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Also all the oil money.
Mostly the oil money, I think.
I assure you they are not rich because of oil anymore than they are rich because of pearl.
Even if the oil is only 1% of GDP recently it was still 50% of GDP back when they were building all of their ports, airlines, banks, and hotels. They’ve also proven as recently as 2020 that they can flood the market with so much oil that it dips into negative cosr per barrel in other nations like the USA and Russia.
Selling oil is also not woke.
Dubai isn’t successful, it’s a rich fucks playground but no one wants to actually live in the shithole country.
A successful country is one where human rights are enjoyed by all, where people are happy, free, and safe. Where the needs are met, and people don’t die unnecessarily.
For those rich fucks, being rich is success. They dgaf about the people.
A quote commonly attributed to Sheikh Rashid reflected his concern that Dubai’s oil, which was discovered in 1966 and which began production in 1969, would run out within a few generations.
“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel”,[5][6][note 1]
He therefore worked to develop the economy of Dubai so that it could survive after the end of oil production, and was a driving force behind a number of major infrastructure projects to promote Dubai as a regional hub for trade
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_bin_Saeed_Al_Maktoum#Development_of_Dubai
there are people who do want to live there (criminals wanted by their home countries with enough money to stay afloat, as long as uae decides to not extradite them)
I’d argue they don’t actually want to live there, it’s just that they’ve run out of other options.
What an amazing way to define success!! I will steal this and share it with the world!!
Fuck all rich assholes who define success as hoarding wealth!
Sold. Adopt me. I’m a poor American refugee trying to escape belly flop-rocket cyberfrucked TACO golden shower up the doge until I tear-if
You probably wont like this. Most places who actually care about everyone (except those who want to change that) are socialists. Either authoritarian or libertarian socialists.
As someone who grew up in Dubai I can tell you it is slavery.
Also as someone who grew up in Dubai and remembers the ‘Dubai! The city that cares!’ Ads on the radio I wonder if those fuckers considered that woke or not.
Also the children’s magazine Majjid added a female police officer to their police comic some time in the 2000s. I don’t remember when, but apparently the Hitler stache wearing sidekick goof cop is still there being a moron (yes…)
Got any pics of that Majjid comic? Google and DDG are coming empty
I looked up the wayback machine. I did find some stuff, but I am on my phone and I need my real machine to properly get them. I’ll report back in several hours. Stay tuned!
Looks like it’s Majid with one “j”. Found this page; which seems to show the character OP mentioned, Lieutenant Maryam. Can’t find when she was first featured—wikipedia just says she was added later.
Yes you even have the Hitler stache guy in it.
Damn… they REALLY changed their art style since the 90s or even 2000s.
Well he isn’t wrong, having slaves isn’t very woke
Dubai without oil would just be no different from Afghanistan.
It is no secret that a large proportion of the wealth accumulated by Dubai merchants comes from smuggling gold bullion (mostly from Britain), Swiss watches and Japanese cloth into Pakistan and…
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/1970/06/06/golden-dubai
Gold flown from London’s bullion houses like Johnson Matthey and Samuel Montagu to the The British Bank of the Middle East and the First national Bank in Dubai played a significant part in making Dubai what it is today. Shipped out by Arabs, Pakistanis and Indians in dhows to Bombay and other ports like Kutch and Calicut in western India, it brought much wealth to the merchants and the larger business community of expatriates who had made Dubai, home. The narrative of oil in the Persian Gulf has largely overshadowed that of gold and underplayed its significance in linking Dubai to the international economy.
https://mei.nus.edu.sg/think_in/gold-smuggling-between-dubai-and-bombay/
They also clean gold that is slave mined at gunpoint in Columbia for the cartels.
Yes it would. Dubai is a small coastal emirate. Afghanistan is a large landlocked country in one of the highest mountainous regions of the world.
Afghanistans largest ethnic groups are Iranian ethnicities (Persian) and the historical and cultural background are very different from the Emiratis who are Arabs.
What you said would be like saying “Italy without Pasta would just be like Denmark.”
I think it would be less flashy than today but actually a minor success. It was already on the rise before oil.
And it’s perfectly positioned for flying between Africa, Europe and Asia. There’s a good reason so many major airlines are from the Gulf.But their airport and national airline were build with oil money. Could Dubai have become a major travel hub without oil, maybe. But surely not as quickly as they have done with oil.
If Japan never invented cultured pearls. That’s what got them rich before oil and gave them the experience that a major revenue source could be lost at any moment. The Emirate of Dubai lead the UAE and the rest of the GCC in moving away from oil.
I was gonna say that Dubai is what you get if you give Afghanistan more money but that’s kinda the same sentiment
I wish, that would be an improvement. Instead they are US and Israel vassals. Their economy though is not oil based. The UAE as a whole is only 30% dependent on oil for its GDP, the percentage is lower for Dubai.
In the past they were rich from pearl before Japan destroyed their pearl-based economy.
well i imagine the average temperature would be slightly higher but i’m not even sure about that.
Isn’t that the same thing?
Pretty sure being anti-slavery is woke at this point
Woke doesn’t have a real definition outside of “anything fascists don’t like”, so of course anti-slavery would be termed woke.
Funny enough, it was the rightwing conspiracy theorists who used the term first. It’s one of the few terms that actually moved from the right to the left.
This isn’t even remotely true.
Remember “wake up sheeple”?
Yeah, that was only around 10 to 15 years ago. The usage of “woke” by left wing anti-racist anti-distlcrimation activists dates back over 50 years.
Ya, its some wokeism to not love slavery. Massively woke. So woke, you’ll be tired of wokeing.
UAE is also massacring civilians including women and children in Sudan
They can do that because they don’t have any wokeness
okay, so if I want my country to become successful, I should establish slavery and start massacring children in Sudan. Got it!
brb, making Switzerland into a world power!
Don’t forget Project Raven.
Never forget Project Raven.
Liberals told me Joe Biden isn’t guilty of the genocide in Gaza because he personally isn’t in charge of Israel. By the same logic, the UAE’s support of the RSF in the Sudanese Civil War doesn’t mean they are guilty of the war crimes the RSF has committed.
Personally I believe both are guilty. Who supplies the weapons and funds and who commits the crimes.
That or maybe the slavery.
Oil. I wonder if this guy really believes his own bs.
At its core he’s likely a religious fundamentalist, so yeah he does believe his own bs.
You don’t know Dubai if you think he’s a religious fundamentalist
For those who are unaware, the UAE among many things, does the following:
- Spreads and promotes Islamophobia
- Justifies Zionism and the genocide in Gaza
- Fights leftist and Islamist resistance groups
That should make it clear they aren’t Islamists or Islamic fundamentalists or whatever you think they may be. They are classist and socially conservative, but you don’t need religion for that. You can get that even from atheists.
No, not oil.
Impressive diversification, funded by oil.
Different countries do different things with their oil revenue. It could have been worse.
You mean an oil state that is destined to run out of their sole economic value of oil in a few decades.
You are in for a disappointment then because their economy is not oil based. Oil makes up only 1% of the GDP of Dubai a lesser share than some Western European countries, and the US and Canada. For the UAE as a whole, i.e. Dubai plus the 6 other emirates, oil makes up 30% of their GDP.
a materialistic hellhole built by slaves in a desert is apparently a metric for success
Would it have been better if built on stolen indigenous lands? say perhaps in North America?
Whataboutism, what a fucking classic move, with the downside of showing literally anyone with slightly more of a half of a braincell that you don’t have any other real arguments. 👍
Whataboutism is such a cope. You would rather your hypocrisy not be called out.
I have yet to hear anything good about Dubai except from people who live there or are stupidly rich and live in a completely different reality than a normal person.
I have not done this myself but from what I’ve heard, it is cheaper for Indians to fly to Dubai, buy stuff like flagship smartphones, laptops, gaming consoles, cameras, watches, perfumes etc., and return to India.
Yeah, our customs/taxes are that exorbitant.
I remember a time this was true here in Europe, some folks booked flights for New York for a shopping week-end and that saved them money
Shouldn’t the people who live there be an authority on the matter?
That’s exactly what he said x)
Yea its like when the President of Iran said they don’t have gay people there. Everyone was posting about how wrong he must be but I think he meant they don’t have any because they execute them.
Or forcibly transition them.
forcibly transition them.
Slavery as in actual people owning others as property or more like slave wages? I always thought it was just oil.
They bring in workers from Nepal and Bangladesh etc, and take their passports and then stuff 30-40 into a little apartment with no ac. They charge them thousands for the privilege to come work in Dubai and they have to live there until they pay off their debt
Closer to indentured servitude, which is a form of slavery.
No different really to the US’ “post-slavery” sharecropping.
