At least a million data points from 23andMe accounts appear to have been exposed on BreachForums. While the scale of the campaign is unknown, 23andMe says it’s working to verify the data.
At least a million data points from 23andMe accounts appear to have been exposed on BreachForums. While the scale of the campaign is unknown, 23andMe says it’s working to verify the data.
As if victim blaming is always wrong.
It is
E. g. if somebody loses money in a multilevel marketing scheme, is it wrong to blame the victim? Or is not every victim a victim?
Regarding your edit, that’s assuming a bit too much to defend your point.
But that’s what I asked for, your reason why there is no responsibility on the side of the victims.
To engage with that line of thinking: if you leave agency at people, you can ask why one would trust a company with that data when every conspiracy theorist doesn’t use that service specifically because of the risk of genocide.
But you are right, there are valid reasons to take the risk.
It’s always wrong to blame the victim, yes. You just genuinely don’t believe they actually are victims, and if you want to have that debate, be honest and have it. But you don’t get to recognize their victimhood and then invalidate it by implying their suffering is partly their fault.
Is this a choice of words issue? Saying that somebody could have prevented something and with that knowledge should prevent it next time doesn’t change victimhood for me. The suffering of the victim remains.
What is lost if the victim had some agency? Is there some metaphysical aspect to it? Are victims prechosen by fate and it’s a sacrilege to question their fate?
I can agree that a zebra being killed by lions shouldn’t be blamed. But a person who ignores advice from friends and joines a multilevel marketing scheme is not entirely innocent.
Because attributing any blame to a victim is always a sleazy attempt to shift all responsibility for a situation away from the aggressor and onto the victim. It’s a common abuse tactic.
Plus, most people really aren’t capable of doing what they need to do in life-threatening or abusive situations. Adults really don’t have as much agency as they like to pretend they do, and I personally am tired of being dishonest about it.
I say that as one of the people who has been abused partly through their own failings and iniquities. I don’t call myself a victim. I’m also not an average representative of people in abusive situations – I have always been and always was capable of doing far more than most other people, and so I am telling you from that experience that you cannot attribute any responsibility for a situation on a victim like that. Most people are just NPCs and you need to respect that.
I agree with your intentions. The integrity of a victim mustn’t be questioned. The issue to me is that it is not logical that attributing any blame does shift all responsibility. If that is the case then the victim is still in an abusive situation and priorities shouldn’t lie on the usage of language.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I hope that you are in a safe environment. I am overextending my position a bit and claim that despite your experience we shouldn’t accept limited agency in humans. For one, I have just been arguing that democracy relies on it. Apart from that, the aggressors can also claim limited agency. To me, that is not acceptable. Agency is a lie that we accept for the law to work. There are no aliens who take care of us. We have to make do with what we have.
That said, I am of course open to concepts about how to structure society with limited agency.
I don’t really disagree with you, I’m just informing you of the reality of the situation. I just read on the World News reel here that 54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level – that alone shows us that Americans at least really don’t have any agency and I assert this is part of the reason why abuse and exploitation from all sides is so goddamn rampant here.
Stopping abuse is a fight that will have to be done through multiple methods, but the only way to do that is to restore our agency as a people, and the only way we can do that is by first recognizing that most of us really don’t have it.
It’s up to us who are educated and who therefore do have agency to lift the others up. We need to make government force people to be educated – offer free remedial classes at community colleges, enforce a high-school level reading standard and if you can’t meet that, you legally can’t be gainfully employed. Anonymize testing and tie results to social security numbers. It can be done.
I was all with you until the forced education. Nothing kills curiosity faster. We can do better. There are enough humans that not everybody has to read, especially in a world of phones and videos.
The important part is respect. Children need an environment that nurtures it so that they are respectful as adults. A bit like ‘do not abuse a child and it won’t become an abusive adult.’
But yes, we don’t have full agency. That’s where development is needed.