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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.
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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.
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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.
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