Between the water use and pesticides, replacing all golf courses with housing would probably solve climate change.
Edit: I know it wouldn’t, its a post not a fact
Actually this post has been fact checked by real hexbear fact checkers and it’s 100% accurate
using golf courses as graves for various oil executives would also help
even half a percent of the land on earth is still a lot of fucking land
Free, and you can bring dogs, byob and drugs, usually no wait to get started.
Ball golfers spend most of the time on the course waiting. I don't get the appeal.
Wasn't golf originally a sport where you went out into nature and did it there? This could possible be done in a responsible way.
Golf is from Scotland, a dreary pile of sheep-infested rocks where growing half an inch high is the best the grass can do. Works if you live in a different dreary pile of sheep-infested rocks, like parts of New Zealand.
I always thought badlands would also be a reasonable place to play golf on the natural ground. It's hard-packed clay and rocks, ball's gonna bounce a little far but whatever.
But uh, have you considered that there might not be enough affordable housing to replace it? If it's not higher than 25% then it's better to leave as a golf course where there's zero affordable houses instead.
I'm joking of course but this is unironically the shit people are arguing and instead of getting 750 affordable income limited homes they end up with none.
Look at the stupid stuff they say though
Harry Doby, a member of the Save Open Spaces group, told Reason that the “environmental impact of developing on green space instead of walking across the street and developing those hundreds of acres made no sense whatsoever.”
You know golf courses are famous for being great environmentally friendly places open to all /s
Have you considered that "affordable housing" is neolib bullshit and that housing should be free?
Sure but using that as a reason to keep a fucking golf course around is still ridiculous.
Developers that are supposed to build some % of affordable units tend to just build what they wanted to anyways and/or begin phasing those units out immediately. They lobby local gov to make it so they only need to pay a modest fee to make them all high-rent units. In the cases where there is some small %, they often create totally separate entrances/exits and drag their feet on actually renting them out, lest the other residents be exposed to the poors.
Gotta go 100% of the building being affordable and have strict policies on what that means for the decades to come.
A great example of why housing shouldn't be a commodity. All the zoning and legislation and agreements in the world will never change the fundamental fact that as long as these buildings are owned by speculants they will work tirelessly to make them as profitable as possible to them.
This is not a radical position. Most developed capitalist economies realised this and built public housing to ensure an adequate supply. Where this housing has not been wrecked by neoliberalism it always outperforms speculative housing in terms of rents, cost of operations and availability.
I think people unironically believe that golf courses and lawns are just totally natural.
Honestly golf course destruction is good, but 25% is honestly not enough. Especially since those flats are often the bad ones you wouldn't want in any case. For example ground level directly towards the road. Just do communal housing / housing co ops etc.
Standing on the roof of the school (gently sloped) and trying to hit a golf ball onto the roof of the church across the street (steeply sloped). It deflects off a lamppost and back toward me on a downward trajectory, finally coming to rest in the schoolyard. A mob of eight-year-olds begin chanting "skill issue" at me. I ask for my ball back. They cannot hear me over the chant.
soft-spoken announcer voice "and Antoine St. Hexubeary has chipped right into the child mob trap. A very unfortunate turn of events for an otherwise enthralling round."
If you do that, how are you supposed to exploit peoples need for housing? How are you supposed to provide pompus rich people with a place to waste their time at the expense of others?
These are questions America can't answer.
I think what radicalizes me the most is how inefficient America is solely because it will divert so much energy with making :grillman: feel good about himself.
There’s a golf course that got wrecked by Harvey somewhat between me and work that i think about something like this for when I drive by sometimes
Nice idea, but for this to make a meaningful difference there would have to be dozens of golf courses in the world.
What if i told you there are hundreds falling into disrepair
I'm pretty sure that if you told me that the manual would tell me that you are a "tankie" and not to be trusted.
you aren't supposed to read ahead in the manual, you are under arrest
Oh god, that was so scary, I was feeling an original thought coming on... Thank you manual!
Pennsylvania sees this, raises: What if we just put part of a subdivision inside a golf course instead?
I mean fuck golf and all but it's not like the housing crisis has anything to do with a lack of housing or places to put houses, lol.
I hate this yimby bullshit. As if landlords got less greedy if they had more houses.
where i live the vacancy rate is less than 1% and population went up 100k but only 2k rental units were built in the last 30 years. Rental postings get 100+ inquiries hours after going live
Pointless trivia: Apropos of nothing - I just remembered that Lewis Black calls himself a socialist but he likes to play golf.
Edit
I never bothered to google what he meant. I knew he had a lib conception of socialism so I shouldn't have been surprised by what follows. Still - it doesn't seem very left of him to focus on what he calls "the middle"...
Comedian Lewis Black: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Not the Answer
Jul. 26, 2018
There does seem to be some momentum when it comes to Democratic-Socialist candidates, with the election of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Does that at least give you a glimmer of hope?
No it doesn’t, because it’s not going to happen. The one thing I’ve learned in my lifetime is that we’ve got to get to the middle before we start pushing things in other directions. We’ve gotta get to the middle, and they have to sit down and decide how to do things.
Yeah what if. IDK I'm so bored by this Utopian shit yeah obviously it would be better but we're dramatically losing the class war we'd need to be winning to change it so maybe we should be focusing on that?
Everyone arguing you is missing the point. The Soviet Union used "utopian shit" alongside actual class warfare. 99% of utopian shit for the last three hundred years, though, has been nothing more than simply utopian shit with no connection to a larger movement.
And when it comes to online discourse, especially the insufferable terminally online discourse that makes up most of this site and twitter, it's even more ineffectual. People's brains are well-trained to take bad news and "solutions" in stride, then go right back to their life. That potential has been largely expended or captured by the culture industry.
The point is that none of this is praxis, and if it isn't directly translating into praxis we need to reassess our strategy and involvement with it. We're pointing out that the "leaves" of ideals and concepts are nothing without the "roots" of interaction with the material, that we can't assume there's necessarily an exchange/dialectic going on between the two. Because the vast majority of it is leaves with no roots, as evinced by the powerlessness and ineffectiveness of the Western left, and even moreso the online left.
If people want to engage with treats and slop as a way of blowing off steam that's whatever, but even leftism-flavored slop is still slop if it isn't resulting in material impacts in the real world. A small fraction of the posts on this site have potential to be useful because they're actually discussing theory or hashing out strategies or helping people self educate. But most of it is arguing about slop/drama or terminally online stuff with not nearly enough engagement with the real world.
I think the culture of this site has shifted a lot as the more active/radical people shifted focus to real world organizing, leaving a higher ratio of terminally online people. Or maybe it's just disproportionately impacted by people with the free time to post 100 comments a day.
The discussion MF started has some potential utility if it's a vehicle for critically analyzing our strategy and engagement with ideals/culture. Critical/strategic discussion in general. But yeah, other than that, it's still just slop.
Feel free to prove me wrong, but I doubt you specifically are capable of having this kind of critical discussion because you spend most of your time in defensive/offensive mode about some argument you can't get over. But it's not really unique to you, it's internet culture in general. Fixated on easy wins and dunks and excessively insecure about the possibility of being wrong. Seems like 80% of the userbase (or maybe just those that make 80% of the comments) is more interested in "winning" whatever discussion than anything.
Like, step back from our "conversation" for a moment and critically analyze your response. You're not actually engaging with anything that I said, you're just attempting to "gotcha" me with reddit-tier inline quotes. This sort of shit is a key part of why online discourse is so removed from material impact. It squanders the small amount of utility that might have been gained from such a discussion because you're making no effort to understand the essence of what is being communicated, instead fixating on whatever little parts you can nitpick. But that's par for the course tbh
I came here to discuss the fact that culture and posting doesn't seem to translate into the material world, and hopefully get a better understanding of why so we can do better. But some people can't stand to have their treats criticized so they reacted defensively
That's when you're supposed to start the Utopian talk yeah after you have found a way to counter class power
after you have found a way to counter class power
Why do you believe that the transformation of the environment is not class warfare? What do you think the bourgeoisie were doing when they transformed cities around the world into car-centric, human-hostile concrete deserts were doing? Not class warfare?
Do you think that one can transform the environment without diagrams or fight a battle without a battle plan?
No, but I think you have a better chance of winning a battle with troops and no plan than a plan and no troops
we dont have the troops. it is easier to acquire troops with a plan than without a plan.
I don't know where you got the idea that I'm nihilistic, I have hope I just don't care about these kinds of ideas until there's a people's movement. I definitely have no hope that just dreaming up cool things will change the world, but I have a lot of hope that organized popular movements can
I disagree with your assessment that this proposal is utopian. In fact, I think it is very practical and even practicable given community support. It is reappropriation of inefficiently used land for use in productive pursuit.
I also disagree that proposals to transform communities for the better are not related to class struggle. To take back what is ours (the land the golf course is occupying) from the capitalists is in fact class struggle.
I agree. Without hope for a better future and the courage to create it, one may as well lay down and die.
Being practical and practicable is besides the point. Solving the climate crisis is practical and practicable too.
The point is to just say "hey you know what we should do is just take a toy of the richest in our society and redirect it to benefit everyone else" is to ignore the fact that that the reason the rich have this wasteful exclusionary toy is because they hold class power. Like yes obviously we should take all of their toys and redirect them for our benefit.
I also disagree that proposals to transform communities for the better are not related to class struggle. To take back what is ours (the land the golf course is occupying) from the capitalists is in fact class struggle.
Obviously it would be, but just saying how great it could be if you could just win a class struggle detached from actually organizing an atomized, disengaged and often reactionary working class is what I'm talking about being tired of.
Being practical and practicable is besides the point. Solving the climate crisis is practical and practicable too.
The point is to just say “hey you know what we should do is just take a toy of the richest in our society and redirect it to benefit everyone else” is to ignore the fact that that the reason the rich have this wasteful exclusionary toy is because they hold class power. Like yes obviously we should take all of their toys and redirect them for our benefit.
Destroying golf courses and car dependency are necessary steps in solving the climate crisis. You are shitting on real movements that are transforming real cities today for the better.
Apparently you think that engaging in class warfare under a bourgeois dictatorship is impossible. This is such an unspeakably wrong assumption that I am astounded. First of all, you should know that workers' unions and socialist movements have exacted victories from the capitalists under a bourgeois dictatorship. Class warfare is not automatically made impossible by the presence of a class dictatorship. It is possible for proletarians to engage in class warfare under a bourgeois dictatorship and vice versa (counterrevolutionary movements).
Second of all, there are real examples of cities being transformed for the better under bourgeois dictatorships. In the capitalist Netherlands, there was a mass movement called Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child-Murder) which was an act of class warfare by proletarians to end capitalist-imposed car-dependency and unsafe road conditions. It was successful and the Netherlands as a whole is now known for walkable cities, with Amsterdam being the most famous. These victories are not limited to the Netherlands. All across the world, mass movements against capitalist-imposed car-dependency are underway and have transformed countless cities for the better, even in North America.
All of these movements involved drawing plans and diagrams of proposed redesigning of neighborhoods. All of these movements involved giving the people hope for a better future. Even under a bourgeois dictatorship, class warfare is possible, and we can win battles. To say that it is otherwise is factually wrong. We can take back what is ours and crush the bourgeoisie. If you think otherwise, you are a defeatist and not a leftist.
To answer your original comment, this literally is class warfare. Breaking the mind prison of capitalist realism is class warfare. You are engaging in capitalist realism with the added caveat of "but if we revolution tomorrow (idk how tho and i dont think we can) capitalism is over". Learn how to walk before trying to run.
Yo you’re right that ideas like these are meaningless without first taking power. But it’s also fun to look at a picture of what a golf course could be if sufficient power was directed at changing it. I’m just like taking a shit and looking at pictures on my phone here. Organizing happens elsewhere.
That is a picture of me when I was writing that comment. How did you find me??
