this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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I couldn't resist (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago by peer2pirate@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/memes@lemmy.ml
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[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So uh, did you read this article? It most certainly does not claim "It’s not how either commons or people work". Quite the opposite.

he got the history of the commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by local institutions.

It's a thought problem, not a literal pasture anywhere.

Of course, humans can deplete finite resources. This often happens when we lack appropriate institutions to manage them. But let’s not credit Hardin for that common insight.

In other words, "he's not wrong, he's just a racist". I didn't know about the guy before this article. Ironically, they have accomplished exactly the accreditation they were trying to discourage.

These corporations’ efforts to successfully thwart climate action are the real tragedy.

That is already how I understood the thought problem's relevance to climate change prior to reading this article.

let’s stop the mindless invocation of Hardin. Let’s stop saying that we are all to blame because we all overuse shared resources.

Double strawman. 1) No one invokes "Hardin", that's why they had to tell us who he was. And 2) The tragedy of the commons doesn't make any claims about who is to blame for hogging the hypothetical "commons". The tragedy of the commons is just a situation. It could apply to any finite resource; ex. if someone is selfishly hogging the wifi bandwidth, everyone's netflix experience sucks. It's not relevant whether 20 people are hogging it, or just one or two people.

The article seems like a non-sequitur, and a waste of time. It means well, but I wish they wouldn't preserve this racists legacy in this way. Feels like taking it's taking the discussion 2 steps backward to take 1 step forward.

[–] buckykat@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He is wrong, because he's a racist. The commons the "tragedy of the commons" is about were an actual real social system which did not work the way he supposes. Capitalism inclosed and ruined them, just like it's inclosing and ruining the planet. The idea that this is just a natural result of a shared resource existing is entirely ass backwards, and comes from this guy's racism and capitalist ideology.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It seems like Hardin didn't even originate the thought problem. The article conveniently leaves out that Hardin simply wrote an article about, and created terminology to refer to William Forster Lloyd's thought problem from over 100 years earlier. Instead they opt to give the racist credit. Why?

[–] buckykat@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Again, the commons is not an imaginary thought experiment, but a real thing that existed, and the so called tragedy is just flat out bad history.

William Forster Lloyd was an early 19th century British economist, I can fucking guarantee he was racist too.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
  1. it is in fact an economic and sociologic thought problem. There is so much overwhelming evidence to show that this is the case, that the burden of proof is on you to explain it all away.
  2. yes, you're right, humans have always been racist and still are today. That doesn't mean we should erase any and all knowledge racist people have ever generated. That would amount to literally everything.