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Comment by x3n0ph3n3 | Hacker News Reader

Harrison Bergeron is the logical conclusion to fundamentally equal outcome. Is that a society anyone really wants to live in?

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Not for me. But I don't thinks its' A or B, but some blend and it's always been some blend. House of Commons and House of Lords. Representatives and Senators, Electoral College, etc.

I believe the right discussion to have is where do we as society want to be between the two outcomes. Not do we want A, or do we want B.

I wouldn't use Congress as an example, as both houses have been elected by popular vote since the seventeenth amendment. Slippery slope in action...

I was referring the the balance of power between large states (House) and small states (Senate) as a metaphor for not wholly espousing the binary outcome equality of opportunity or equality of outcome.

Man, I've been frustrated when I see that story recently; it reads like a bad caricature of what a lot of good movements are trying to accomplish. In reality the goal (though not always perfectly executed of course) is always about raising people up, not tearing people down (like the handicaps in the story)

Show me any evidence that this isn't literally what the far left wants? CA is moving to remove hiring anti-discrimination protections, as if nothing could go wrong with that line of reasoning...

The far left wants power, not equality.

Even as someone who identifies as a liberal, I 100% agree with your sentiment here. Anyone who thinks otherwise is blind to the obvious narrative or too simple to acknowledge basic tenants of human behavior.

My belief is that this is a compromise of convenience rather than want. It appears to be easy to achieve equality by hampering the best, but much harder work to achieve equality by raising the worst off up.

As an aside, I find it interesting how Harrison Bergeron is so commonly misinterpreted as a satire of the left. When one considers Vonnegut's personal beliefs and the strawman portrayal of communism in the story, it really should become clear that it is actually a critique of Cold War/anticommunist hysteria. A satire of anticommunist satire, if you will.

In context, it was written at a time when the ideological and intellectual opposition to communism hadn't been very well-articulated yet, and hadn't become "obvious" to onlookers.

It might be a little on-the-nose, but I think it is a sincere takedown of the authleft (and moreso: crab mentality). These views can and do come from within the left - like Orwell, most notably.

...In the same way that cannibalism is the logical conclusion of capitalism.

Don't get me wrong - the impulse is there and some people think that way. Just like are absolutely people who would peddle filet of Steve.

But amplifying the marginal to discredit the general is fundamentally dishonest, and we won't do that here, right?

I don't see how you draw that path, but maybe you could try explaining it. It seems the story is clearly an extreme form of "equality of outcome," but there's no clear linguistic or conceptual path from capitalism to cannibalism.

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