Nah, Maggie’s government did for common land way back.
It figures “no such thing as society” Maggie would tear down something like that.
No, and no! Although fortunately I have not gone really hungry since I have been a parent. Part of being a parent is being responsible for teaching them ethics, as well as skills which are actually useful - such as growing food and making shelter - as opposed to abstract skills such as impressing others or grubbing for money. When I say that how we live is more important than how long we live, I do not mean that as some airy greeting-card aphorism which I choose to “buy into” as part of a chosen lifestyle. Rather, it is an affirmation of my children’s agency and autonomy, because if we sign that away to fit in, then we become little more than resources to be exploited by an opportunistic minority. What good would our comfort or longevity do then?
No doubt some would argue that children have a right to the comforts of capitalist culture. This might be part of the cultural circumstances behind why you assume that these principles are more suited to young adults. That is ultimately a doctrinaire political point, and I would sooner apply for political asylum elsewhere than cave into it.
Greed winning out in the end would not be so bad, if people made any practical efforts at resisting it in the beginning! Saying that how I live is an ideal I think misses the point somewhat, which is that selfishness seems to me to be obviously impractical for any truly social system. This is based not upon how popular it may be, but rather how it is supposed to work. A society which advocates it is conflicted, and needs to be dishonest because it cannot live up to an ideal of “collective selfishness”.
A yucky analogy might be that of cancer. Every person is vulnerable to cell reproduction errors if they live long enough, and don’t die of anything else. Bodies are temporary, and they eventually corrupt, which is sad. But you don’t see billions of people decide to give up and embrace cancer right now, because one can argue that it is an inevitability of our nature! Most have enough sense to say “No thanks! That is dysfunctional and unhealthy, so I am going to resist it as long as I can.” Rather than opting out of capitalism, I just never found it rational enough to be “socialized” into it. And that is part of the importance of introducing children to non-transcactional living and scientifically-grounded resource management. Because the status quo is to condition people to accept sociopathy as not only normal, but inevitable.
Ha, but cancer sucks and causes dysfunction while greed makes you oh so materially comfortable if you can just bother to suppress any twinges of “hey, those people over there don’t have…”. The problem is that greed, as an inherent part of animal nature is to some degree self rewarding. It may not work well for societies as a whole, but it works great for individuals. The only populations that I can think of that have effectively bypassed “greed” are 1) made of very small groups of ideologically similar people or 2) animal groups, usually hymenopteran with a common genetic link (the “Queen bee” system).
Unfortunately, I just don’t see humankind maturing any time soon. It’d be nice to see people be willing to relinquish ownership of personal property, secure in communal ownership, but to be honest, I’d be really happy if we could just stop killing each other over stupid non-provable religious philosophies, the how much melanin you happen to have, and other inconsequential things first…
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If one of your cells decides that it is more deserving of survival than others, and refuses to die when it needs to, this is how cancer starts. Sure, it does appear to benefit that cell over the organism as a whole. Except that, unchecked, it eventually kills the host organism. The death of the host organism also kills those wayward cells.
That is the kind of application of “set theory” that I am talking about. The notion that an organism can survive its destruction of its environment is demonstrably false. Sure, I like my cells to be as healthy as possible, but they are a subset of the organism, just as the organism is a subset of society. If these come out of balance, there is literally no future in it.
If the article was pointedly about how awesome that brand of string was at stopping bikes tied to it, then perhaps a smidgen of skepticism could be warranted. 
heehee I keep laughing about this… thank you
Big String? Ho ho, oh dear me no. There is no such thing. There never was. Don’t believe everything you read on the internets, eh little feller?
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Exactly. But right up until the end, things seem awfully sweet for that cell and it’s progeny.
It takes a forward thinking cell to recognize that it’s part of a larger organism, and much like individual cancer cells, individual humans seem to have trouble recognizing that.
Quite a while ago I worked with a guy who’d had his car broken into while he was in college. The thief didn’t steal the car but they did take the stereo. What made this memorable both to my co-worker and to myself after all this time was that the thief ejected the CD from the stereo, found the case in the door pocket, and put the CD in the case. Then they stole the stereo, leaving the the CD case sitting on the dashboard.
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A friend of mine had her car broken into, via the old screwdriver-through-the-lock trick. The lock was trashed, but the only thing stolen was the bag of condoms that had been on the passenger seat…
We figured that if you’re in that urgent a need, we could forgive them the lock.
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