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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   25196 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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I got a culture war hot take for ya'll in the dying hours of this thread while I marinate infront of a screen on account of I fell off a fucking ladder and rolled my ankle like a QUA-SAUN'T:

Qualification before I even start: obviously its bad if anyone is killed, and I would prefer if none of this happened, or if it did happen it stayed as geographically isolated as possible, but given that it hasn't:

I am not fan of Iran or it's ruling class, but if I had to pick between them and the gulf states, I'd pick them every time. The gulf states are full of degenerate lazy assholes, run by people who are dumb as shit outside their little lanes, ruling over people who are parasitic insects on the global economy, and I don't give a shit what happens to them or anyone who chooses to live there. It is the worst place I have ever been payed to go, I would rather go back to bucharest and get chased down a half finished bridge by stray dogs then spend another hour in Dubai, and anyone who likes it has no taste; a crime worse than being a bastard.

What the fuck is even the point of these places? At least Switzerland and Singapore have some class as they wash your blood money; I just don't want to hear another dude talk about how nice his place in dubai is. Bitch, Dubai is rich person Mcdonalds, be a real man and get you a place in Macau and another in Monaco and a third in Sun Valley.

It's interesting because getting wealthy from oil happened at the same time as "wahhabism" was spreading. Although apparently there's some dispute if that is actually the correct term.

In the 70s the idea was running spreading that any music other than singing over drums was un-Islamic. Similarly there were strict views about women's clothing. So even though the Ottomans certainly had music and women's fashion there was domestic pressure against promoting it. Cat Stevens famously converted to Islam in 1977 and felt he had to give up his music career.

Also gulf donors took over funding far left groups in the West after the Soviet Union fell, and they managed to make Palestine one of the premiere causes on all campuses. That's actually a pretty incredible achievement of foreign policy.

The worst crime of the Gulf Arabs is their gullibility. They invested in those vanity projects (The Line being its ultimate symbol), basically redistributing the oil windfall back to the West. This is deserving of much mockery.

But on the merits, they've exceeded every standard I could expect from them. They maintain stable, rich nations. They are trying. They are buying world class AI experts hoping to get some high value-add economy going, building datacenters, constructing attractive (not to you yeah, I get it) cities on worthless patches of the desert, despite negligible culture of sophisticated urban life. Their royalty has some real assabiyah and is concerned about its legitimacy among the native masses – more so than the elites of the West. This time they are doing it without the cheat code of Persians carrying their intellectual jobs. I respect all people who struggle against the odds. It would be quite sad if they failed.

I agree and also respect the Arabs for what they are trying to do. I view places like Dubai, similar to places like Las Vegas or phoenix, as a testament to the idea that you can really just decide to make someplace nice. Even with unlimited amounts of money that kind of infrastructure takes functional governance. It’s sad that in this age I don’t think the us could do as well. For instance do any communities in California besides San Diego have any kind of desalination capacity?

I don't know that desalination capacity is really the best measure of competence. California doesn't desalinate because, most of the time, there's enough water in the mountains that can be impounded that it doesn't make sense to desalinate. Consider that California supports large-scale agriculture that the UAE doesn't have anywhere near the capacity for. Urban water use is a drop in the bucket compared to that. Desalination is energy-intensive, and brine disposal is a real problem, so it's only done when there aren't any better options.

I claim that given the state of Californian infrastructure they couldn't do it even if they wanted to.

The barriers are all legal and paper based, which are actually more real than gross physicality it turns out.

See also: Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable from SSC. It's getting to the point that geology is more mutable than society.

Half jokingly California is a third world country with a 100,000 outer space alien enclave.

That's not true.

We've got at least half a million outer space aliens in the enclave.

Yeah, I'm also really not into that dubai style, but I've now heard from multiple people (some I know in person, some just online) who worked with arabs that they've been impressed with how they at least try to think in a genuine long-term perspective on how to keep their society running in a way that isn't just a complete capitulation to the west. Not that I'd expect that to work well long-term, anyway. For an example, the demographer & pronatalist Lyman Stone has commented on the foresight of the UAE to explore possibilities to keep up the birth rate before even dipping below replacement rate. Most other countries dipped below replacement half a century ago, told themselves it's just delay and will surely fix itself, noticed after ca 20 years lol no it doesn't, then told themselves that surely infinite immigration will surely fix it, and now, well, the results speak for themselves.

Iran is an oil state that completely ruined itself through religious revolution and now regularly mass murders its population whenever they vet the balls to protest every couple years and exports terrorism throughout the region. Are the gulf states retarded? I guess so. Would any sane person prefer to live in Iran over them? No.

That is true. It is also true that the people of Iran are more productive than the sum of the entire population of the other gulf states, who need to import third worlders to do their physical labor and europeans/americans to do their intellectual labor; which populations are prohibited from entering into their society.

If that isn't the essence of degenerate decadence, I don't know what is.

Broadly agreed. Iran atleast capable of putting together a solid situation whilst essentially everything South of there has nil chance outside of occasional massive petrochemical windfalls that they will inevitably squander in the longrun.

Dumb analogy: is the Arab Gulf basically the Avatar of the world? A bajillion dollars and zero cultural impact (at least in the West).

I'd say their cultural achievement runs the other way. There one of the best maintained non western cultures.

As an Egyptian, completely wrong. The vast majority of Arab culture, i.e music, movies, films and intellectual writings, are produced in Egypt or Lebanon. Gulf arabs merely consume.

Also, while outwardly they might seem non western, the elites are just as westernized as every cosmopolitan rootless elite out there. They drink, smoke weed, fuck prostitues, buy German cars. There's nothing unique about them.

No cultural impact he said sipping his alcohol and coffee with sugar while sitting on a sofa and wearing a cotton shirt posting on a machine that works on algorithms made with algebra.

Those are products of yeast, north africans, Persians, Persians, Peruvians, and Persians again! Three out of six of those are IRANIAN, hence my bias.

algorithms made with algebra

These are named after Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi who was, well, Persian and who in his youth was likely Zoroastrian. Though kudos for Arabs who after conquering Persia allowed such a talent to flourish.

I hope you aren't claiming that the Arabs were the first to discover fermentation.

alcohol

I don't know if that's what he meant, but the etymology of the word alcohol is Arabic.

Naturally, but I don't know what that proves.

Yes. Loan words exist. Including from Arab sources within the past few centuries.

Not clear why they are being credited with cotton and sugar. Ancient Egyptians and Indians had cotton and traded it to ancient Romans. The middle East being between Europe and East Asia means they were the middle part of larger trading networks. So Indian numerals and far East trade such as sugar cane went through them. But I don't give them credit for being in the way of Chinese and Indian traders. Adopting Indian numerals was a good call on their part.

Alcohol is worldwide, and wasn't cotton well known in Egypt back before it was really "Arab"? And sugar is... either cane-origin or beet-origin, neither of which is indigenous to the Gulf.

The word "alcohol" is from the Arabic, though the Arabic word had nothing to do with the intoxicating sprit. As is the word cotton (English lost the characteristic "al", which still exists in Spanish "algodon") -- here, Arabs brought it to Europe but didn't originate it. Cane sugar also came to Europe through the Arabs, but originally from India.

Ah. So the cultural impact is just the linguistics, rather than anything about the concepts themselves.

Except for coffee.

What did they produce in the last few hundred years that isn't the various forms of Dubai Chocolate (stinky vs not)?

Mostly the logistics of spice trading as attested by the Portuguese, and the large scale development of desalination technology.

Eh? I think being a traveling merchant or a trade hub doesn't count by my standards.

I'm sure they've helped with the cost-reduction scaling curve and overall adoption and implementation of desalination, but they did not invent it, and as far as I'm aware they do not directly export it or have independent cutting-edge R&D that isn't just hiring a Western firm. I could well be wrong here, please correct me if I'm missing something.

Are we giving all the civilizational accomplishments of the Chinese to the Mongolians since they had whatever tenure as colonial overlords?

I'll take this bait.

Because there is a bastard here. And it's the one that laughs at industry.

You sit in some People's Republic of Museums and you spit on the few who dare to do instead of waiting to die. Because they do with so little class.

Has Howard Roark no taste? Why does he insist of making gawdy metal things, why doesn't he just lay there and die? Is Hank Rearden not a dangerous fool making monuments to his vanity instead of giving his all for boomers and children like good Jim Taggart?

A few poor bedouins lucked on some, not much, but some, oil. And those poor bedouins were sly enough to turn this not into an endless war, not into a brutal theocracy, but into one of the most successful cities in the world.

And people like you, who feel small in the presence of achievement, will instinctively need to lower it. The search of greatness must simply be a sign of one's vanity. Poor Yankee doodle so classless he thinks the feather in his cap is macaroni.

But it's not low. Greatness is great. Bending a desert full of essentially nothing into a paradise is nigh miraculous and demonstrates clear ability that commands respect to the wise, or at least, the sane.

In the end if it does get destroyed, the world will be worse for all the people this city has welcomed and one of the few places in the world that rewards skill with opportunity will be lost, hastening our spiral towards world spanning destruction and mayhem in exchange.

Damn you and damn all like you who worship death.

Having been there: They deserve credit for choosing a dude and not biting the hand that feed, we can give them that. Other peoples have managed less with more. That said:

The degeneracy comes from the fact that they took that enormous amount of money that comes out of the ground, and who exploits it? They have third world poors do their physical labor, they have professional class westoids do their intellectual labor (me!), they import all their artists and cultural production from those who have the mercenary souls needed to take it (me again!), and they half heartedly manage when they can be bothered, until a western technocrat jingles some keys at them loudly enough that they stop eg. plowing a trillion dollars into impossible megaprojects wouldn't even make sense in the post scarcity future.

If tomorrow all the oil in the world vanished, after the dust settled Russia would still be Russia, the USA would still be the USA, Iran would still be Iran, Venezuela would still be Venezuela, Canada would still be Canada, and the gulf arab states in question would be populated entirely by tribal nomads and ghosts.

This discourse is all too common and may be true of much of the GCC but you targeted Dubai specifically, which essentially exists on the premise of diversification because they knew the oil would run out. The rulers we're literally spelling out that exact scenario as something that needed to be avoided.

What then is one to make of a place whose economy is now a mere 1% petrochemicals? Does that falsify your judgement or validate it?

I suppose one could make arguments around the strategic necessities of Abu Dhabi and of the ostensible tensions created by oil. But were there no oil there would also not be funding or motivation for this war.

Dubai has already had several huge pullbacks when the oil money was disrupted. The 1% number is inaccurate since it's pulling in oil money from across the region and still heavily subsidized by the Emirates who have larger amounts of oil.

As somebody who's seen the Dubai government investment process first-hand a lot of their future proofing efforts are more elaborate scams from the connected to absorb resources than productive endeavors

As someone who's seen many investment processes from the inside, that's essentially all of them and not really a good yardstick.

It's scams all the way down. Competence is really measured in how much you can wrangle the scammers into having to produce actual value.

But Dubai is pretty infamously known for being created by slave labor. You claim the rulers bent the dessert into a successful city, but neglect to mention who actually did the manual labor. Slaves. Slaves create the buildings, slaves maintain the infrastructure. Without slavery, the city collapses. That is not a successful city. Successful cities are good places to live for a large majority of their inhabitants. Mistreatment of foreign workers, trapping them with debt, and stealing their passports so they can't leave is all pretty well documented at this point. The city is a hellhole if you are not a tourist or rich.

I see that the city is an impressive feat from the perspective of human ingenuity and mastery over nature. But the leaders deserve no praise. Anyone so explicitly utilizing modern day slavery for an achievement that is impressive but obviously totally unnecessary is a pathetic loser.

By all means, dare to dream and attempt what others believe to be impossible. But if your construction project that mainly exists to show off how great you are, requires trampling on tens of thousands of human lives, then it is time to let go of it, and do something else.

That's entirely fair.

But is the claim that it's all built on the back of slaves substantively true?

The largest estimates for this phenomenon by NGOs top out at around 100k people, about the same absolute numbers as the UK (though much more concerning proportionally). A big issue that ought be stamped out for sure, but hardly a systemic necessity to run the place.

My estimation is that it's one of those real social problems they have, as any society does, and that they're trying to address it. Not that it's some kind of ostensible social choice, like their political system.

Iran's issues in contrast seem much more like deliberate choices of its ruling class.

While I broadly agree with this point I heavily disagree with their choice of architecture. Why must everyone make the same souless glass and concrete blocks everywhere? If you're making all this money at least do something more interesting with it than making a bigger glass tower than anyone else. The artificial islands are working in the right direction imho.

People focus on the Burj because it's iconic, but there's a pretty wide diversity of architectural styles in that city, from this to this.

War brings out the worst in people. Especially on message boards where no one is actually in danger of dying. But we sure have opinions about who deserves to die and who doesn't.

Dial it down.

To hell with opinions. I'm making an argument. I shall like to see it answered. As is after all the point of this forum.

In response to the few things in there that might have been an argument I'd say that:

  1. Bending a desert full of essentially nothing into a paradise is NOT nigh miraculous if you do it by throwing money at it, unless you think that just having oil money is miraculous. It's better than just using the money to go to war, but that's an extremely low bar to meet.

  2. There's a difference between demanding that some specific person not waste their money (I agree that it's their money and they can do what they want) and noticing that everyone is wasting their money and making unfavorable inferences about the society from that.

I don't think you have any understanding of the logistics involved in something like this if you think one can just throw money around and end up with Dubai.

Most of the GCC got more oil money to play with and don't get anything like it. Despite some actively trying. Why is this?

Have you been to the region? There's an abundance of Dubais and microDubais built to resemble each other through Oil brute forcing

I lived in the region for some years doing business. I don't think that's an accurate characterization.

People like to copy models that work, and the financial ar hitecture of the region is very much grown around the oil business, not least because all modern industry flows from petrochemicals.

But the UAE is not Oman is not Saudi is not Qatar. There are significant differences, which is why some projects succeed and others fail. If there were none, Saudis would just be blowing past the whole gulf out of sheer scale.

Exactly. Good for the emerging world peoples and tax-avoidant who've been able to take advantage of the Gulf States, but the whole thing is borne on essentially a massive oil lottery win and all the neighboring states sans oil are absolute messes. Being able to just buy luxury space communism for a tiny population (which isn't going to necessarily last and has already crumbled before) for 50-100 years is pretty piss poor in the terms of broader civilizational accomplishment.

Would you make the same argument about the industrial revolution? And if not, why not?

Industrial Revolution is a series of processes that is widely copied and not a random windfall.

Exactly. Good for the emerging world peoples and tax-avoidant who've been able to take advantage of the Gulf States, but the whole thing is borne on essentially a massive oil lottery win and all the neighboring states sans oil are absolute messes.

Except Jordan.

Is Jordan a Gulf state? I figured they're more Levant.

... which, granted, a lot of the Levant is a hot mess, but for different reasons unrelated to oil or lack thereof.

No, Jordan isn't a Gulf state; it's a neighboring state, however.

Hear hear.

They trade oil for a high standard of living, and Dubai banks the oil money locally.

Now, to be clear, Iran is in some ways morally superior to these countries- at least the locals do actual work instead of abusing indentured servants, for example, and the gulf states don't have stellar human rights records either. But let's not sugarcoat the Iranian regime; they're fucking retards whose sine qua non is being enemies of America, who have seemingly failed at both their good governance and their religious goals. The same cannot be said for the gulf states.

Literally, the gulf states are the bull case for monarchy. You know what most Arabs do when they discover an ocean of oil? Have a civil war and let the winner squander the money on terrorism, with no benefit to the people. Saudi citizens might be lazy fucks, but they don't do that. Saudi Arabia is a developed country with a high standard of living, that's managed to avoid sanctions. Same for Qatar, Kuwait, etc. Iran hasn't had a civil war recently, but you know what they spend their oil money on? 'Cause it ain't good governance. They're out of running water in the capital. That's very unlikely in Riyadh despite supplying water to it being a harder problem. The Gulf Monarchies are basically achieving both their human and religious goals, even if they don't get all their foreign policy goals and have poor human rights records. Yes, they cheated by using oil money, but this is not a foolproof loophole- just ask Nigeria, Venezuela, Libya, Iraq, etc. Does the median petrostate benefit the people at all? I guess Russia's oil money enables a military machine that provides economic stimulus.

For avoiding the petrostate trap, hats off to the gulf Arabs. This is actually a hard problem and they solved it.

The Gulf Arabs are absolutely in the petrostate trap. They don't make things, they just function as a shady tax haven and cheap-energy zone for certain industries. They have ambitions in AI, not in making AI models but buying GPUs made by industrious countries, hosting AI models made by clever companies, exploiting their cheap energy.

The Gulf buys US weapons, they buy Chinese weapons, they buy (or attempt to buy) US protection. Who makes the actual oil equipment and drills? Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Samsung... The Saudis have some Chinese made ballistic missiles waiting for Pakistani nuclear bombs they think they paid for.

Iran makes their own oil equipment. Iran's MAPNA Group makes gas power plants at world standards. They are trying to export technology, not just oil. Their oil industry has problems, as you would expect given sanctions. But it is their oil industry and not imported oil industry.

Iran makes things, they build their own missiles, drones and weapons. They develop their own strategies to take advantage of their enemies' weaknesses. Their proxies do a good job.

The UAE's proxies in Sudan haven't covered themselves in glory and they're merely fighting Sudan, not exactly a tough opponent. The Saudi army has all this fancy US gear. And how do they perform against the Houthis? They got wrecked by the Houthis.

Iran is far superior to the Gulf Monarchies in governance. They may be an enemy of the US but they are not stupid. There's a huge power gap between Iran and Turkey and Pakistan at the top end of the Islamic world, then there are the Gulf monarchies and below them assorted Arab riff-raff. The Gulf states don't know how to fight or do anything correctly. Their manifest impotence in this war is obvious, America has to do all the fighting for them.

The gulf states turned their oil money into everything they want, without needing to kill tens of thousands of their own people from time to time. They have high human development, high incomes, and did that without needing to abandon their way of life/traditional culture.

Not bad for petrostates with average IQ in the 70's- the most comparable countries are shitholes in sub saharan Africa. Has Nigeria transmuted its oil money into anything good?

Iran produces better tech than the gulf Arabs, I'm willing to believe that- but unlike the gulf Arabs it doesn't keep the water on in its own capital city. Iran's government ignores huge chunks of its responsibilities.

When the oil runs out, the Gulf States will wither into nothing. Already it rather looks like they're withering away since they're so shit at fighting, even with all the fancy weapons they purchased. The crass prostitutes and grifters seem to be moving out of Dubai.

I dispute that the Gulf is highly developed. All their development is done by other people. It's just development that happens to be located in the Gulf and whose fruits happen to accrue to Arabs since imperialism went out of fashion at a very fortunate time for these people. It's not true development and comes without the underlying productivity and industriousness one expects of a real developed country.

Nigeria is a 'it never even began' country, irrelevant. They make the Arabs look like a bastion of civilization.

If the water was really off in Tehran, wouldn't the people be dying of thirst? The water situation there is bad. But droughts do make it difficult to get water. In Australia we also had problems with water during the Millennium drought requiring rationing. It didn't get quite as bad as Iran but it was pretty bad.

Their land mostly sucks. There is a reason the Arab states never developed much in terms of civilization. It’s because most of its desert and not useful to develop agriculture and then more. Sort of like Alaska in some ways.

Just to distinguish, the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates are canonically the breadbaskets of the ancient world and are largely Arab.

The Arab States in the Gulf, not so much.

The Fertile Crescent used to be a lot more green back in the times of the Sumerians, there's a cycle of roughly 25,000 years in which the Sahara and that region as a whole transitions from being a lush green fertile land to becoming a desert and back. Plus those people who built those civilisations weren't really Arab, either culturally (which really arose with Islam) or to a large extent genetically.

Also the irrigation literally salted the earth over centuries.

Are they? Egyptians are pretty separate to Arabs especially the vintage that made Egypt a big deal initially. That's like saying the Byzantines were Turks.

There is a reason the Arab states never developed much in terms of civilization

This is a truly bizarre take without more elaboration.

Think I’m suppose to specify the oil countries which are mostly desert that can’t support a lot of population without outside resources paid for with oil money.

To be clear Iran cuts down on Chinas oil exporting allies which actually makes it fairly important for policing China and protecting all of the west Asian allies.

To be clear this is capeshit. China does not depend on Iranian oil (it just exploits the sanctions-driven discount) and in fact keeps getting Iranian oil even now. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan depend enormously on the oil from the Strait of Hormuz and unlike China have NO domestic fossil fuel production; this all can turn out tragic for them. Accordingly Chinese indexes are stable and other East Asians are in shit. And removing THAAD launchers from Korea to reinforce the Middle East underscores how little attention has been given to the Chinese angle in this conflict.

Trying to frame this obviously Israeli war as part of some 4D chess strategy to "police" China is cope. Israel is not at war with China, therefore neither is the US. Indeed, Trump is even calling on PLAN to assist in reopening the Strait.

There's an alternate history where America winds up allied to the Iranian Shia coalition instead of the Turkish/Saudi/Egyptian Sunni one. I'm not sure that world is any more peaceful, but the Shia generally are less trouble than the far more numerous and expansionist Sunni.

I have a lot of respect for the Iranian people and their ability to organize. I have a lot of respect for Persian culture and their long and fractious history. There's a reason it's so unstable, and it is largely the result of tribal loyalties and clan-based societies. In this respect, the Iranians are no different from the Arabs.

Aesthetically is an entirely different story.

Brother the folks running Iran are not better. They also live off oil revenue and are degenerate.

The worse thing about Iran is that they rule over a populace with decent innate potential (well, subtracting anyone with means and will to leave).

Brother the folks running Iran are not better. They also live off oil revenue and are degenerate.

Yeah but they've had periods where they've managed to genuinely better themselves and hold actual jobs and whatnot.

What the fuck is even the point of these places?

Osama Bin Laden answered your question thusly:

(c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis;

(i) These governments prevent our people from establishing the Islamic Shariah, using violence and lies to do so.

(ii) These governments give us a taste of humiliation, and places us in a large prison of fear and subdual.

(iii) These governments steal our Ummah's wealth and sell them to you at a paltry price.

(iv) These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people.

(v) The removal of these governments is an obligation upon us, and a necessary step to free the Ummah, to make the Shariah the supreme law and to regain Palestine. And our fight against these governments is not separate from out fight against you.

(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of you international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.

(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.

You may have a different view of the moral valence of these facts, but they form a pretty useful model.

Dubai is cringe all the way. Simple comparison between Qatar airlines and Emirates shows everything wrong with the dubai mindset.

Lol, Qatar is just Dubai Jr. Same "build a fuckload of gaudy skyscrapers in the middle of the fucking desert despite miles of empty space everywhere while relying on a population made up of 90%+ imported labor to do all of the dirty day to day actual work."

And Qatar Airlines is just Emirates with a better marking team. They fly the same planes to the same destinations with the same customers (ie- economy is full of subcontintals on transit flights, biz class is full of rich arabs or western biz people). The whole experience from glitzy airport lounge that somehow manages to be less comfy than the average Scandinavian bus stop to the glitzy permium cabin pods that are underneath the outer cosmetic shell the same parts made by the same suppliers to the glitzy menu with gold-leafed cappacinos and "premium" wines is interchangeable with most airlines these days.

Except Qatar is quite light on glitz. Emirates are all glitz and flash. I have flown both and spend quite a lot of time in the lounges. Qatar color scheme is more subdued - calming purple instead of gold everywhere. Even the music is better. The personal are quite good at giving you whiskey and cashew and getting the fuck out until you land. They don't pester you every five minutes with "do you need anything sir?" They don't wake you up about seatbelts while you are sleeping. They let you sleep almost to the touchdown. The first class lounge is also better if you care about comfort - quieter, calming.

Emirates are built on the idea that the luxury must be displayed and consumed, qatar - that it needn't be.

As in, Dubai/emirates has superficial style and no substance? Does Qatar have substance?

No substance, but Doha doesn't try to suffocate you with opulence. It is built on slave labor and not a good place - not sure how to tell it - a month in Dubai - and you will be tired, a month in Doha - you will be rested.

Have you seen much of the middle east? Would you recommend any of it to people who want to sample parts of the whole world?

Right now - I would say that I wouldn't recommend anything of the middle east. But the best places I have been there are Erbil and Muscat. Dubai is Sin City - anything goes if you have money. Didn't like it that much. There is no reason to go to Saudi Arabia unless you are muslim. Doha is ok, but kinda boring.

Seconding Erbil, once things have calmed down. Also get out to the countryside while you're there, many historical sites.

Before going to the middle east, finish out europe/asia/ go to Romania/Bulgaria and do the ancient painted monastery loop from cluj to brasov/ go to plovdiv and veliko tarnovo to see some OLD christian sites.

If you've been everywhere else: Trust your heart. I still need to get to poland, cambodia and most of china before I think of doing middle eastern tourist shit.

China's good though the recent development wave means a lot of the bigger cities are kinda samey.

I have been highly recommended to visit Chongqing by multiple people. I'm also interested in travelling around Yunnan province and experiencing life away from the big cities. One day...

I went to Chongqing at the start of February and I've been to approximately 15 or so cities in China. It's a cool shock to see the whole urban geography, but the day to day experience in Chongqing is pretty typical for nice, new developed Chinese cities. There's not a ton of unique flavor there honestly but it is abundantly pleasant.

Chengdu and Yunnan more unique vibes arguably.

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Tangentially, is Bucharest really so bad as to be your go to "place only really better than that other place I really hate?" No experience traveling in that area, but was considering visiting someday.

No, bucharest is great if you aren't so tiktok pilled you can't deal with old stuff that isn't perfectly aesthetic; beautiful churches/arcades/opera house, totally insane palatial monument to being a dumbass you can visit, the people are nice as heck (to me, but my vibes are immaculate in person. I save all the poison for the internet.)

It just happens to be the place where; after dark; I had one beer over my tolerance; and then was chased by stray dogs up an unfinished road bridge. It's the funniest thing that has happened to me while traveling to relate in text form. Unless you get drunk and do dumb shit late at night you'll be fine.

You can add that they are literal slavers who fund ethnic cleansing terrorists in Sudan and betray fellow Muslims by allying with imperial outsiders and extract much of the region's natural endowment of wealth through resource and geography rents while spending it on sybaritic pleasures, and yeah, they basically exist to cater to the globalist rich who don't think they're cool or suave enough for any other tax haven with greater personality and style to it and would prefer to construct their personal images around chintzy opulence and unreproductive sex with Russia prostitutes, or at least that's the view of the place I receive.

has no taste; a crime worse than being a bastard

Absolutely based.

I have a soft spot for Saudi Arabia, but Dubai can go and do one.

I have a soft spot for Saudi Arabia

That's bait.

Saudi Arabia has a few insane vanity projects and a poor human rights record, but it manages to accomplish both its religious and human development goals. That's a hard problem to solve.

No, I genuinely like Salman bin Saud and think of all the gulf nations Saudi Arabia is the most on the "righteous path": not being too fundamentalist but also not going full hedonist like some of the other countries. Plus the fact that they control Mecca and Medina helps too.

He does seem to be drinking the Techbro Abundance Kool Aid a bit too hard and I'm skeptical he's going to be successful longterm. I do agree with you that I'd rather 'Arabs spend a lot of money trying to actually build productive things even if too ambitious' to the 'Whores' or 'Wahabbism' alternate routes on the tech tree, though.

What the fuck is even the point of these places?

According to international consensus, as codified by the United Nations (1 2):

  • Every people has the right to self-determination (free determination of political status and free pursuit of economic, social, and cultural development).

  • The purpose of a country is to fulfill its people's right of self-determination.

  • More developed countries do not have the right to decide that a particular people is not sufficiently civilized to deserve the right of self-determination, or has failed to properly pursue economic, social, or cultural development.

Every people has the right to self-determination (free determination of political status and free pursuit of economic, social, and cultural development).

If anyone truly believed this, surely they'd conclude that the South should have been allowed to peacefully secede from the Union. I'm sure someone is going to pipe in with "but slavery", but wars of aggression to change economic and social models is directly against the third point (and if it weren't, we can talk about fascist Italy ending slavery in Ethiopia, or the British ending widow-burning in India).

I see roughly what the authors were intending to codify, but I don't think it can be done even-handedly, and in practice it's going to end up being a lot of "who, whom?" and unwritten assumptions about what counts as a "people" that privilege certain parties. Not even always unreasonably: we couldn't practically take every sovereign citizen at face value. And for the record, I think Southern secession was a bad idea for a bunch of reasons, and slavery abhorrent.

If anyone truly believed this, surely they'd conclude that the South should have been allowed to peacefully secede from the Union. I'm sure someone is going to pipe in with "but slavery", but wars of aggression to change economic and social models is directly against the third point (and if it weren't, we can talk about fascist Italy ending slavery in Ethiopia, or the British ending widow-burning in India).

I've been toying with the thought that nothing Israel is doing in Gaza is more "genocide" by any definition than what the North did to the South. And, for the record as you say, I toothink Southern secession was a bad idea for a bunch of reasons, and slavery abhorrent.

I'm not subject to rule by the UN, so I say fuck these places in particular. They can send a blue helmet to stand outside my house and shake their head disapprovingly if they feel like it.

The best thing that Trump is doing is destroying those international travesties. If we are lucky by the end of his term we may get to the point where "rule based order" is so damaged that even eager democrat president may be unable to salvage it.

Padme: And then we build a new rule-based order that actually functions as such rather than just being a marketing label, right?

Sure, nothing wrong with "might makes right" world order ... as you are 100% certain that you have the might, that you really wield the biggest club.

I am convinced that the modern "rules-based order" is actually might-makes-right order, it's just that at the time the rules were established in 1945, "might" was on the side of Western Liberalism and generally wrote them down in its favor. It's quite evident in practice that the rules are never applied to the major powers evenhandedly: in fact, they quite explicitly gave themselves vetos at the UN for most such issues!.

But the principles of rules-based order do sound good on paper, if that means anything. I like the idea, but I don't think they're enforceable without a higher power enforcing them. And Team America: World Police is a poor simulacrum of such a thing.

To the extent that America's foreign policy was subject to democratic influence, I think it did lean towards a rules-based order to a greater extent than any other empires or hegemons have historically done. Vietnam as the crowning example - taking a geopolitical loss in order to stand by popular principles and appease the masses. The problem is that the people only take an active interest in foreign affairs from time to time, and quite a lot can be done clandestinely through the CIA or whatever. This gives the state department a lot of room in pursuing an agenda that's might-makes-right under the hood while preserving an outward appearance of civility.

But the very need to disguise their actions imposes some limitations, so even that can be considered a win for creating a more idealistic world.

Exactly. The world may not be black and white, but there are paler and darker græys. The post-1945 liberal order has moved us closer to the Star Trek future, while the belief that "The U. S. isn't perfectly virtuous, therefore all possible international orders are equally lex silvæ." moves us closer to Warhammer 40k.

I hope I don't need to explain why the former is preferable to the latter.

I think the "rules-based order" after the Cold War has basically been nothing but Team America: World Police; before that it was that plus some wrangling with the Soviets about how to keep the cold war from turning too hot.

The alternative is "might makes right when used against us, but when used to our benefit we are suckers who could use our might but give in instead". I don't think that's better. I can't think of a time when the US benefitted from the international order keeping anyone from using "might makes right" against us.

"Self-determination" is a concept that really could use some expounding here, since we are talking about absolute monarchies. Who sets the boundaries of the "self" here? You seem to think that Arabs under a dictatorship of Arabs are satisfactorily self-determining. If you are a Hindu Shudra in a Brahmin dictatorship, are you enjoying self-determination? What about a hypothetical Wakanda project of US census "black"s, where Ethiopians in the vein of Timnit Gebru rule over Haitians?

Unfortunately, the ICJ has not seen fit to issue an authoritative ruling on this issue. However, the opinions of Kosovo and Serbia on the topic may be of interest.

Kosovo:

While the exact contours of any right of self-determination have not been articulated by this Court, the authorities noted above may be read as identifying two key components that permit the exercise of the right: the existence of a "people"; and the demonstrated inability of that people to be protected within a particular State, given prior abuses and oppression by that State's government. The people of Kosovo are distinct, being a group of which 90 percent are Kosovo Albanians, who speak the Albanian language, and who mostly share a Muslim religious identity. The Security Council itself has referred to the "people of Kosovo". Further, the prior infliction of massive human rights abuses and crimes against humanity by the Serbian authorities upon the people of Kosovo, are well-known and well-documented, as demonstrated by the February 2009 ICTY Judgment in Milutinović et al., and have been condemned by the General Assembly, the Security Council, and many other international bodies. The continued denial by Serbia of representative government to Kosovo was recently demonstrated by the failure of Serbia to invite Kosovo-Albanian representatives to the drafting of the 2006 Constitution of Serbia, nor to give them a chance to express themselves upon it (only Kosovo Serbs were allowed to participate in the referendum). In these circumstances there can be no doubt that the people of Kosovo were entitled to the right of self-determination.

Serbia:

Kosovo was neither a mandated/trust territory nor an overseas European colonial territory in the UN sense, nor was it registered or recognised or ever even submitted for acceptance as a non-self-governing territory with the United Nations, nor did any international or regional body ever recognise it as such, nor was it subject to foreign occupation as determined or evidenced by relevant international organisations. Kosovo formed an integral part of the FRY (State Union of Serbia and Montenegro). It remains an integral part of Serbia, and as such the population of that territory were, and remain, part of the "people" of Serbia. Those persons forming part of a minority within the territory of Serbia, including Kosovo, are entitled to the protection of minority rights as laid down in Articles 14 and 75–81 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia 2006.

Kosovo, as a part of an internationally recognised independent State, is not a self-determination unit as that term has been understood in international law and practice. Consistent international recognition of the territorial integrity of the FRY (and thus of its continuator, the Republic of Serbia) by definition precludes acceptance of the right of self-determination as inhering in the inhabitants of the province of Kosovo.

Who decided who is "nation" deserving of self determination?

In practice, your ability to find great power generous uncle who supports your cause diplomatically/militarily decides the issue.

There is no supreme commission of linguistic experts that examines dialects spoken in Trashcanistan/Carbombistan border zone and scientifically chooses where the true border should be.

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