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Comment by djohnston | Hacker News Reader

Are you implying that people should only vote on things which they encounter in their day-to-day lived experience? That's silly and not how the world works. Why are you mad about Gaza? You aren't getting JDAMs dropped on your roof, are you? How does Gaza impact you on a daily basis?

Harris failed to distance herself from positions that are deeply unpopular with the majority of Americans (e.g. sex changes for illegal immigrants). That's all there is to it.

If you want to step away from this particular issue, she failed to distance herself from the Biden administration's policies. There's a pretty famous clip of her failing to answer a question to that point, definitely on the youtubes.

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I tend to care about policies that don't impact me personally when they harm other people. I'm a natural born citizen, I'm not going to get deported with out process, but I still care about that. I'm not in grade school, so I'm not going to be a victim of a school shooting, but I still care about that. If it is a policy that doesn't impact me personally, but benefits someone else, yeah I tend to not give a shit. Why would I be against a position that has no impact on me whatsoever when it only meant to help someone else as in the case with civil rights?

> If it is a policy that doesn't impact me personally, but benefits someone else, yeah I tend to not give a shit.

You're excluding a key point - the policy often benefits one party at the cost of another. You mentioned immigration and that's a great example of this sort of pathological empathy that has infected the left.

There's a cheap and fleeting sense of virtue attained when you champion illegal immigration and decry deportations. You post photos of mothers and their children crying at the border because the human trafficking organisations are having a hard time getting them across nowadays. But it's important to remember the negative pressure illegal immigrants place on wages and why there's a gross cabal of large corporations, lobbies, and affiliated NGOs, who virtue signal immigration as a means to lower their labor costs. It's important to remember the entire pipeline of illegal immigrants is owned and operated by extremely violent cartels - humans are now their most valuable product. Your desperate craving for that high of in-group acceptance is propping this up.

It's not that you're empathetic - you just don't care about the negatively impacted party. Nothing new under the sun.

Yeah you don’t get to use the claim of “virtue signaling” to shut down conversation any more, we all understand that is a manipulative play to make someone feel a chump for having standards. Your claims on immigrants don’t match stats, they are less violent than the American population at large. And your example wasn’t that, it was about trans rights. Why would you be singularly opposed to recognizing someone’s basic rights to be who they are?

> they are less violent than the American population at large.

I made no assertion about the criminality of the immigrants, but rather the cartels bringing them here.

Regarding "trans rights", which is quite a large umbrella of ideas, negatively impacted parties include:

1. Parents who don't want schools influencing their children's ideas about sexual identity.

2. Women who don't want to compete against biological men in athletics (this is the most bewildering failure of the left's tolerance).

3. Women who feel uncomfortable sharing previously women-only spaces with biological men.

4. Trans people who made life-altering decisions as a minor and now regret it.

These negatively impacted parties are vocal now - they aren't hard to see. You don't care about them, is all.

Yes I see a general lack of common decency lately. And scapegoating. And fear mongering. Because a lot of people hold a view doesn't make it right.

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