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Comment by livinginfear | Hacker News Reader

When the hell did Bill Hicks ever tell anyone to vote for anyone? It's been a minute since I listened to his shows, granted, and it's not as if he's still around to care. But don't you think it would behoove you at least to make sure you know what you're talking about here?

Chomsky calls out pretty much all past presidents (Dem or Rep) as war criminals.

Hicks has been dead for almost 30 years. Its not fair to say who he’d vote for today.

He was also preforming in the early 90s where Bush Sr. was conducting a stupid war that set the stage for our current collapse and imperial hubris.

Im a staunch Republican, but Im not going to pretend that the Bushes werent a curse and half of Reagan’s team were too (the other half got purged by Bush until the Pauls helped revive them).

If you want to hear Hicks skewer Democrats, Im sure Ive heard him going on about Tipper.

That seems fairly reductive for such a wide breadth of work and influence, especially given the context that the US is and always has been essentially a two-party system. In such a system you’re either one, the other, or irrelevant.

Reductive is an understatement, it's basically trolling (or extreme bias, which is indistinguishable).

Bill Hicks died at 32, in 1994, so he lived through 12 years straight of Republicans ('81-'93), and presumably thought maybe Bill Clinton and the Democrats would be different. Had he lived longer, I'm sure he would have been as salty about the Democrats being liars, too. Just like those who lived through 8 years of G.W. Bush in their formative years probably thought that Obama would be much different, with all of the propaganda about hope & change, etc.

Chomsky still telling people to strategically vote for Democrats vs. starting a new party (like the People's Party[0], a populist-focused, anti-corporate party) is pretty inexcusable, though, but that's beside the point.

If you like Bill Hicks' far left view, you might like Jimmy Dore [1], too. Though he's more of a "pothead club comedian".

0- https://peoplesparty.org/

1- https://www.youtube.com/user/TYTComedy

Please don't take HN threads into tedious ideological and political flamewar. This is against the HN guidelines because it leads to lame, dumb, repetitive discussion and we're trying to avoid that here. We want curious conversation.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30282558 and marked it off topic.

Why does Chomsky boil down to that? Most of what he advocates is organisation and activism, which I don't think boils down to voting Democrat - perhaps it does if you think the only impactful thing an American citizen can do is vote, but that is plainly enough false.

"Can I recommend some jugglers you might like?" - Context - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoCezQAF5AA

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