bubbatheclown

Exploitation might loosely be defined as taking opportunistic advantage of someone else's unfavorable circumstances, especially in a way that results in some additional harm to the sufferer.

The concept has come to occupy outsized importance in contemporary Western ethics, and has been made to include everything from Walmart paying its greeters minimum wage to Andrew Tate confiscating his immigrant girlfriend's passport and making her shoot naughty webcam videos for him. But for the sake of this discussion I will tender a narrow definition of exploitation:

1. The exploiter takes advantage of during or after the fact of, but is not the cause of, another's original misfortune; and
2. The exploiter does not employ coercion, but instead leverages the promise of some relief from said misfortune to secure whatever it is he or she wants in return.

So this definition would include, say, the owner of a Somalian sweatshop who pays his workers in pennies because he knows a Somali single mother of 5 is desperate enough for work to accept his terms, but not the owner of a sweatshop that uses hired muscle to physically prevent workers from leaving the compound (I.e. modern-day slavery).

Likewise, it would include a man who offered a homeless woman the chance to spend the below-zero winter night inside his warm house in exchange for having sex with him once, but not a kidnapper who kidnapped a woman, locked her in his basement, and made her his sex slave.

For purposes of this discussion I will add two more stipulations:

1. The exploiter does not trick the sufferer via asymmetrical information (e.g. offering a dehydrated man in the desert a bottle of water if he signs over all his life savings without telling him that, just over the next hill, there's civilization and a working water fountain); and
2. The exploiter does not take advantage of a debilitating character flaw or mental weakness of the sufferer to convince them to agree to terms that are not actually in their best interest. So for example, tapping into an addiction or irresistible compulsion, or a serious mental illness of some other stripe.

I don't dispute that, in all these hypotheticals, the morally correct thing to do is to offer help to those who need it without the expectation of reward. But my position is that relatively few people truly choose this option.

You see, there's four possible ways to respond when you know that somebody is in need:

A. Help them and demand nothing in return

B. Exploit them (re: help them in some way, and demand something in return)

C. Offer no help, get nothing in return

D. Offer no help, get something anyway (i.e. robbery, scams, etc).

For the sake of this discussion let's rule out instances of D. Instead let's talk about A, B, and C, starting with A.

The world has over 8 billion people, around 10% of whom live on the US equivalent of $2.15 or less per day, and a very large chunk of whom aren't quite that desperate but are still objectively poor. Though the average Westerner is willing to perform some light charity, like tipping at a restaurant (in the US) or rounding up their retail store purchase to give a couple cents to a children's hospital or whatever, very few people give away the entirety of their disposable income to noble causes. Today it's considered to be a fairly exceptional person who tithes 10% of his/her income whereas, for the average Westerner, well over 10% of their income is disposable. Sure, many of us are willing to move mountains for beloved family members or friends, but charity that hinges on a deep emotional connection generally rules out giving to anonymous adult strangers halfway across the world whose needs are just as real. A steady donation of $1,500 every year, either in cash or in basic goods like food, would be a life-changing break for a poor family in, say, Haiti or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the average American has the means to help at least one person/household in this manner, if not multiple. But most of us do not.

Where am I going with this? The default option for most people is C, meaning that discussions of exploitation generally entail Cs sitting in a seat of judgment over Bs and accusing them of a grievous sin against their fellow man.

Now to be clear, I am not levying a charge of hypocrisy against the Cs because their attitudes are consistent with the prevailing values of the West today; most people do genuinely consider exploitation to be more disgusting than apathy, even when, ultimately, the consequences for apathy turn out to be worse - because, again, when no coercion or trickery is involved, rational actors will take the best deal available to them. Those agreeing to be exploited, insofar as it meets all of the above criteria, are making that choice because the only alternatives are even worse. They perceive that the harms that come out of the deal are outweighed by the harms they're getting relief from in the course of accepting the deal.

But anyway, the question up for discussion is this: is exploitation, in fact, worse than taking no action to help in the face of human suffering?

The Hays Code, which governed what could and could not be depicted in Hollywood films, was enacted in 1934 and lasted until 1968.

One of the Code's biggest no-nos was glamorizing crime and the criminal lifestyle, on the assumption that people, especially impressionable youths, would seek to imitate in real life the behaviors they saw on the screen.

While these assumptions are universally ridiculed by the left today (was it any sillier than other moral panics surrounding new technologies, such as the left's contemporary hatred of AI, self-driving cars, SpaceX, crypto, etcetera?), the underlying logic was, at least, intuitive enough:

Man is a social animal, and people will spend a sizable fraction of their lives trying to win the approval of their peers in one way or another, be that dressing attractively or moving into a higher income bracket they can boast of to a date, or going to church on Sunday, or virtue signaling on the internet. So if those who they do in some respect admire - perhaps even fictional characters - are driving around town riddling their enemies with bullet holes, then it may cause their thought processes to conflate violence with the acquisition of social status.

Almost as if in exploration of this idea, there was an early Hollywood film (I don't recall the name of it) where the gangster antihero, condemned to die soon for his crimes, was asked by a priest to deliberately make a sad spectacle of himself as he was being dragged to the chair since he would be passing by a group of juvenile delinquents.

It was the priest's belief that whether these kids saw the gangster carry himself with dignity - even on an occasion so undignified as public execution - or like a coward would cement a lasting impression in their minds as to whether the hardened criminal's life was "cool" or not. And the gangster, who initially said he wouldn't, did exactly that when the time came, though it was left ambiguous whether he did this to dissuade his younger counterparts from walking the same path as him or whether he was genuinely terrified of death.

Anyway, my point is that if the "cool" criminal breeds copycats then the "uncool" criminal must do the opposite. Or in other words public humiliation is an often overlooked element of deterrence theory.

Merely lock a guy up for three years and his little brother or cousin will be like "yeah, losing your freedom must suck, but at least someone like that has street cred." But let's imagine that, for the next three years, they see him about once a week during their commute to school, picking up cigarette butts on the side of the interstate in an unflattering orange jumpsuit. Or riding on the back of a garbage truck while it's making its daily rounds through suburbia.

In a school setting, this would mean fewer suspensions and more having to wear a lunch lady-style (could be clearly male attire for males; that's beside the point) frumpy outfit while slapping lasagna onto lunch trays. I think it's fair to say that that bully will no longer sit perched at the comfortable top of the pecking order.

This would not, of course, deter people who commit crimes for the sake of the benefit or gratification of the act itself, but those who act up in the pursuit of status would find the whole exercise counterproductive. This would mainly target low-risk offenses, since giving serial killers ample opportunity to escape and/or interact with potential fresh victims doesn't exactly make for sound policy. But I think it matters because most offenders start out small before their crimes gradually escalate; this is a pipeline that, if interrupted early (for both the offender himself and anyone who would be influenced by him), will yield the best results for society.

As the Iran War has demonstrated, the Imperium Americae is being stretched too thin.

Contrary to headlines making rounds right now I don't believe that, barring further depletion of our stockpiles at least, there's a major risk of Russia and China exploiting this gap. In the event that the Strait of Hormuz is fully reopened tomorrow it will take possibly as long as 18-21 months for global oil reserves to fully recharge and China (which imports over 70% of its fuel) won't want to be caught in a really bad situation should it turn out they underestimated the Pentagon's remaining capabilities, whereas given current efforts to ramp up munitions production as fast as possible I believe the US will have sufficiently recuperated by the time China does the same. Russia, of course, is losing badly yin Ukraine and the last thing Putin would (or at least should) want to do is open up a second front.

However, what's clear is that, given the long-term decline of US hard power relative to its enemies (evidenced by a mid-intensity bombing campaign having this effect in the first place), to shore up the prevailing global system the US will need its coalition partners to step up to the plate and rebuild their own atrophied capabilities.

This is almost certainly what Trump has been trying to do since his first term, but the obvious dilemma is how to go about this without alienating them as allies. Which brings us to the topic of this post: a reform of the armies to better manage the threats we face on multiple fronts.

The first thing to note is that, like the armies of many historical empires, the Pentagon is divided into various theaters. Specifically it divides the globe into six Unified Combatant Commands, not counting space (which is technically the seventh). Each UCC has a Commander, the most famous of which at this present time is Admiral Brad Cooper of CENTCOM.

The second thing to note is that the Pentagon has broad flexibility to reshuffle forces from one UCC to another, as in the buildup of naval forces in the Middle East from, say, the Indo-Pacific leading up to the start of the Iran War. This has its obvious advantages, but it also leads our allies to assume that, in the event of a conflict, they'll enjoy access to the full scope of American firepower. Which, for them, may skew the old guns vs. butter calculus in favor of more butter and fewer guns.

What I'm proposing is a tightening of the belt. In other words, staggered reforms -which would take a couple of years to take effect - that would make it harder for the US to redeploy assets from one UCC to another. Each UCC has its own strategic plan for defending that theater, which relies on certain assets being present in said theater. I propose that, in the event that said redeployment would leave a given UCC unable to reasonably meet its own security needs per some regulatory definition, it should require an act of Congress before such could go ahead.

Obviously this ought to be coupled with a return to pre-Trump norms of publicly committing to honor our mutual defense treaties, and above all not being so batshit insane as to threaten our allies for no reason. But the main gist of this proposal is to give our allies advance notice that, in coming years, it'll be harder to secure US firepower from outside the given UCC that their country/regional bloc falls under, meaning they'll have to pick up the slack.

Discuss.

This proposal would see possession - though not distribution - of small quantities of dangerous hard drugs (such as heroin) decriminalized, or at least changed from a felony to a misdemeanor. The legal threshold (again, for possession) will fall just below the amount that your average user will consume in one day.

At present any degree of possession can result in felony charges in the US. What is the result of this? Your incentives as a user align the most with the goal of not getting caught. Assuming the police don't have a warrant to search your house, the time when you're at most risk of getting caught is when you're making a trade with your dealer.

If, hypothetically, you bought a week's worth of heroin in one go, and you did this every week, you (a daily user) would have to make some 52 trips a year to your local drug den (or spot on the street where you try to make a discrete 3-second exchange; whatever). You will have to risk 1/7th as many trades through this method; while being caught with larger quantities may worsen your sentencing in the event that you are caught, the lesser risk of getting caught in the first place may offset this in the mind of the average user. I would add that the drug-addled brain is less capable of long-term planning; you may perceive that there's no difference between a 15 year and 30 year sentence, whereas getting caught in the first place is a more short-term problem you do have reason to care about.

On the other hand, let's say you the average user wake up tomorrow only to learn that the law has been changed. If you only buy small quantities at a time (again, only for your personal use), then there's nothing illegal about that.

What are you going to do? Hit up your dealer once a day, every day, to purchase exactly one day's worth. You won't be as sneaky about it either, since you yourself are at no risk of arrest (or at least imprisonment).

This is from the average user's standpoint. But for the average dealer, whose activities emphatically are still a felony offense, now he has to make trades with said weekly buyers seven times as often.

This should make it soooooo much easier for the police to catch dealers - or, the chokepoint in the drug trade that, if successfully cut off, would nip the entire drug epidemic in the bud.

Yesterday the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was indicted by a grand jury on charges of misappropriating funds to pay off "field sources"(informants) within white supremacist groups.

While the SPLC had operated a network of informants since the '80s, the illicit payments spanned from 2014 to 2023 and amounted to more than $3 million. It appears that many of the so-called informants were in fact leaders of said white supremacist groups, including at least one organizer of the Charlottesville rally.

In other words, it appears that some racists were effectively under the SPLC's payroll and promoted racism, especially highly public acts of racism, under the SPLC's directive, presumably with the goal of convincing lawmakers of the need to fund organizations like the SPLC.

The indictment can be read here:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.almd.90265/gov.uscourts.almd.90265.1.0.pdf

The USFG has been undergoing a long-term shift away from three coequal branches to an "imperial" presidency. Notably the White House is a lot smaller than the Capitol building (I should know; I've personally visited both), suggesting an original vision of a very much restrained presidency, but the former has since eclipsed the latter in importance. Like 80-90% of political discourse revolves around the President rather than Congress or the judiciary, or the states, and it can be said that some Presidents have enjoyed de facto cults of personality.

This probably started with Lincoln and the consolidation of Federal power that was perceived as necessary to win the civil war, then accelerated in the 20th century with the massive expansion of the military and welfare state, and finally there's the Second Trump Administration (albeit basically 100% of coverage thereof has a partisan slant to it, which makes an objective understanding of its workings difficult). I predict that even if the next President, be that Vance or a Democrat, makes a show of scaling these powers back, said reforms either won't be very substantial in practice or they won't last very long.

My position is that this present scenario was, in fact, always structurally embedded in the Constitution. Congress is a large body that, via parliamentary procedures, bicameralism, staggered elections, etc., gives its minority faction an effective veto. Likewise, polarization has broken down the longstanding mutual arrangements that for centuries have kept said gridlock to a manageable minimum.

The Presidency, in contrast, rests in the hands of a single individual. The President will never be gridlocked arguing with himself (not unless he happens to be schizophrenic, anyway), but is always in a position to make swift, decisive use of the authority legally available to him.

This both gives the President a long term advantage in consolidating power (re: he's fast and they're slow) and boosts the perceived legitimacy of him holding onto it. Because legitimacy, in practice, is a funny thing. Generally speaking people care about serious problems getting taken care of, and then they care about whether it was done lawfully. If they run into a scenario that the former cannot be had without dispensing with the latter, they will be tempted to accept that bargain. Polarization in Congress causes said unchecked problems to increasingly pile up, which makes the public increasingly willing to accept a more powerful Presidency to take care of them.

Is there a realistic solution to this? Probably not. Congress could clean up its act but in practice there's too much bad blood between the two parties to expect this. Nor is it realistic to expect that they'll vote to substantially curb the President's powers when both parties labor under the perennial delusion that they're one "great" presidency away from realizing every item on their longstanding ideological bucket list by four or five dozen acts of executive fiat.

If, in the 1780s, the Framers of the Constitution had designed a Bosnian-style presidency with multiple officeholders sharing power, a balanced government might've survived much longer but at the expense of a much slower response to wars or other national crises or disasters. Which would have the side effect of making for more powerful governors, who commanded state militias with a faster response rate, and by extension less of a need for a strong national army. Which, granted, may well have had the butterfly effect of "slavery was never abolished" or whatever.

So, uh, we're doing this again. In roughly 2 years we should be back on the moon, this time to establish a permanent human presence. But for now, hopefully we'll get some cool pictures.

Discuss.

On February 14, Rima Hassan (a left-wing French politician) was speaking at a college in Lyons, France. A small group of feminist activists, known as Nemesis Collective, protested outside of the event on grounds that Hassan was a vocal supporter of Islam.

There were reportedly as few as five people in this group, possibly all women. So they were backed up by a somewhat larger group of right-wing volunteers who were there to shield them from attack by antifa. Unfortunately, this group wasn't very large or well-disciplined and when an even larger antifa mob showed up they bolted and were chased.

This culminated in the fatal beating of 23 year old Quentin Deranque, part of the aforementioned group of right-wing volunteers.

The event has made national headlines in France, and has elicited a response from the highest levels of government, with most of the political establishment setting aside their differences to condemn the violence. On the ground, however, the leftist response has gravitated between indifference (with even the French language Wikipedia article being considered for deletion, despite currently having 46 citations) to open celebration of the murder of a "Nazi".

Discuss.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has issued new guidelines recommending that sex reassignment surgeries not be performed on children under the age of 19.

Previously, while there have been lone experts in the US and large institutions in non-US Western countries that have dissented from the current US oligarch consensus on the issue (that it's bigoted "misinformation" to so much as question the wisdom of sterilizing and castrating children), this marks the first full-scale rebellion by a medical professional association of that size (it employs more than 11,000 physicians globally) within the US itself. And it comes on the heels of a recent jury trial in New York of all places, where a teen girl who surgically transitioned into a trans man and subsequently regretted the decision and detransitioned was awarded $2 million in damages ($1.6 million for "past and future pain and suffering" and $400,000 to cover medical expenses, including therapy). This is the first time in American history that a lawsuit on said topic resulted in said outcome, and it'll most likely inspire a flurry of further lawsuits like it.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a publication of Congress. It is publicly funded and officially non-partisan as opposed to being, say, a privately company owned by a left-aligned oligarch. I bring them up as an edge case; a sin that the CRS is capable of committing is well within the realm of plausibility for CNN or The Guardian or PBS or the Associated Press.

The CRS recently published a report titled U.S. Capture of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro: Considerations for Congress. It's fairly short, but at one point it writes:

"Some experts have disputed the Administration's claims about Venezuela, including those regarding the existence of a non-international armed conflict, Maduro's direction of TDA, and stolen oil."

The underscores were added here to represent hyperlinks. For stolen oil, the hyperlink takes you to a January 4 PBS article titled Fact-checking Trump's claims after U.S. strike on Venezuela and capture of Maduro.

It's pretty long, but under it's stolen oil section it only mentions the 1975 Venezuelan nationalization and subsequent buyout at a loss that the target companies accepted, quoting the Washington Post that "The U.S. was much more interested in having Venezuela be a provider of oil -- relatively cheap oil -- than to have a production collapse in Venezuela...As a result, the change was relatively uncontroversial at the time."

This section goes on, but makes no mention of any subsequent moves by the Venezuelan government to the same or similar effect, lending the impression that 1975, half a century ago, is the last time Venezuela stole oil from foreign companies.

There's just one problem: it isn't true. In 2007 the Chavez government carried out a new round of nationalization. While it was more wide-ranging than just the petroleum industry (it also affected the electricity and telecommunications sectors), our focus here is oil so here at the deeds:

It was ordered that PVDSA, the state-owned oil company of Venezuela, must own a "60% stake in all heavy crude projects in the Orinoco Belt, forcing foreign companies to accept new contractual conditions or leave the country. As a result, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips withdrew from Venezuela."

Subsequently, these two companies sued Venezuela in an international court, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). It awarded both a cumulative $10.3 billion in damages, of which Venezuela has paid back only a small fraction (possibly as little as <3 percent). Even this is less than what both companies claim they are really owed in lost earnings, which amounts to several tens of billions of dollars.

So why did CRS imply that the stolen oil claim had been debunked by experts? Because their source was a shoddy, poorly researched PBS article...

...Which is what this thread is really about. Secondhand reporting.

I don't know what the CRS article author's intentions were. Did they intentionally seek to misrepresent the full extent of the current regime's wrongdoing? Did they naively assume that PBS did its due diligence on the topic? Or was there "motivated reasoning" involved, wherein they found a source that fit their biases and purposefully avoided doing further research that might call the reliability of said source's claims into question?

Either way, the primary think tank to service U.S. Congress just cited a PBS article and did no fact checking of its own on the matter.

Like I said, CRS is an edge case. If they did this, then what about private companies allowed to be as openly partisan as they want?

Let's say you've got ten journalists working for various oligarch-controlled publications. The first to the punch does his research, realizes this is a nuanced issue with more than a little evidence favoring claims made by the Trump Administration or the GOP at large...and decides to lie about it (either directly or by omission). Maybe there's a non-zero chance someone could hold him accountable for lying.

But then what about the other nine? Well, if they cite him as an expert, thus proclaim that "the experts have debunked Trump's talking point", then they're also being untruthful but in such a way that there's no skin off their back whatever happens to the first guy. If someone calls them out for this, they can always claim they assumed the initial source to be factually correct.

But hey, who am I kidding? No one's actually going to comb through the news and find every case where the first guy was cited.

In other words, as long as someone is willing to write a full article, however spurious its contents, it can be held up by all the rest via secondhand reporting as the "experts debunking" whatever pesky facts are getting in the way of the narrative. They can basically manufacture evidence to support any position they want.

We are truly living in a post-truth world.

Occasionally over the years I've propounded on a concept which I call "hub value".

It's the reason why a state like Kansas can lower corporate taxes to the floor (I remember there was a governor named Sam Brownback who tried this) but not be able to entice businesses to migrate there from California: all your business partners are already in California. All the talent has already migrated to California since that's where the jobs are. If they all simultaneously migrated then the cost would be mitigated but the first to move will suffer a loss. And so, nobody moves. The passive influence that comes from already being big is what I call hub value.

Hub value isn't all-powerful. Texas is gradually gaining on San Francisco or Los Angeles even in the tech sector. For example, laxer zoning laws make it easier to build AI data centers in the state than in California. But basically no matter what California does it'll continue to be a big player for years, and probably decades, thanks to its massive pool of hub value.

This applies to the internet too. "Alt-tech" competitors to, say, YouTube or Wikipedia (e.g. Odysee and Conservapedia) will always struggle to take off because YouTube and Wikipedia are where things are already at. Granted, the cost is less than the California-Kansas example because you can visit multiple sites, but when what you find is a ghost town will minimal content then you'll be tempted to spend more time where a lot of content already exists and less time where that's not the case. The people uploading content to competitors sites, in turn, will be discouraged by this fact and upload to YouTube or Wikipedia instead.

But we may be entering an age where internet hub value is breaking down, and the first experiment is Grokipedia.

Grokipedia, an AI-generated alternative to Wikipedia, launched on October 27. At the time of writing (three days in) it has 885,279 articles available; in comparison, English-language Wikipedia has 7,082,943 articles after 24 years.

To put it another way, if Grokipedia can sustain its current rate of growth then it will have as many articles as Wikipedia in under a month.

Browsing Grokipedia it seems to work. I've put in such random search results like:

-Sword Art Online

-A Confederacy of Dunces

-Beverly Cleary

-Ampersand

-List of Presidents of Namibia (this one only gave me President of Namibia, which included a list of officeholders lower down in the article)

-Beer Pong

-Trapdoor Spider

-Romulus Augustulus

This is absolutely unprecedented by the way. Something like Conservapedia, which specializes in covering political topics and little else, could never dream of having such a massive scope of content. It even seems to hold up well compared to Wikipedia itself, its article on RFK Jr. including biographical details missing from the latter (e.g. a successful 1997 lawsuit against a polluting company called Consolidated Edison).

For 20 years Wikipedia has stood as the online gatekeeper of "facts". An either glowing or excoriating article about a political candidate can decide (and probably has decided some) elections. And of course, the nature of said articles invariably depend on the political lean of said candidates. But now a more politically neutral alternative might pop up out of nowhere thanks to the AI revolution. And if Grokipedia itself proves dissatisfactory to some then who's to say Grokipedia won't prove but the first in a long line of overnight Wikipedia copycats?

Anyway, you can check out Grokipedia for yourself here:

https://grokipedia.com/

Jonathan Rinderknecht, age 29, has been arrested for deliberately starting the Pacific Palisades fire, which burned through vast swaths of urban/suburban California at the beginning of this year and caused 12 deaths.

Discuss.

I found myself this evening, for the umpteenth time, completely boned on account of my work computer disconnecting itself from the internet and refusing to recognize any networks, all for no discernable reason. It is an HP laptop, the third HP I've owned to meet the general description of being garbage.

For my other job, I have been mailed computers to use from home for work purposes. Due to systematic failure to perform various updates mandated by the office, I've kept having to send these back, and the office would mail me a new computer. I'm currently on what is at least the third computer they've sent me. These, too, are all HPs. Or to put it another way, at least five out of six HPs in my possession over the years have been garbage. The sixth is also janky and chances are good I'll have to mail it back at some point too.

In contrast, I've had the same ASUS Chromebook since 2018-2019. While the outer frame is now in the very early stages of starting to come apart, it is still more reliable today than any HP I have ever handled.

What is the takeaway? HP is a borderline fraudulent company which sells laptops at standard laptop prices but with a tiny fraction of standard reliability.

Now, this is partly a rant thread but not entirely. The extremely unequal qualities between different laptop brands have led me to consider a possible solution:

Statutory minimum warranties on all new laptop purchases of, say, three years. Companies that sold less reliable laptops (re: those more likely to need repairs before the end of three years) would eat the costs of this in the form of repairs, instead of said costs being passed onto consumers. And if they tried to re-pass these costs onto consumers in the form of higher upfront laptop retail prices, then at least this would have the side effect of making the true price of laptops (retail + long-term repair) more transparent, and we know that markets work better with more transparent pricing. Indeed, the absence thereof is an often-touted factor in healthcare's ballooning prices.

To enforce this, there ought to be established Federal warranty commissioners, analogous to state insurance commissioners, each overseeing a district and who would have the power to impose fines and other penalties when a laptop manufacturer is caught refusing to perform mandated repairs.

Now, I say laptop because HP desperately needs this kind of oversight, but there are other markets which routinely deal with warranties. Cars, refrigerators, window glass, etc. The same regulatory scheme could apply to all of these.

Thoughts?

Footage of right before and right after the murder of 23 year old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, which appears to have been totally random/premeditated and unprovoked, is public record now. The killer, after fatally stabbing her three times with a pocket knife, proceeded to wander the interior of the train car, trailing blood, muttering "I got that white girl". Everyone in the vicinity seemed to ignore him. He removed his red hoodie in the middle of the train, either because he found it uncomfortable or in the belief that doing so would let him slip away from the scene easier.

One DeCarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., age 34, a man with 14 prior criminal cases against him, has since been arrested and federally charged in connection with the murder. He was homeless at the time and had been allowed to board the train without paying fare.

Discuss.

I remember a case not all that long ago when the findings of a researcher (it might've been a report card for then-Senator Harris indicating she was one of the least productive members of Congress) were pounced upon by Republicans for one reason or another.

In response, that researcher got upset, claimed his/her findings were being misrepresented, and scrubbed the page from the internet. I don't believe this is actually what happened; more like, what they were saying amounted to “I, the source of this knowledge, did not consent to said knowledge being used to support this ideology, and I conflate doing so with misrepresentation of said knowledge.”

Some of you may remember the story and it is sort of old news at this point, but I think there wasn't enough discussion around this idea: that a fact can be “properly” or “improperly” used depending on the originator's intent, as opposed to facts being in themselves neutral things that belong to nobody and to everybody. Or alternately, the idea that information which would be used for “wrong” purposes should be stifled; for example, FBI reporting on race and crime.

The idea isn't completely without merit. If you peeped on a woman in the shower and photographed her without her knowledge or consent, that is simply “knowledge of her unclothed appearance” but very serious moral problems would arise from this, or from thereafter disseminating said information to the public. In contrast, that same woman has a right to share a nude selfie with her boyfriend or husband. So this is an example of facts having proper/improper use based on the originator's intent. We can also say more broadly that privacy rights are the same way. 

But to what extent can this be said about research or statistics?