Dump truck driver acquitted for crash that killed pedestrian in Cambridge

You can do your own research. We do anticipate the actions of others but it is impossible when a truck backs up in an intersection. It is not a driveway or a loading dock. It was illegal driving. He was charged with vehicular homicide and by even the limited evidence given, he was responsible for negligent homicide. The head phones were not in her ears when her body hit the ground. Assuming that they "might" have been in her ears is bias.

Again, if this truck had backed into another car, he would been found at fault.

If I say, “don’t leave your laptop on the seat of your car with the door unlocked,” would you accuse me of victim blaming?

Yeah, you ought to be able to do so, and the thief who steals your laptop is to morally to blame and not you, but my advice remains, “don’t leave valuable shit lying around.”

And if you were my employee, and if it had been my laptop you left lying out in plain sight, I would be justifiably pissed off at you for your negligence. Would you interpret my position as exonerating the thief?

Wearing earbuds while moving around in shared public space is needlessly stacking the deck against yourself.

because I have no knowledge of this case. My comments pertain to the practice of wearing earphones while walking around

first of all, you are equating those three things as if they were equal.

They are not equal but they are similar, in that each of them entails voluntarily doing something to yourself that reduces your awareness of the world around your or your ability to deal with the task of moving around safely in it.

by extension, you imply that a person wearing headphones in public wants to be injured.

How would you or I know whether the person who puts on a blindfold, or ties his ankles together, or puts earphones in his ears wants to be injured? All we can see is the facts, which is that each of these three actions increases the chances that he or she will be injured.

second, you are putting the onus squarely on the individual pedestrian and not on the operator of a multi-ton vehicle that, through the smallest error or careless operation can injure or kill other living beings.

Not in the slightest. The responsibility is on the driver to avoid me as a pedestrian, just as the responsibility is on the passer-by not to break into my car and steal my stuff. But in either case, there actions that I can take that either tend to increase or decrease my risk.

your logic would seem to indicate that if I step out of my home and into public with so much as anything less than the situational awareness of a Navy Seal, I am to blame for any injury I might sustain

Only if you look at any event as having a single cause, and only if you're looking through the lens of "whom to blame" rather than "how to prevent such occurrences." Professionals who investigate complex failures such as airplane accidents or building collapses tend to favor the "Swiss cheese" approach, which is worth looking into if you're not familiar with it.