"The Turning Point" seeks to spark dialog with novel approach to blame

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Originally published at: "The Turning Point" seeks to spark dialog with novel approach to blame | Boing Boing

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I really hope this won’t be Noah going down the bothsidesist path that Jon Stewart took immediately after his retirement from TDS and more a combination of assigning blame where it’s due but then incorporating novel perspectives not usually heard in political debate.

Assigning blame is necessary, though, when bad actors are involved. Often the situation is what it is because of bad actors. The American right is all bad actors, to one degree or another.

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Bothsiderism in its usual forms does indeed suck, but I don’t think it helps to hold up the corporate-funded (and thus often toothless) Dem establishment as blameless.

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As my history here more than demonstrates, I regularly assign blame to the hapless Dem establishment when they drop the ball or prioritise the interess of corporate “persons” over humans or when they just accept the shifting over the Overton Window. That said, they’re also constantly outdone in maliciousness to a grotesque degree by American conservatives and right-wingers – establishment or not.

Third Way Dems have often enabled bad actions, but the authors of those actions are almost exclusively from the political right.

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Don’t blame me, I didn’t do it.

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Roger that. I’m not doing it right now! :wink:

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… if we have a conversation about what is without looking at who you want to or not want to blame, you can just have a discussion around the why …

This is totally incoherent, right? Like, a discussion of “why” necessarily involves discussing agents who are responsible for events. The alternative is the “bullet kills child” kind of reporting that we should ignore as mental poison.

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I respect those who focus on what they themselves are to blame for. That is where change happens. Also promotes humanization over dehumanization.

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In context, Trevor Noah is saying focus on the current situation first so we can agree about what we are talking about, then we can affix blame, but if blame is assigned from the beginning, some may shutdown the dialog because it paints them in a bad picture. It’s an interesting idea, because it allows people to discuss a topic and agree that things are bad without delving into why they are bad first. That line Trevor said about who parked in a spot, but then someone says “what parking spot”, that’s what Trevor is trying to dodge by delving into the current situation first before delving into why the situation got that way.

So instead of starting with “bullets kill child”, it’s “child dies from bullets because this happened” so we can establish facts both sides can agree on, then go into the blame game.

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That’s a better way of explaining it. It still doesn’t solve the problem of those who enter the conversation in bad faith (e.g. typical range of fallacious talking points from ammosexuals) or sometimes in denial of facts and reality (e.g. “no child was hit by a bullet because it’s a hoax and conspiracy complete with crisis actors”).

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