brainpanhandler wrote:holos wrote:I really want to add more to this thread but at my back I always hear etc.
I hear ya.
I'm working my way through the linked articles smiles. I want to give this sunstein a fair shake.
I found the following fairly sensible and I think it sheds light on why he used the reasoning he did to arrive at the notion of cognitive infiltration.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/25271412/The- ... R-Sunstein
Whether there were intended effects is entirely speculative, but there must have been at least predicted effects. A google search for the terms " conspiracy theories sunstein" returns a lot of results. A brief sampling suggests to me the libertarians and the right are positively foaming at the mouth over this guy. They've got out their torches and Ak's and are ready to go to war. The left seems underrepresented in the outrage shit storm. Those are just some cursory observations.
I'll keep thinking about this.
He can't possibly be as naive as he seems. I needed to know that he's a serious candidate for the supreme court. That informs my reading of him.
Sunstein was one of the author's of my con law text used by a professor whose is on the board for the Center for Constitutional Rights. Sunstein's take on the constitution is that its a dynamic, living document which can be responsive to the realities of the age while preserving and protecting the core civil liberties and rights enshrined in that document. during law school I considered him one of the "good guys" - a progressive who saw the law as a vehicle to serve human rights/interests. His statistical work reflected this by its incorporation of "soft" social variables into his cost/benefit analyses of the legal outcomes. This is in contrast to Chicago-school types like Posner who, myopically,tended to use only "hard" economic data in their equations which made the law little more than a financial alogrithm.
Of course, during law school I still considered myself a progressive who believed that only if Bush and the conservatives were vanquished the Democrats would usher in a new era of peace, prosperity and human dignity. The echo-chamber of institutions like academia and the law tend to foster and reinforce such naive beliefs. In law school, the sole political metric came down to your feelings about Scalia.
My guess is that Sunstein's concern is over teabagger's, death panels and the fact-free lunacy of the political right. Forums like RI and those on the left are probably not even on his radar. He probably still believes that if only the people had access to "the facts" and the were "responsibly presented, we could have the kind of public policy mainstream liberals still believe is possible. This kind of thinking is still quite prevalent in the sheltered bubbles of academia.
He is totally wrong of course and to the degree where he doesn't grasp the Orwellian implications of his methodology. What he doesn't get is that he is epistomolgically in the same boat as his hypothetical conspiracy-mongers who proceed from a fixed assumption and marshall the data to reinforce that assumption. In his case, he believes in some idealistic world where good government exists to promote good public policy - the lessons he learned back in grammer school during the 60's after Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy.
I understand this belief-system as I too once shared in its earnest, good-hearted blindness. However, I've come around to embracing a more realistic epistomolgy that embraces no idee fixee or delusion about how the world is actually run. What is running things- Aliens?NWO?Capitalists?Shape-shifters? Vampires?All of the above? I really can't say but I am willing to entertain and/or discard pretty much anything in these increasingly absurd times, which, btw is a more intellectually responsible/honest approach than Sunstein's delusions of a more authoritative government that fights the menace of disinformation. Its akin to the academics back in the 50's who thought the best way of defeating the commie message was to task the CIA in an info war.
hold conspiracy theories 
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