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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26043 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.

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.

Sorry, missed this at the time, but I liked reading it so here: a late response in kind in honor of intresting prose.

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.

They ain't doing shit, what they have is the consent of the people who actually do shit to pretend to own the land the go juice comes out of; as opposed to Iran who owns their go juice land by their own blood and effort.

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?

Much like those jagoff fantasies of a shitty writer and welfare leach, the Gulf state imagine themselves captains of industry when they are pathetic ticks living and dying by the consent of their betters; the great historical cultures of the world that walk their goat paths and deign to not instantly obliterate them.

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.

They took their great gift and turned it into ashes and CO2; they received their inheritance of 5 talents and built a glittering babylon on sand, the great whore of the world who accepts all abominations. Where is their world bestriding colossus? Who builds their great monuments, forges their weapons, who is it even who constructed the substrate of their society? It's not called the Petro Riyal or Dihram.

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.

Unless it changes, when it gets destroyed the world will continue turning, having gained nothing and lost nothing. The great river of crude and trade and lucer will lurch and slosh until it finds it's new level, and collect into new tributaries and oxbows and lakes, and the opportunity to rise will have been squandered on libidinal ephemera.

Damn you and damn all like you who worship mediocrity and pretend it is virtue.

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.

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