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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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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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