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.
Well paid professional native Arabs and foreign experts because it's a notoriously dangerous and sabotage prone industry?
You're talking about an industry where you can throw a water bottle into a chemical vat and kill everyone in the building or loosen a valve and set an oil rig on fire lmao.
Slaves under the kafala system are used in domestic duties, construction, and service (or "service") jobs. Not jobs that require significant trust and knowledge.
You need well treated wage slaves that think they're free for those.
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)
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...)
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.
And the oil. Everything in Dubai is funded by oil either directly because of subsidies or indirectly because it brings people to a region that is otherwise essentially an enormous empty desert.
Do you think people would go to las Vegas if there weren't casinos there?
Oil makes up 30% of UAE’s GDP and an even smaller percentage of Dubai’s: only 1% according to this Wikipedia article. Dubai is one of seven emirates that make up the UAE. Dubai has existed prior to the discovery of oil as a fishing and trade port, and has been rich before due to pearl diving. It was a major source of pearls before the Japanese invented cultured pearls.
For thousands of years, most seawater pearls were retrieved by divers working in the Indian Ocean, in areas such as the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and in the Gulf of Mannar (between Sri Lanka and India).[10] A fragment of Isidore of Charax's Parthian itinerary was preserved in Athenaeus's 3rd-century Sophists at Dinner, recording freediving for pearls around an island in the Persian Gulf.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_hunting
The following map shows Bronze Age trade routes in purple:
Neither is oil. The experience of losing pearl money and going poor for some years before oil was discovered is what motivated them to plan moving away from oil decades ago.
No, when people accuse the UAE of slavery they mean the oppressive and exploitive working conditions that abuse the class and wealth hierarchy, into a form akin to slavery. Not actual slavery where people are being sold outright, that is actually outlawed. In the same sense when people say prison labour, and undocumented migrant labour in some highly developed countries is a form of slave labour. It is not slavery in the traditional sense but still a grave abuse of human rights.
Do you think people would go to las Vegas if there weren't casinos there?
This is an even more apt comparison because the Mafia started setting up those casinos out in the middle of the desert so they could do so in a place where they could control all the laws
That first photo is a very famous one of the Paraisópolis favela and the Morumbi district in São Paulo. (Source)
The second photo is of the Naya Nagar neighbourhood in Mumbai’s Dharavi area. (Source)
The third one is, however, actually what you purport it to be. (Source)
I imagine you're not trying to deceive people and I agree with the points you're trying to make but please make sure that you check your sources before spreading info
Fuck, now i feel bad. Really
Cant trust the internet these days.
I changed it up and included the one picture i could find that appears authentic but because that picture of mumbai was actually labeled dubai i really dont know anymore.
Thanks for pointing it out.
I also found this one but its the same source as the mislabelled mumbai picture so i cant trust it.
Look on the right side. Graffiti says "Carlos Perez" and the flag has the word "presidente" in it.
Neither Dubai nor Mumbai since nobody there would write graffiti in Latin alphabet or in Spanish for that matter.
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...
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.
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."
Oil production, which once accounted for 50% of Dubai's gross domestic product, contributes less than 1% today.[4] In 2018, wholesale and retail trade represented 26% of the total GDP; transport and logistics, 12%; banking, insurance activities and capital markets, 10%; manufacturing, 9%; real estate, 7%; construction, 6%; tourism, 5%.
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 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.
The temperature would be lower, because all that asphalt, glass and concrete create heat islands that traps heat and makes everything more miserable. It would smell nicer too, since Dubai has no sewers and garbage collection is awful, so the whole city smells like shit and putrefaction.
This is why right wind douche canoes who go onto talk shows and news panels are always coming up short when asked what "woke" actually means. Because without a couple of paragraphs of obfuscating bullshit to attempt to offset the actual meaning, their points of view come off like Nazi racist assholery. And if they actually just described the real definition they would find the audience agreeing with being "woke".
I’ve long looked for a succinct definition of the pejorative sense of the word. Wikipedia delivers:
Insincere form of performative activism
…
Some leftists, such as writer Daniel Bernabé and philosopher Susan Neiman, criticize wokeness as a form of tribalism which divides the working class and distracts from the universalist class struggle
Though to be fair, tribalism is really hard to escape. Everyone seems to have a tribe.
I personally don’t identify with any of the large social movements taking place right now, on the right or the left. I do have a group of similar, like-minded friends. Now it seems like they’re my tribe.
I personally don’t identify with any of the large social movements taking place right now, on the right or the left. I do have a group of similar, like-minded friends. Now it seems like they’re my tribe.
This sounds like it makes you feel very safe. The fascists will likely come for you last.
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.
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.
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.
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. 👍
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.
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.
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
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.
Hey, that's unfair to magicians. The whole point of stage magic is that you are purposefully suspending disbelief in order to enjoy an entertainment show. Of course magic isn't real, the magician knows it, everyone in the audience knows it. That's not the point. The point is to relive childhood wonder via escapism. At the end of the day, what the magician does on the stage takes time, practice, dedication, skill, knowledge, showmanship and ingenuity to pull off properly. All feats to be celebrated and admired. Screaming how the trick is done ruins the experience for yourself, the magician and the entire audience. Like cheating at board games, or heckling a comedian, it's a bad faith transgression into the social contract of a show.
What this POS refers to in Dubai is causing human suffering at a massive scale, it's not an well meaning or heartfelt illusion. Calling it out is a protest. It's not equivalent at all.
Well, we can't deny that the silencing the opposition (like wokists) help to maintain a slavery society.
So both are actually right. But one is a shitty fascist
The lack of wokeness in Dubai may be one of the condition for it's slavery system to exist.
Both actors are reading the event from their point of view: a woke one, and a fascist one
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Dubai
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.
Kind of fucking weird to say slavery is the source of their success when they have so goddamn much oil money tbh.
Who do you think is working the refineries?
And cleaning the compounds, being nannies, groundskeeping, chauffeuring, tutoring...
ding ding ding!
Well paid professional native Arabs and foreign experts because it's a notoriously dangerous and sabotage prone industry?
You're talking about an industry where you can throw a water bottle into a chemical vat and kill everyone in the building or loosen a valve and set an oil rig on fire lmao.
Slaves under the kafala system are used in domestic duties, construction, and service (or "service") jobs. Not jobs that require significant trust and knowledge.
You need well treated wage slaves that think they're free for those.
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
And the oil. Everything in Dubai is funded by oil either directly because of subsidies or indirectly because it brings people to a region that is otherwise essentially an enormous empty desert.
Do you think people would go to las Vegas if there weren't casinos there?
Oil makes up 30% of UAE’s GDP and an even smaller percentage of Dubai’s: only 1% according to this Wikipedia article. Dubai is one of seven emirates that make up the UAE. Dubai has existed prior to the discovery of oil as a fishing and trade port, and has been rich before due to pearl diving. It was a major source of pearls before the Japanese invented cultured pearls.
The following map shows Bronze Age trade routes in purple:
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/roads-of-arabia-presents-hundreds-of-recent-finds-that-recast-the-regions-history-127324646/
There are good reasons to hate the UAE such as hosting US soldiers and normalizing with Israel. No need to lie about their history and origin.
Yeah, I don't think pearls or trade is making Dubai that rich anyhow any more. Especially after the Suez and like you said "cultured pearls.”
Neither is oil. The experience of losing pearl money and going poor for some years before oil was discovered is what motivated them to plan moving away from oil decades ago.
They are rich from trade though.
Are they trading slaves for money?
No, when people accuse the UAE of slavery they mean the oppressive and exploitive working conditions that abuse the class and wealth hierarchy, into a form akin to slavery. Not actual slavery where people are being sold outright, that is actually outlawed. In the same sense when people say prison labour, and undocumented migrant labour in some highly developed countries is a form of slave labour. It is not slavery in the traditional sense but still a grave abuse of human rights.
Some progress is being made on the matter, and there's still a long way ahead. India-UAE Progress on Migration Agreements and Mobility Pacts. India’s Labour Agreements with the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries: An Assessment.
Trade makes up 26% of it's GDP. That's the largest contributor.
Trade in what, that makes no sense... Oil and gas exports make up 85% of its economy
Once a city gets big enough it can be self sustaining from the people that live there and tourism even if manufacturing or resource extraction dies.
This is an even more apt comparison because the Mafia started setting up those casinos out in the middle of the desert so they could do so in a place where they could control all the laws
Behold; the epitome of success!
EDIT: first pictures were not Dubai so i changed them. Sorry!
(https://uae-dubai-pesci.weebly.com/poverty-and-policies.html)
(Worker/builders)
Dripping with success. The people who risk their lives building skyscrapers even get their own bed (sometimes)
That first photo is a very famous one of the Paraisópolis favela and the Morumbi district in São Paulo. (Source)
The second photo is of the Naya Nagar neighbourhood in Mumbai’s Dharavi area. (Source)
The third one is, however, actually what you purport it to be. (Source)
I imagine you're not trying to deceive people and I agree with the points you're trying to make but please make sure that you check your sources before spreading info
Fuck, now i feel bad. Really Cant trust the internet these days.
I changed it up and included the one picture i could find that appears authentic but because that picture of mumbai was actually labeled dubai i really dont know anymore.
Thanks for pointing it out.
I also found this one but its the same source as the mislabelled mumbai picture so i cant trust it.
Look on the right side. Graffiti says "Carlos Perez" and the flag has the word "presidente" in it. Neither Dubai nor Mumbai since nobody there would write graffiti in Latin alphabet or in Spanish for that matter.
The fuck.
Basically this entire article is a lie, the author framed it as pictures from their own trip even.
https://travellingtopics.com/slums-of-dubai/
Wait a minute, someone lied on the internet?!?
The third pic in this article is just AI slop
Dubai without oil would just be no different from Afghanistan.
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/1970/06/06/golden-dubai
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.
From Venezuela, as well.
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."
Italy's isn't dependent on pasta though. Dubai is dependent on oil.
Don't underestimate the
softal-dente-power Italian pasta projects across the globe.As for oil and Dubai: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Dubai
Dubai isn’t dependent on oil. Oil makes up 30% of the UAE’s economy and an even lesser percentage of Dubai’s specifically.
Oil and the pearl trade made Dubai rich, but they managed to escape this dependency.
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.
The temperature would be lower, because all that asphalt, glass and concrete create heat islands that traps heat and makes everything more miserable. It would smell nicer too, since Dubai has no sewers and garbage collection is awful, so the whole city smells like shit and putrefaction.
Is slavery woke fellas?
if wokism is about equal rights, ending slavery was the start of wokism in America
Yeah, the response agreed with them but seems to think it was a dunk.
Or maybe they're an ancap and want slavery back.
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.
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. The term acquired political connotations by the 1970s and gained further popularity in the 2010s with the hashtag #staywoke. Over time, woke came to be used to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and denial of LGBTQ rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.
This is why right wind douche canoes who go onto talk shows and news panels are always coming up short when asked what "woke" actually means. Because without a couple of paragraphs of obfuscating bullshit to attempt to offset the actual meaning, their points of view come off like Nazi racist assholery. And if they actually just described the real definition they would find the audience agreeing with being "woke".
I’ve long looked for a succinct definition of the pejorative sense of the word. Wikipedia delivers:
…
Though to be fair, tribalism is really hard to escape. Everyone seems to have a tribe.
I personally don’t identify with any of the large social movements taking place right now, on the right or the left. I do have a group of similar, like-minded friends. Now it seems like they’re my tribe.
This sounds like it makes you feel very safe. The fascists will likely come for you last.
No it doesn’t make me feel safe at all. It feels like 1920s Germany all over again!
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:
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Dubai
Impressive diversification, funded by oil.
Different countries do different things with their oil revenue. It could have been worse.
They also don't have sewage infrastructure.
Aka woke pipes
/s
I don’t think this is true anymore. Even in the past it wasn't mostly true anyways.
Well that's good. It's always good to have sewage infrastructure.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
Tomato; Tomato
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.
Obligatory
Its like a stage magician saying, "I do magic" and they get mad if some yells out how they do the trick.
Hey, that's unfair to magicians. The whole point of stage magic is that you are purposefully suspending disbelief in order to enjoy an entertainment show. Of course magic isn't real, the magician knows it, everyone in the audience knows it. That's not the point. The point is to relive childhood wonder via escapism. At the end of the day, what the magician does on the stage takes time, practice, dedication, skill, knowledge, showmanship and ingenuity to pull off properly. All feats to be celebrated and admired. Screaming how the trick is done ruins the experience for yourself, the magician and the entire audience. Like cheating at board games, or heckling a comedian, it's a bad faith transgression into the social contract of a show.
What this POS refers to in Dubai is causing human suffering at a massive scale, it's not an well meaning or heartfelt illusion. Calling it out is a protest. It's not equivalent at all.
It provokes anger
The broke mind virus strikes again!
Well, we can't deny that the silencing the opposition (like wokists) help to maintain a slavery society. So both are actually right. But one is a shitty fascist
The lack of wokeness in Dubai may be one of the condition for it's slavery system to exist. Both actors are reading the event from their point of view: a woke one, and a fascist one
And oil
Two sides of the same coin
This is true, according to Spec Ops: The Line.
They are both correct, only one of them is worth listening to though.
that the problem, you should