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Roachboy, I think you're right that the middle isn't necessarily "correct." Some decisions are binary, meaning that one side or the other is correct. But I don't think that's what people here were talking about. I think they meant "middle" as "neither uniformly in one camp or the other" - so that on some issues they'd come out with a "left" answer and on others with a "right" answer. That's a diff concept of middle than coming out somewhere between right and left on individual issues.
Mayhaps we flatter ourselves, but it's hardly an idiosyncratic conceit that we fancy ourselves as sufficiently independent of mind to be able to think through any particular issue for ourselves. And I remain convinced that the more well-read you are, the more knowledgeable you are about any particular type of problem, the better your judgment will be. That's why history is important. That's why it's important to read more than one newspaper.
However, people do have general overall approaches, and those approaches will determine what sorts of arguments are convincing, which facts are significant and which chains of logic are persuasive. The key is not to get into a "team" mentality, where one believes that things done by those one agrees with are necessarily correct, and that things done by those one disagrees with are venal, motivated by evil or based on stupidity. Neither proposition is usually true - most of the time it's honest disagreement based on different perspectives.
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