Originally published at: Disabled US veteran faces Dubai jail over pain meds - Boing Boing
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I don’t don’t get why people want to go to Dubai
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Is a dystopian hellscape that has managed to convince naive outsiders (and privileged insiders) that it’s actually a utopia.
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I’m right there with you. My inclination for a comment was:
Explain it to me like I’m five: Why would any one want to travel to Dubai?
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Dubai has been selling itself as a country where a Western middle class amount of money can provide a luxury experience, for both tourists and Western workers who take jobs there. They leave out the absurdly draconian drug laws, slavery, debtor’s prisons, lack of basic rights for various groups, and how employers can screw over workers without recourse.
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“Come for the cool jetpacks and indoor ski resorts. Stay for the indefinite detention.”
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Because you’re too fancy for The Villages, but fall for the same “let’s pretend we’re private jet rich” schtick.
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Nobody is serving time in Dubai for three poppy seeds. A little skepticism is a good thing Mark Frauenfelder.
Perhaps not (that case is not confirmed nor disproven). However…
For all the glitz that attracts nouveau riche trash from the West, it’s still a backwards authoritarian slave state whose inbred leaders can’t tell the difference between a narcotic and a spice.
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When you look at them a bit more closely, most utopias are.
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Grooverider was the more famous case
also
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For popular US entertainers… easy big money at public and private events.
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My daughter went to Dubai on a work trip, interviewing teachers and students at international schools about the interface design in educational software. She and colleagues knocked around a bit during their time off. She said it was an interesting experience but she wouldn’t bother to go back for a holiday.
There isn’t much there except the world’s largest air-conditioned mall, the world’s tallest skyscraper, and other such “nouveau riche” government sponsored excesses.
The original culture has been either pushed into enclaves or packaged into tourist friendly encounters.
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Um, welcome to BoingBoing! ?
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dubai is so fucked. I wish merkin von bankrupt would move himself and his gobshite family members there: they deserve each other. Stick 'em on a few of those stinking, sinking islands.
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A work flight had a stop there in 2017. People-watching at the airport was interesting - it’s a big transport hub that’s really close to a lot of places. You see Arabian, Indian, Pakistani, and Central African clothing everywhere, and my ears were bathing the sounds of the languages.
I had precisely zero urges to step outside the airport, maybe because I’d talked to people who’d lived there. “Nothing interesting there is real” was a common refrain.
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I don’t think the tourists come for the drug laws; but I have the unpleasant suspicion that everything else on that list is essential rather than incidental to the experience advertised.
It’s obviously not like that can of tomato sauce in the grocery store here is so affordable thanks to an impeccably ethical supply chain; but it’s running a Dubai-style labor market that allows people on fairly middling white collar salaries to be chatting about how to find the best live-in domestic labor at the Tadbeer center.
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Many people mistakenly believe that Dubai is just one big shopping mall, but it’s actually a series of separate shopping malls that are adjacent to each other.
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I’ve never been there and have no real desire to go but it sounds like the UAE looked at Las Vegas and said “hold my beer” (metaphorically).
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Some of the rest of it gets ignored too, as people from vulnerable groups also want to join in what they think will be some safe, Disney-style experience of 19th century-style wealth. (Where yeah, the human cost - to others - is an implied part of the charm. Which is why I’m not terribly sympathetic to most people who run afoul of the draconian shit that they didn’t think would apply to them.)
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