarackObama has been getting slammed by ''both'' sides of the political spectrum. The conservative criticisms of Obama being a radical Marxist might have been expected, but then there are a fair number of progressives who accuse him of selling out. Go figure.
** [[RealityEnsues Reality]] has a tendency to punch you in the balls when you promise things you can't realistically deliver, and getting an entire country to agree on the best way to run it is very high on that list of things.

** It's rather telling that the pro-kitten blending side is [[AcceptablePoliticalTargets represented by an elephant]]. Guess the author just couldn't help herself.
*** Given that the comic is quite explicitly anti-Bush, and indeed was written for the purpose of attacking him and his allies, it's not so much a case of the author not being able to help herself as it is of the author making a quite intentional parallel between the people supporting kitten-blending and the Republicans at that time.

* The idea that teachers should deal with school bullies by staying neutral is an example. Many schools treat bullying as thought it were a mutual conflict where both students are equally wrong, rather than one student abusing another.

** Furthermore, the issue of ''where'' this 'even-handed' teaching is supposed to take place comes into effect, which frequently results in this example becoming one of the supposedly 'moderate' approaches which on closer examination turns out to be nothing of the kind; because a science class is inherently based on teaching on issues which can be physically proven through research and experiment, introducing faith-based material which ''cannot'' be scientifically proven into that environment does not act as a 'moderate' approach at all but instead subverts and weakens the whole point of the class in the first place.

The GoldenMeanFallacy is turning both sides of an argument into [[StrawmanPolitical Strawman Politicals]] and declaring that the only sensible approach is to take the middle road. There is a number of benefits to this - you avoid offending either side too much since they can each take comfort in the fact that their enemies get just as ridiculed as them, you get to come off as a sensible person who thinks for yourself and doesn't blindly follow any one party line, and you get twice as many people to insult and make fun of.

** Those people usually want to push their ideology through the news under the guise of "moral concern" or something else that sounds like puppies and kittens while meaning [[FlameWar annoying grandstanding]].
** They've simple conflated objectivity and neutrality.
** ...hang on, isn't a good journalist ''supposed'' to interview both sides? It's called ''doing the research''. People criticize the media, but honestly, how are they supposed to do their jobs with [[UnpleasableFanbase these circumstances]]?
** Interview both sides, yes. Equal time for everything, however, is fallacious, when some arguments are demonstrably wrong.
** The problem is that certain groups try to insinuate that the opposing view is demonstrably wrong even when it isn't, and just want to avoid having to debate or defend their ideas. Hint: if a subject is considered "controversial," '''it's not self-evidently true'''.
*** An Example would be an article that goes something like this: Political party A says dogs can fly. We contacted representatives from party B who claim "That is simply not true, dogs cannot fly." The reporter would not clarify who was actually being truthful. This is a problem when dealing with issues that aren't patently obvious to the reader like the actual cost of a new bill.
** See, the problem with the above example is that objective truth really doesn't exist in things that would ever be reported in a newspaper. It's not a matter of right or wrong being hidden from the reader; it's that those solid definitions might not even exist.

** This often actually seems to be a XanatosGambit by the media. After being attacked for being partisan, they started doing this, so they can say "Oh, but we're showing both sides!"...and then they find the dumbest person they can for the side they don't agree with. That's why it looks like one side is demonstrably false: they found [[FoxNewsLiberal the biggest dingleberry they could to represent it.]]
** Joe Klein of Time, for a while, had a consistent reputation for [[StrawmanPolitical painting both sides as dangerous extremes]], most notably when he regardeded liberal Democrats opposed to warrantless wiretapping to be just as out of touch with the American base as the right was on the Terri Schiavo right to die issue. Not to mention a cover story he wrote called "Ascendancy of the Center", with perhaps the most {{Anvilicious}} yet banal cover image in print history: a Venn diagram made of two circles, [[ColorCodedForYourConvenience the right one red, and the left one blue, with the center represented by the overlap violet.]]

* Congressman John Tanner (D-TN) on his fellow Blue Dog Democrats: "We're too liberal in our home areas and too conservative in Washington. ''I mean, we get it on both sides, and which means I think we're doing something right.''" He neglects the possibility that either the people in their home areas or the people in Washington are actually correct and falls squarely into this trope.
** Does it really count when what he said was so vague it doesn't mean anything? They could easily be "too Liberal" and "too Conservative" on separate issues.

** Simple response to that argument: "You say we should teach both sides. I say we shouldn't teach ''either'' side. How about we compromise and just teach evolution?"

** As of April 2010, Obama announced opening up new areas for offshore drilling.
*** And within the month, an oil platform exploded, sank, and is at this time still spewing huge amount of oil into the ocean, and may very well continue to do so for the next 3 months. We may be looking at a few extra requirements for new drilling at the very least.

** Anyone who's read "The Dilbert Future" knows Adams considers ''himself'' an idiot, as well—he's pretty much an agnostic on everything ''except'' {{God}}, where he's a Spinozan pantheist. He tends to have a very weak understanding of metaphysics, but he's hardly unique; if philosophy was physics, 90% of the population would think the world was flat and objects fell by antiperistasis.
*** He certainly ''claims'' to consider himself an idiot, but that doesn't stop him from second-guessing 90% of the scientific community, so it might be more a case of "I'm an idiot, but everyone else is a bigger idiot." And philosophy has nothing to do with it - the issue is that he appears to think that cynicism is an adequate substitute for actually knowing something about an issue.
**** Another point he makes is that when someone is carrying the IdiotBall, he is unaware of the fact - and this includes Adams himself.
**** So, in other words, his epistemology is founded on distrust of the human intellect? That ''is'' philosophy. [[SophisticatedAsHell Post-modernism calls it the hermeneutics of suspicion. He's just an unusually smartass po-mo]], and less leftist than most.

** He had to deal with the problem of slavery, where there is no middle ground. Either you have slavery, or not.
*** There was, however, middle ground between immediate abolition and keeping it around forever. For instance, there was the policy that slavery should be excluded from territories, as opposed to states, which would effectively guarantee it would be abolished when those territories became states themselves. Which in point of fact was the actual platform that Lincoln ran for office on in 1860. It was only several years into the War that he came to favor emancipation, partly for cynical reasons (it would cause unrest in the rebel states.)

* In ScottAdams' book ''[[{{Dilbert}} The Dilbert Principle]]'', the chapter "How to Get Your Way" suggests using the "final suggestion maneuver" to get the last word in meetings. The technique involves staying uninvolved throughout the entire meeting as conflicting suggestions are made, then chiming in at the last minute by disguising your suggestion as a composite of everyone else's. The theory behind this maneuver is that everyone will be so desperate to leave that they'll rush to accept your suggestion without questioning it.

-->"I don't know Leela, do you think you could survive a 200-foot drop?"

-->"I'll never be too good or too evil ever again!"

* Also parodied in [[http://xkcd.com/690/ this]] ''{{xkcd}}'' cartoon.

** Joe Klein of Time, for a while, had a consistent reputation for [[StrawmanPolitical painting both sides as dangerous extremes]], most notably when he regardeded liberal Democrats opposed to warrantless wiretapping to be just as out of touch with the American base as the right was on the Terri Schiavo right to die issue. Not to mention a cover story he wrote called "Ascendancy of the Center", with perhaps the most {{Anvilicious}} yet banal cover image in print history: a Venn diagram made of two circles, [[ColorCodedForYourConvenience the right one red, and the left one blue, with the center represented by the overlap violet.]] SoYeah.

**** Another point he makes is that when someone is carrying the IdiotBall, he is unaware of the fact - and this includes Adams himself. SoYeah.

** Anyone who's read "The Dilbert Future" knows Adams considers ''himself'' an idiot, as well—he's pretty much an agnostic on everything ''except'' {{God}}, where he's a Spinozan pantheist. He tends to have a very weak understanding of metaphysics, but he's hardly unique; if philosophy was physics, 90% of the population would think the world was flat and objects fell by antiperistasis.

** Anyone who's read "The Dilbert Future" knows Adams considers ''himself'' an idiot, as well—he's pretty much an agnostic on everything ''except'' {{God}}, where he's a Spinozan pantheist. He tends to have a very weak understanding of metaphysics, but he's hardly unique; if philosophy was physics, 90% of the population would think the world was flat and objects fell by antiperistasis.