Almost everyone's charity donations are worth zero with the IRS since everyone takes the standard deduction now.

I don't think that's what's happening here. The flags are coming from users (as explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). We can only guess why users flag things, but when I looked at the flagging histories, they didn't seem focused on this issue; rather they were the most common type of flag, from users who don't want to see flamewars or too much politics on HN. For example, here are other submissions flagged by the same users:

In L.A., a new vision of incarceration proves rehabilitation works - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38844740

The Myth of Meritocracy Runs Deep in American History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38844240

Psychopathic men have more children, study finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38824962

Brexit has failed for UK, say clear majority of Britons – poll - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38817190

Losing weight without any stress - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38815866

Florida health care can now be denied based on moral, ethical, religious beliefs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35941427

I'm not mentioning these to start arguments about whether or not they are on-topic for HN—some are, some not—but rather to give the flavor of what the user flags look like.

We sometimes turn off flags, and I've done so several times on this topic and posted quite a bit about why. However, HN is not a current affairs site, and it is a site that gets damaged when threads turn into flamewars. So we have to be careful about which threads to turn off flags on, and I don't think an outright advocacy piece is the best choice for that. It's all relative; there's no way to avoid flamewars on a topic like this; but some go to the inner circles of hell faster than others.

War is a huge escalation - usually when two countries see no other avenue than to fight it out.

Most wars are fought over borders. Land ownership is 0 sum game. Especially land blessed with natural resources. (Middle East is great example of oil wars)

In the 90s imperialism was popular - if you had the manpower and weapons, you’d take land from the weak.

Russia is playing land grab card against Ukraine.

Hamas is playing the land grab card against Israel. Although Israel being backed by US will inflict a lot more damage.

Africa is full of border conflicts for centuries. We don’t hear much about it since it’s a poor continent.

The US has the world’s largest military and a big part of what they do is to ensure their allies have their borders intact (NATO, Australia, Japan, S Korea etc).

So sinking some ships is likely gonna be met with some bombs on their military production facilities where missiles are made (if they figure it out).

For the world’s largest military, US holds much restraint not invading other countries borders, and helping democratic countries keep their borders intact.

If US unleashed colonialism card, we could be much larger than British empire. However the bitter lesson is that conquering is easy, maintaining power is way harder.

Seems China is holding restraint invading Taiwan until they see a clear win with a blitz, or another peaceful avenue.