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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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
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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.
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