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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but that does not change anything. “I don't care what you are doing and will sell you the same services as to anyone else (I am only interested in your money)” is still a political decision with almost the same effect as “I support what you are doing and will contribute to your cause”.

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> is still a political decision

When you say "political decision", what do you mean? I suppose it is possible to regard every decision one makes (eating at McDonalds, buying a MacBook, driving a car, riding a bike, doing sports, watching news, going to college, etc.) as political. It's almost certainly not how people prefer to think.

The personal is political.

If everything's political, then nothing is

Exactly. Politics are nuanced. Nothing is clear cut. When you are a business the effect of your decisions grow exponentially with your scale. For you it might be a political decision not to eat meat, or it might be a personal decision because you simply don’t like the taste of meat. A business doesn’t have this luxury if it pervades through many peoples lives.

Not everything a business does is political, but when a business chooses to remain apolitical on an issue which effect the lives of other people—especially those who work for the business or who’s lives are affected by the customers or the product of that business—they are making a political decision. And more often then not a rather poor one.

The scale in this case is typically a minor amount of turnkey commodity business going to ICE.

I prefer to test principles by inverting the politics and seeing if I still agree: what about the gay wedding cake guy? Was he justified in refusing a commodity average cake to a gay couple?

Whether he was justified or not, I think the point OP was making was that it is still a political decision.

This person means everything is a fucking ideological purity test, according to his or her own politics.

And you aren't good enough (and never will be).

This kind of ignorant, childlike approach to politics is why the Democrats are going to lose so hard in 2022... and God forbid the Republicans stumble onto their version of Barack Obama... 2024 will be a nightmare.

When I eat at Chick-fil-A, I'm not making a statement that I want gay people to be eradicated, I just like goddamned pressure fried chicken sandwiches. When I buy something from a company that produces their goods in China, I'm not saying I want Uyghurs to be slaughtered en masse.

In fact, in every single one of these instances, I'm not actively giving a shit - or making a statement - about either of those things... I'm doing it because I haven't eaten since 6 a.m., or because I need a USB-C cable, not because I hate gay people and Chinese Muslims.

Then you have to follow that to it’s logical conclusion. When you pay for a Caltrain boarding pass in the Bay Area you implicitly support Exxon/BP and everything they support because they provided train diesel to the company that you fully support.

This is why the did business with == “fully support” equivalence is so dumb.

I don’t agree with that assessment - I evaluate decisions based on what your alternatives are. Riding Caltrain is a much lower fuel intensive act than riding a Hummer, and since you had the choice to do either it reflects on your values.

You can’t possibly have the information that would be required to weigh his decision-making that way. First, there aren’t two alternatives, there are countless alternatives and all you’ve said with your example of the Hummer is that it’s better than a really bad one on a single metric. Second, you don’t know the reasoning behind the decision. Maybe someone else drives because they were assaulted on a train less than a year ago and can’t even stand on a train platform. You don’t know, but you’re judging their “values” as if you do. Third, none of us have perfect information on which to base every single decision of our lives. How many of us act or don’t act in ways that don’t reflect our values simply because of our own ignorance? You’re likely surrounded by thousands of individual artifacts with scant idea of how, where, and by whom they were sourced and manufactured. Are you vouching for every single one of those artifacts as a reflection of your values? Not likely.

Ah, the minimum effort approach to patting yourself on the back. Note that the least fuel intensive act is to not ride the train or the Hummer, but that would actually be disruptive. The correct answer was to use an electric car powered by solar (because the current zeitgeist doesn’t care about manufacturing). Thanks for playing though, you’ve been cancelled.

Lol it’s not like building a solar car has no ecological cost, the amount of times you’d need to ride the train to come close to equaling the environmental cost of buying an electric car alone is immense - probably long enough for Caltrain to become electrified and powered by renewables, but idk, Bay Area government always surprises me with its incompetence.

There is a fundamental difference between your personal chooses and the chooses of a workplace. When you are a business there will be a point where a decision you make is political, way more so then if you are a person of no fame nor power.

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