Woke means eyes are open

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?

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.

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.
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:
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.”
- 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.
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

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.

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."
- Italy's isn't dependent on pasta though. Dubai is dependent on oil.
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.
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.

Isn't that the same thing?

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.
- 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.
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.
No, not oil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Dubai
- Impressive diversification, funded by oil.

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. 👍

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.

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?

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.

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.

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