In the UK, Marks and Spencers started charging about 5p for a carrier bag. I changed my habits to re-using carrier bags almost instantly. They seem to have stopped that and just give out really posh carrier bags with proper handles and everything. This also works as they look too posh to just stuff with rubbish and throw out.
While it is possible to criticize the policies of Israel without being antisemitic (and you might be one of these people), the vast majority of the critics of Israel criticize Israel because they hate jews.
I think such a statement really requires some evidence. Israel is guilty of a large number of sins and it needs no prejudice on the part of anyone to criticise the state. Indeed there are large numbers of jewish people alone who are highly critical of the Israeli government and we can presume that most of these are not anti-semitic. If I were to say that Israel has bilked the american tax payer of over $15billion dollars in [i]military[/i] aid, then that's something you can verify (and you can verify it, btw). That statement exists independent of any value system.
If you were familiar with my writing you would see that I am highly critical of human rights abuses all over the world. But Israel is guilty of a lot and made more sickening because it is such a rich and powerful country.
I'd like to move it a little bit further away. I'm tired of all this ranting about global warming. Let the polar bears have their little ice floes, and I can get back to reading about something else!
Do you have to be an antisemite to disagree with the politics of Israel?
The Israeli government and many of its citizens are always implying so. The Israeli governments continual pretense (or perhaps its a genuine delusion) that they represent the Jewish people is one of the most insidious pieces of political trickery in the modern era. Being Jewish does not imply a particular political viewpoint of national affiliation. But some people don't half push the idea that it does...
And the Israeli tags are shaped like a little star because the government decided that it was a shape that conveyed their aspirations for a better, more peaceful society. And they're bright yellow to make them harder to misplace.
Of all the nations in the world you might hope would be wary of pervasive monitoring, you'd think one that bills itself as a "jewish state" would be it.
Sorry, but any form of government that requires the People to keep it working, and which does not take into account the fact that the populace is "uninformed and overly-obedient" is broken today.
Do we say a system is broken because it doesn't work when people stop using it? I don't know what government your expecting that doesn't depend on the People to keep it working, but I don't see anything other than a Machine dictatorship fitting the requirements. The existing US constitution and body of law provides what is needed to prevent the current corruptions. The issue is that the government is not working according to these rules. Ultimately, something must enforce the rules. Saying that the problem is with the rules themselves is not a complete truth, only very partially.
As for trying to punish the telecom companies for following the request of the government - well, I for one can't see how you can punish someone for doing what the Executive Branch asked for without punishing the Executive Branch as well.
There seems to be a growing confusion over what powers the US government has. Someone working in government has no more right to tell you to break a law than I have. And someone working in government has no more right to break a law than I have. If I tell you to murder someone and you're daft enough to do it, the crime is still yours. If you can only manage to convict the telecoms, it's still very much worth doing. But by all means try and get the people in government who requested illegal activities and provided false assurances as well. Why on Earth would you advocate failing twice, just because you can't help failing once?
If I understand you rightly (please verify), you are agreeing that the fundamental system is valid, but saying that it requires additional modifications to enable it to withstand the pressures of transnational corporatism. That's very interesting. It's an intriguing challenge to try and think of a way you could build safe-guards into the system to protect against this. As we have seen, there actually are safe-guards but the law and constitution is publically being ignored by the government. What you are asking for is a way of setting up rules that protect against people ignoring those rules. Problematic.
But not necessarily impossible.;) For a start, it's not a simple black and white system. It might be possible to be more explicit and vehement both in emphasising what constitutes variance from the written laws and in the punishments for doing so... something along the lines of "a congress that knowingly protects a member through amendment of existing law must immediately stand down and face an immediate re-election." Not very good - it's just a rapid example of the sort of stuff you could build in. Not fool-proof, but explicit and in your face enough that it's harder to turn a blind eye to. The other approach you could take would be to build pro-active countermeasures into public life through the constitution. Set up a body that has the power to enforce adherence to the law and with the power to prosecute congress (but only in regard to this) and to impeach presidents - a body with an non-negotiable mandate to prosecute on behalf of the public. Prevent disenfranchisement of the electorate through explicit, legal prevention of disbarrment such as by being a convicted felon. Publically fund all election campaigns and legally forbid other sources of funding (very difficult in practice, but damage control still has great benefits). I don't know how many of these actually do exist in some form and I'm just not aware of them, but I list them as illustrations of how a rule system could guard against people not paying attention to the rule-system; because that's essentially what you're asking for and it's difficult.
But I think my original statement is supportable: the problems are not with the fundamental and philosophical structures of the government, but with the enforcement of those structures. Now here in the UK, we do have a problem with the fundamentals, but that's a different area to be looked at. In the USA, you need to stop things like the Telecomms Immunity bill from happening and if possible, undo it and prosecute the telecoms. It would help stop a government promoting / inciting criminal activity in the future.
Punishing the telecoms for complying with the demands of federal officials will do nothing to address the fundamental problem: the federal officials felt within their rights to make the demands the first place.
That it was federal officials that told them to break the law carries no more weight than if I or you told them to break the law. The officials are undoubtedly at fault, but that does not mean the telecoms aren't as well. It's really, really important to drive this point home, because it's something that the govnernment seems to be convincing people isn't the case... but the government is not the law, they are just a legislative body. They are bound by it as is anybody else as well as the Constitution which is the foundation of the law of the United States of America. In going against the constitution and the law, the US government has lost legitimacy. The authority of the US government no longer comes from electoral and legal process, but from force alone. And on that basis, people will claim moral equivalency to it based on the force they can lay claim to themselves.
I also RTFA (and worse, I'm not ashamed of that), and they're pretty adamant it's not about the presence of life (past or present), so I wonder what it could be. If it's to do with the habitability of Mars, then the two candidates I can think of are: They've found a lot more water than expected. Enough that it would make a huge difference to the possibilities of colonising Mars. Or that they've found a useful fuel, e.g. a bumper crop of Uranium. I have no idea if the latter was even something they were equipped or trying to look for. I'm just listing the only things I can think of that have to do with habitability that would be worth getting a head start on.
The form of government of the USA is not "fundamentally broken in design and philosophy." In its design and philosophy, it is one of the best models that has been yet tried by the species. The problems have resulted from two things: Firstly, an uninformed and overly-obedient populace resulting from excessive media control and from everyone being too in-debt and thus too over-worked to invest time in their own government. Secondly, violation of the "design and philosophy" of the system by governing parties that has gone unpunished. You want a fundamental design and philosophy that works, but you have it! The Constitution is an advanced and well-thought out thing and shows impressive foresight and intelligence on the parts of its authors. But certain governments have wiped their arse on it. It's not a failure of fundamental design and philosophy, but of enforcement. Get the telecoms companies punished for breaking the law recently, and you've made a good start to fixing things.
Yes - either hordes of people are buying and playing music they don't like through the mind-control technologies of the music industry or... outlandish as it sounds, many people like something that you don't.
Complaining about Britney is doubly showing people's age, however: firstly for complaining about it, and secondly for being out of touch enough to continue complaining about its popularity long after its popularity has faded, or at least its certainly not the big thing anymore.
This is going to be hilarious in about ten years time: "What the fuck? We have a law against hitting ping pong balls into cups of beer! When did we make that?!??!!"
However, the nice artificial islands are in sharp contrast with the reality of how all these got made.
You are correct. I think my response to you was accurate, but it might have been over-vehement. As you can see from the way this thread has turned out (particularly if you browse at +0), there was a whole heap of messages which seemed to be motivated purely by a hatred of arabs - at least that's my assumption which I think is reasonable. Your post appeared to me to be a continuation of that, but was certainly not factually incorrect because of that. I apologise if I went over the top with my response.
One thing that is particularly bad, aside from the bare pittance the workers get paid, is that the workers are made to follow Islamic strictures such as fasting during the day in Ramadan. That's not healthy when you're working in the heat and the conditions those workers are in. Certainly things need to change and this is a legitimate criticism for which the city shoulders responsibility. I'll look out for Syriana if it's good. That's not the one that cause George Clooney's Smug Cloud, though, is it?;)
It's German for stock exchange, but I wasn't using German just for the sake of it - several major stock exchanges are named Borse Something Or Other. In this case, the entity is the 'Borse Dubai.' They're commercial entities in their own right, despite the obvious national entanglment. The Borse Dubai bought a 20% stake in the NASDAQ (aka the New York Stock Exchange) at the end of last year. That upset a number of people but, basically, there was too much money sloshing around and it was too low on the public radar to for the sale to be blocked. It will take a while before the US public wake up to this and will probably be a bit of a shock when they do. Just how in debt the USA is, is still something people haven't realised. Big business and the current government have done a sterling job of selling the country to foreign interests.
Do some more research. Prison is anything but profit in the US. It is a burden on local resources and eats tax dollars like candy.
I already did some research, thank you. It's not profit for you but it's profit for certain groups with a seeming ability to influence your government. For a start, yes, it eats up tax dollars. In other words, it's a nice way of shifting money from the public into private hands. The more people are locked up and for lesser and lesser crimes, the more the prison industry makes. Again, because it's really worth thinking about, the USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world. For one of the richest countries in the world, that should really make you question what's gone wrong. Now on the subject of prison labour, I've already given you a list of major US businesses that employ convicts at dirt-cheap rates. Do you think they would do this if it wasn't increasing their profits? If you want to see just how much of a business prison labour in the USA really is, then look at the website for Unicor aka, Federal Prison Industries, where you can grab yourself some "bargain" prison labour. The main issue is that exploiting people (80% non-violent crimes, by the way) to work for less then 50 cents an hour is wrong in itself, assuming you agree slave labour is wrong. But you might also consider the depressing effect such sub-market rates has on the wages of non-prisoner workers who are just trying to hold down a job.
You're right in several ways when you say that prison is a burden if you're talking about the general public. But you're wrong (and I wish you weren't) if you think there aren't powerful private interests that make very large sums of money from it. There is a financial incentive to get as many people as possible imprisoned and the people who benefit have lobbyists in Washington. I know this, because they're over here (UK) now as well and our own politicians are busy building super-prisons touting the same "tough on crime" rubbish that was used on your lot.
Check out a couple of the links. I've done my research. Your turn.;)
yes, but not at the cost of Chinese and Indian slave labor
I am aware of the exploitation of immigrant workers. But this sub-thread very rapidly reached the point where people were seeking things to condemn Dubai with. The sequence has gone:
"Dubai is a wasteland where camels eat any wiring - of course Internet connection is expensive" - Grossly innaccurate as shown.
"It's stupid for a city to be there, its only industry is oil and it shouldn't have been built" - Factually innaccurate as shown and explicit that there is something morally wrong for it existing.
"It's wrong for it to have been built by exploited immigrant workers." - Correct, but nowhere have I said otherwise. In fact, I agree. Fair wages should be paid and better conditions provided. However, this is only the latest step in a sequence of condemnation for the city being there in the first place. Where is all this hatred coming from? That workers there should be paid better is legitimate. But that is an argument that, well, workers should be better paid, not that the city shouldn't be there.
Again - where is all this hatred coming from? Does a major and developed city in the Middle East shock the people of the USA that much? I think it really does on some deep level. Judging by the irrational and factually incorrect abuse being hurled around here, it really does.
wow, you seem to have a real hardon here. Maybe you should stop and realize the middle east is a third world shithole.
I dislike innaccuracy. The ignorance and misinformation being hurled at me so passionately suggests to me that several people here want Dubai to be a desert wasteland. Perhaps facts such as the Dubai borse now owning 20% of the New York Stock Exchange are unsettling people.
I see buildings in a fucked up shithole wasteland. I'm sure Dubai is really great with no racism, no rampant class separation, no traffic problems, no public dress code, religious tolerance everywhere, and nice breezy T-shirt weather. Of course, I could be wrong.
And all this has precisely what to do with a poster who thought Internet must be expensive there because it was a desert filled with camels? I showed otherwise and told the AC he or she was stupid. And for some reason you think you are correcting me? Want to try reading the post you responded to and seeing what it actually said?
OP: "Dubai is a wasteland"
Me: "Rather a lot of skyscapers for a wasteland"
You: "Rant."
Pretty much until the hotels are full, I guess. If you're talking about Israelis, then you have a problem.But Jewish != Israeli. The nastiest trick the Israeli government pulls is to try and pretend it represents not a nation, but an ethnicity. Nobody should let another country define who they are and what they believe in.
Imagine that stretch of land without petro dollars. Would you see it and say to yourself: "This is where millions of people should live", or would you leave the place like any other desert?
Dubai has existed for centuries as a thriving port city and I don't remember there being a massive automobile industry in the 1700's. It has an excellent location for trade. But what, anyway, is the point of saying "yeah, but if it wasn't for the oil industry it wouldn't be like that..." It does have an oil industry and the people who live here are justified in using it to improve their living environment, are they not? Or perhaps you feel that they shouldn't. This is shifting, by the way. Dubai is now one of the worlds financial capitals. Not all business needs to be pulling things out of the ground and sticking them together anymore (thankfully).
Notice anything? Hmm, I notice a bunch of buildings built upon the backs of slave labor in the middle of a desert with zero natural resources.
No natural resources apart from... oil! Or do you believe that trade should be banned and things built only with the resources already local? The Middle East may also find itself a natural location for solar energy should it ever become viable (which bit by bit it starts to look as though it might). And before oil, Dubai has been also been an important trading point for centuries due to its prime location. Dubai has many reasons for existing, not the least of which is that people in that part of the world would like a city to live in. Or would you have them scattered about in tents, culture stifled?
Now the slave labour issue you are right to comment on. Immigrant workers in the UAE get a dreadful deal and this should change. However, I said nothing about this, only that the GP was talking out of his or her bottom when they called it "the middle of a shithole wasteland" where camels drifted randomly about the place eating copper wiring. Clearly this person needed educating as to the actual size and level of technological development of Dubai and I was happy to oblige - graphically.
Now you come at me with what I can only take to be some sort of condemnation of the existence of the city. Certainly if you're willing to put 2,000,000+ people up at your place you might be justified in suggesting getting rid of the place, but for the meantime, I think it's a bit wrong to condemn it for being there. As to the slave labour, I hope that improves but, assuming you are from the USA, it's worth pointing out that your country has its own slave labour industry only you call it "prison labour." Used in such stalwarts as Toys-R-Us, Honda, Konica, Microsoft where people have been paid as little as $0.50 per hour. Prison is profit in the USA. No wonder you have the highest incarceration rates in the World.
Obviously I'm not saying two wrongs make a right, but pointing out a false sense of superiority is a useful step toward improving things. And besides, my sole point was that Dubai is a big, highly-developed city and the OP is crassly wrong to think it is some wasteland.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK, Marks and Spencers started charging about 5p for a carrier bag. I changed my habits to re-using carrier bags almost instantly. They seem to have stopped that and just give out really posh carrier bags with proper handles and everything. This also works as they look too posh to just stuff with rubbish and throw out.
I think such a statement really requires some evidence. Israel is guilty of a large number of sins and it needs no prejudice on the part of anyone to criticise the state. Indeed there are large numbers of jewish people alone who are highly critical of the Israeli government and we can presume that most of these are not anti-semitic. If I were to say that Israel has bilked the american tax payer of over $15billion dollars in [i]military[/i] aid, then that's something you can verify (and you can verify it, btw). That statement exists independent of any value system.
If you were familiar with my writing you would see that I am highly critical of human rights abuses all over the world. But Israel is guilty of a lot and made more sickening because it is such a rich and powerful country.
I'd like to move it a little bit further away. I'm tired of all this ranting about global warming. Let the polar bears have their little ice floes, and I can get back to reading about something else!
The Israeli government and many of its citizens are always implying so. The Israeli governments continual pretense (or perhaps its a genuine delusion) that they represent the Jewish people is one of the most insidious pieces of political trickery in the modern era. Being Jewish does not imply a particular political viewpoint of national affiliation. But some people don't half push the idea that it does...
Out of morbid curiosity, why is my post modded as troll and why is the GP modded troll and flamebait? The historical resonances are pretty overt.
And the Israeli tags are shaped like a little star because the government decided that it was a shape that conveyed their aspirations for a better, more peaceful society. And they're bright yellow to make them harder to misplace.
Of all the nations in the world you might hope would be wary of pervasive monitoring, you'd think one that bills itself as a "jewish state" would be it.
Do we say a system is broken because it doesn't work when people stop using it? I don't know what government your expecting that doesn't depend on the People to keep it working, but I don't see anything other than a Machine dictatorship fitting the requirements. The existing US constitution and body of law provides what is needed to prevent the current corruptions. The issue is that the government is not working according to these rules. Ultimately, something must enforce the rules. Saying that the problem is with the rules themselves is not a complete truth, only very partially.
There seems to be a growing confusion over what powers the US government has. Someone working in government has no more right to tell you to break a law than I have. And someone working in government has no more right to break a law than I have. If I tell you to murder someone and you're daft enough to do it, the crime is still yours. If you can only manage to convict the telecoms, it's still very much worth doing. But by all means try and get the people in government who requested illegal activities and provided false assurances as well. Why on Earth would you advocate failing twice, just because you can't help failing once?
If I understand you rightly (please verify), you are agreeing that the fundamental system is valid, but saying that it requires additional modifications to enable it to withstand the pressures of transnational corporatism. That's very interesting. It's an intriguing challenge to try and think of a way you could build safe-guards into the system to protect against this. As we have seen, there actually are safe-guards but the law and constitution is publically being ignored by the government. What you are asking for is a way of setting up rules that protect against people ignoring those rules. Problematic.
But not necessarily impossible.
But I think my original statement is supportable: the problems are not with the fundamental and philosophical structures of the government, but with the enforcement of those structures. Now here in the UK, we do have a problem with the fundamentals, but that's a different area to be looked at. In the USA, you need to stop things like the Telecomms Immunity bill from happening and if possible, undo it and prosecute the telecoms. It would help stop a government promoting / inciting criminal activity in the future.
That it was federal officials that told them to break the law carries no more weight than if I or you told them to break the law. The officials are undoubtedly at fault, but that does not mean the telecoms aren't as well. It's really, really important to drive this point home, because it's something that the govnernment seems to be convincing people isn't the case... but the government is not the law, they are just a legislative body. They are bound by it as is anybody else as well as the Constitution which is the foundation of the law of the United States of America. In going against the constitution and the law, the US government has lost legitimacy. The authority of the US government no longer comes from electoral and legal process, but from force alone. And on that basis, people will claim moral equivalency to it based on the force they can lay claim to themselves.
Some very popular people suck cocks. Don't feel bad about it. :D
I'll admit I was pretty confused by your reply, though. Glad you explained.
Regards,
H.
I also RTFA (and worse, I'm not ashamed of that), and they're pretty adamant it's not about the presence of life (past or present), so I wonder what it could be. If it's to do with the habitability of Mars, then the two candidates I can think of are: They've found a lot more water than expected. Enough that it would make a huge difference to the possibilities of colonising Mars. Or that they've found a useful fuel, e.g. a bumper crop of Uranium. I have no idea if the latter was even something they were equipped or trying to look for. I'm just listing the only things I can think of that have to do with habitability that would be worth getting a head start on.
The form of government of the USA is not "fundamentally broken in design and philosophy." In its design and philosophy, it is one of the best models that has been yet tried by the species. The problems have resulted from two things: Firstly, an uninformed and overly-obedient populace resulting from excessive media control and from everyone being too in-debt and thus too over-worked to invest time in their own government. Secondly, violation of the "design and philosophy" of the system by governing parties that has gone unpunished. You want a fundamental design and philosophy that works, but you have it! The Constitution is an advanced and well-thought out thing and shows impressive foresight and intelligence on the parts of its authors. But certain governments have wiped their arse on it. It's not a failure of fundamental design and philosophy, but of enforcement. Get the telecoms companies punished for breaking the law recently, and you've made a good start to fixing things.
What the...? Oh, sorry - I meant to reply to the parent post of your comment. The "suckers for advertising" one. Apologies - my mistake.
Yes - either hordes of people are buying and playing music they don't like through the mind-control technologies of the music industry or... outlandish as it sounds, many people like something that you don't.
Complaining about Britney is doubly showing people's age, however: firstly for complaining about it, and secondly for being out of touch enough to continue complaining about its popularity long after its popularity has faded, or at least its certainly not the big thing anymore.
This is going to be hilarious in about ten years time: "What the fuck? We have a law against hitting ping pong balls into cups of beer! When did we make that?!??!!"
You are correct. I think my response to you was accurate, but it might have been over-vehement. As you can see from the way this thread has turned out (particularly if you browse at +0), there was a whole heap of messages which seemed to be motivated purely by a hatred of arabs - at least that's my assumption which I think is reasonable. Your post appeared to me to be a continuation of that, but was certainly not factually incorrect because of that. I apologise if I went over the top with my response.
;)
One thing that is particularly bad, aside from the bare pittance the workers get paid, is that the workers are made to follow Islamic strictures such as fasting during the day in Ramadan. That's not healthy when you're working in the heat and the conditions those workers are in. Certainly things need to change and this is a legitimate criticism for which the city shoulders responsibility. I'll look out for Syriana if it's good. That's not the one that cause George Clooney's Smug Cloud, though, is it?
Regards,
Harmony.
It's German for stock exchange, but I wasn't using German just for the sake of it - several major stock exchanges are named Borse Something Or Other. In this case, the entity is the 'Borse Dubai.' They're commercial entities in their own right, despite the obvious national entanglment. The Borse Dubai bought a 20% stake in the NASDAQ (aka the New York Stock Exchange) at the end of last year. That upset a number of people but, basically, there was too much money sloshing around and it was too low on the public radar to for the sale to be blocked. It will take a while before the US public wake up to this and will probably be a bit of a shock when they do. Just how in debt the USA is, is still something people haven't realised. Big business and the current government have done a sterling job of selling the country to foreign interests.
I already did some research, thank you. It's not profit for you but it's profit for certain groups with a seeming ability to influence your government. For a start, yes, it eats up tax dollars. In other words, it's a nice way of shifting money from the public into private hands. The more people are locked up and for lesser and lesser crimes, the more the prison industry makes. Again, because it's really worth thinking about, the USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world. For one of the richest countries in the world, that should really make you question what's gone wrong. Now on the subject of prison labour, I've already given you a list of major US businesses that employ convicts at dirt-cheap rates. Do you think they would do this if it wasn't increasing their profits? If you want to see just how much of a business prison labour in the USA really is, then look at the website for Unicor aka, Federal Prison Industries, where you can grab yourself some "bargain" prison labour. The main issue is that exploiting people (80% non-violent crimes, by the way) to work for less then 50 cents an hour is wrong in itself, assuming you agree slave labour is wrong. But you might also consider the depressing effect such sub-market rates has on the wages of non-prisoner workers who are just trying to hold down a job.
;)
You're right in several ways when you say that prison is a burden if you're talking about the general public. But you're wrong (and I wish you weren't) if you think there aren't powerful private interests that make very large sums of money from it. There is a financial incentive to get as many people as possible imprisoned and the people who benefit have lobbyists in Washington. I know this, because they're over here (UK) now as well and our own politicians are busy building super-prisons touting the same "tough on crime" rubbish that was used on your lot.
Check out a couple of the links. I've done my research. Your turn.
I am aware of the exploitation of immigrant workers. But this sub-thread very rapidly reached the point where people were seeking things to condemn Dubai with. The sequence has gone:
"Dubai is a wasteland where camels eat any wiring - of course Internet connection is expensive" - Grossly innaccurate as shown.
"It's stupid for a city to be there, its only industry is oil and it shouldn't have been built" - Factually innaccurate as shown and explicit that there is something morally wrong for it existing.
"It's wrong for it to have been built by exploited immigrant workers." - Correct, but nowhere have I said otherwise. In fact, I agree. Fair wages should be paid and better conditions provided. However, this is only the latest step in a sequence of condemnation for the city being there in the first place. Where is all this hatred coming from? That workers there should be paid better is legitimate. But that is an argument that, well, workers should be better paid, not that the city shouldn't be there.
Again - where is all this hatred coming from? Does a major and developed city in the Middle East shock the people of the USA that much? I think it really does on some deep level. Judging by the irrational and factually incorrect abuse being hurled around here, it really does.
I dislike innaccuracy. The ignorance and misinformation being hurled at me so passionately suggests to me that several people here want Dubai to be a desert wasteland. Perhaps facts such as the Dubai borse now owning 20% of the New York Stock Exchange are unsettling people.
And all this has precisely what to do with a poster who thought Internet must be expensive there because it was a desert filled with camels? I showed otherwise and told the AC he or she was stupid. And for some reason you think you are correcting me? Want to try reading the post you responded to and seeing what it actually said?
OP: "Dubai is a wasteland"
Me: "Rather a lot of skyscapers for a wasteland"
You: "Rant."
Pretty much until the hotels are full, I guess. If you're talking about Israelis, then you have a problem.But Jewish != Israeli. The nastiest trick the Israeli government pulls is to try and pretend it represents not a nation, but an ethnicity. Nobody should let another country define who they are and what they believe in.
Dubai has existed for centuries as a thriving port city and I don't remember there being a massive automobile industry in the 1700's. It has an excellent location for trade. But what, anyway, is the point of saying "yeah, but if it wasn't for the oil industry it wouldn't be like that..." It does have an oil industry and the people who live here are justified in using it to improve their living environment, are they not? Or perhaps you feel that they shouldn't. This is shifting, by the way. Dubai is now one of the worlds financial capitals. Not all business needs to be pulling things out of the ground and sticking them together anymore (thankfully).
No natural resources apart from... oil! Or do you believe that trade should be banned and things built only with the resources already local? The Middle East may also find itself a natural location for solar energy should it ever become viable (which bit by bit it starts to look as though it might). And before oil, Dubai has been also been an important trading point for centuries due to its prime location. Dubai has many reasons for existing, not the least of which is that people in that part of the world would like a city to live in. Or would you have them scattered about in tents, culture stifled?
Now the slave labour issue you are right to comment on. Immigrant workers in the UAE get a dreadful deal and this should change. However, I said nothing about this, only that the GP was talking out of his or her bottom when they called it "the middle of a shithole wasteland" where camels drifted randomly about the place eating copper wiring. Clearly this person needed educating as to the actual size and level of technological development of Dubai and I was happy to oblige - graphically.
Now you come at me with what I can only take to be some sort of condemnation of the existence of the city. Certainly if you're willing to put 2,000,000+ people up at your place you might be justified in suggesting getting rid of the place, but for the meantime, I think it's a bit wrong to condemn it for being there. As to the slave labour, I hope that improves but, assuming you are from the USA, it's worth pointing out that your country has its own slave labour industry only you call it "prison labour." Used in such stalwarts as Toys-R-Us, Honda, Konica, Microsoft where people have been paid as little as $0.50 per hour. Prison is profit in the USA. No wonder you have the highest incarceration rates in the World.
Obviously I'm not saying two wrongs make a right, but pointing out a false sense of superiority is a useful step toward improving things. And besides, my sole point was that Dubai is a big, highly-developed city and the OP is crassly wrong to think it is some wasteland.
He lost?