Nah, just criminalize irrigation for golf courses, if you want a golf course, you gotta work with what will grow natively.
Sand. Play on sand.
Played with a friend on a sandy area with some trees, it was great fun and requires no maintenance.
I am not a golfer, we used a mini golf club and golf balls i found near actual golf clubs.The healthy/sane version of the thing.
I have such a hard time identifying with people’s hatred for golf and I’d really like to understand more. For context I played golf in highschool, so I got to use the course for free since I was a member of the team. For clubs I used either inherited clubs or ones I found in the dumpster. I’ve still got those clubs and I can still hit in the direction I want the ball to go.
I live in a very rural mountainous region that gets plenty of rain and has some of the strictest environmental guidelines in the US. The closest golf course to me costs $17 to play all 9 holes.
What I get is that there are some regions that could not support a golf course naturally and where space is at a premium and could probably be used better (like as another fucking parking lot or something, zoning laws are stupid sometimes). I also get that these courses can over fertilize and run off heavy metals into the watershed. Or waste precious water.
What I also get is that golf is not a fun sport to learn. It is not fun until you start making good swings. But once you do it feels as good to me as snowboarding or mountain biking. You also usually golf with friends (drinking can be a big part too), and doing stuff with friends is fun.
It seems to me that most hatred for golf comes because of capitalism and not because of golf. It’s associated with the capitalist class, buying new equipment is expensive (nothing like hockey though, serious WTF), and capitalists are irresponsible with land.
It seems to me that most hatred for golf comes because of capitalism and not because of golf.
I think you’re right, and you summed up my thoughts about the first 80% of your comment better than I was going to, lol.
I’d say the hatred for golf has a lot in common with the dislike behind the fuckcars communities. It’s not that people hate the experience of a clean hit in golf or a brisk drive down twisty country roads. It’s the resources that go into supporting them which by definition do not go into supporting more efficient/healthy/equitable choices. And yes there is probably a secondary effect tied to certain target audiences who value exclusivity and are generally the worst.
criminalize owning billions and treat the desire to own billions as a mental disease
i dont disagree with the first part, but u know that having a mental disease isnt a wrong thing right? like good people can have mental issues? this isnt a mental disease, its desire to be evil. i dont like that socially mental disease can be 1:1 with being immoral or evil
Wanting to own billions isn’t necessarily evil. I’d say it’s actually pretty common to want to be a billionaire in our society; the desire to gain wealth is core to capitalism. They may not understand the consequences of it or be able to conceptualize of the people they’d hurt.
Hypothetically, if we treated it as an illness (or rather a symptom) we could shift societal norms and rehabilitate people who express signs of trying to hoard wealth.
I think there is still a mental disease aspect. Sociopathic or extremely narcissistic people can also seem evil, but at the end of the day they are still mental diseases. I would even go as far as to say that anyone who wants to be a billionaire is probably a mixture of sociopathy, narcissism and has some sort of addiction (ps: not an expert basing this only on common sense).
I could perhaps say wanting to own billions is a symptom of multiple mental diseases.
“Whats wrong with golf?” i shout as i stand, my striped collared sport polo fluttering, my full golf bag clinking with expensive clubs
Don’t forget the cabby and the 3 aides to ensure you look fabulous on every swing
Don’t forget the cabby
Caddy, unless you bring your taxi driver with you out onto the course. Which would be silly, golf carts are so fun to drive!
minigolf is fine tho. this one can stay.
tbh i dont care about golf as long as it doesnt destroy natural resources for no reason other than privileged entertainment. minigolf fixes that. so does video game golf or vr golf, those are a ok
tbh i dont care about golf as long as it doesnt destroy natural resources for no reason other than privileged entertainment
Then you always care about golf. Huge impeccably groomed and frequently watered lawns with shitloads of pesticides and herbicides are inherently disastrous to fresh water supplies, biodiversity, and other aspects of nature.
I don’t think it was always restricted to manicured courses. I’m reading that the dutch used to play a similar game in spring, summer, fall, and even in the winter playing on ice
Minigolf doesn’t involve lawns
True. Minigolf isn’t golf, though. It’s infinitely better.
Ever done indoor minigolf? Its even better, and it comes in Glow in the Dark mode! All the fun of minigolf, in an air conditioned environment!
Black light mini golf ftw
You ever notice there’s zero birds or wildlife in these places?
It’s all the pesticides and herbicides.
There was even an article a while back that living next to a golf course had a really high correlation with developing neurological diseases.
Though I read that study was skewed by the average age of people that can afford to live near a golf course. They didn’t compare like for like in terms of health (as I recall anyway, open to correction!)
WTF todayi learned
Sure it correlates, but does it cause it?
Clearly its correlated because neurological injuries cause you to want to play golf.
Correlation does not mean causation, but it might. If there is a plausible explanation for the correlation it is at least worth exploring, especially if there are many golf courses and therefore a lot of data.
It might also be all those toxic golfers, of course.
Golf will inevitably go the way of the touradas.
Golf: Destroying large swaths of land so a few guys can hit a little white ball around more easily.
I’ve always liked “golf and all the problems that come with it only exists because cishet men are scared to ask each other if they want to go for a walk”.
this is a metaphor for capitalism
🫡
/signed
Only extra rich persons could’ve created such an unsustainable and boring sport. I can’t see it as anything else but a networking context for the elite class. I mean, compare it to proletariat’s bowling, but instead of staying on the lane with everyone else (and many people from the other lanes), you can travel alone or in a small company of co-players, naturally isolated to talk about business stuff sub-rosa.
Gameplay-wise and comparing it to bowling once again, it is that random - by terrain types, weather - it lets people playing it save face while failing at it. Unlike different kinds of balls you can instinctively take for your liking by just weight, the set of clubs is not intuitively obvious and 90% of players don’t know what to do with them all. While golf is akin to an archery contest slowed down to a slog with, basically, one metric - how many turns it took to complete the course, bowling has 10 pins and a variety of outcomes with two tries each turn all going into the final result.
Darts has deeper mechanics and is more fun. Snooker is too about taking balls into a hole but you compete with other person directly. And that’s a problem with these people: they don’t need a skill-based sport-like game, they want a background activity that lets them socialize with select persons while having a premium rich-person experience, with restaurant\resort service, expensive clubs, golf carts and young boys carrying\driving it all for you to hit a ball once in a while.
It should die off with many of it’s avid ‘players’.
