Memes

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.