Man smokes legal weed in Nevada, gets arrested in Dubai, could face 3 years

we took the dam tour maybe 20 years ago - when you could still go down inside and see all the gigantic generators and such. It was pretty fascinating and a remarkable feat of engineering. Not sure if they still allow this with all the paranoia over security and such. (we went there pre-9/11).

The kids thought the Kidd Marshmallow Factory tour was the highlight of the trip however. Alas it is no more…

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Mt Charleston is great, depending on the time of year you go there can be snow up there and as a bonus there’s wild horses in the area :smiley: if you’re lucky you might see them.

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You can criticise both. You are only a hypocrite if you are part of the US prison industry.

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That’s most of us, a majority, or we wouldn’t have it.

There’s active involvement, and there is the more passive kind that comes with being part of a society. There is more culpability for one than the other. But even then, you got to make some caveats for people whose best or almost only options are working for the US prison system (as in some places, they are one of the only employers in the region).

But yes, we’re all at least partially culpable for the US prison system, if you live in the US. That doesn’t mean that we can’t criticize others, as @anon73430903 notes. Being critical and discussing issues such as the problem of incarceration both here and abroad is part of how you raise awareness and move the issue forward into the public consciousness more generally. The problem comes in when you act like your country doesn’t have this problem while criticizing another country that also has the problem, especially when that country is one that is bound up with the history of modern imperialism (as is the case with the ME in the 20th century).

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Yah, it’s most worrisome in that direction- if I’m drinking and the government decides I’m a Muslim, how do I prove I’m not, and what does that even mean? Now we have the government defining religion, deciding what’s in my head about it, and picking winners and losers in that area, all of which is not something I like the sound of. Of course, the US does some of this as well (deciding who gets to have their corporation be tax free because it is a “religious organization”, etc) but at least here we try to minimize that.

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Not a good one, though.

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Everything @Grey_Devil mentioned plus the Erotic Heritage Museum. Also, Lawry’s The Prime Rib cooks up the dead cows very nicely.

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But keep in mind, how critical tourism is to the Dubai economy. Too many stories like this one or ones where the rights of non-Muslims rights are being trampled is not going to be good news for that. One’s passport probably helps. In this case, it seems like the nurses were required to both test for and call the police with regards to marijuana use. I’m guessing that they did not immediately know when he arrived in the city.

And of course, this is from the Daily Fail, so we should keep that in mind. They’re not exactly know for their Muslim-friendly positions.

But as for the US, we currently have a Supreme Court that’s going to rule in favor of Evangelical Christianity more and more, such as with their most recent ruling:

More rulings like this mean that they’re going to be far less likely to strike down state laws that allow for religious based bigotry. There were victories in the middle of last century in support of a strong separation of church and state, but that’s really unraveling in favor of one particular flavor of Christianity being enshrined in law (white Evangelicalism).

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I think it can be even more subtle than that, as in when people only notice when it happens in another country. Jailing people for trivial drug offenses is a daily occurrence in the US. NY cops used to (maybe still do) stop and frisk minorities, force them to turn out their pockets and then bust them for illegal “public display of drugs” for amounts that were not otherwise an arrestable offense.

If we write articles as if Dubi’s arrest of a person is especially notable vs. the general din of American injustice people will get a false sense of that kind of injustice being a “foreign” or “Muslim” thing when it is not.

Also, every time I’ve tried to track down the poppy seed article’s original source it ends in a dead end. So I don’t even know if that one really happened. Meanwhile, in the US, people are arrested and jailed for things that weren’t even drugs. Our system is that much worse than the Dubai system in that sense. It’s not necessarily hypocrisy to report on the Dubai story, but it is skewed relative to the actual frequency.

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Don’t go to Dubai with a bread roll poppy seed on your sweater. Don’t go to Dubai with a microscopic speck of pot on your shoe. And don’t be like Peter Clark, an American who smoked pot in Las Vegas and was imprisoned in Dubai days later for having trace amounts of THC in his blood.

Or, better yet, just don’t go to Dubai at all. I noticed the UAE had a booth at a previous Game Developer’s Conference, trying to get people interested in setting up studios there, but my only reaction to that was, “lol, NO.” I really hope they didn’t sucker too many people into doing what this guy did… I’d say a good percentage of (American) game developers would find themselves on the wrong side of the law there.

Tax and other incentives. (He wasn’t trying to find one, but set one up.) They’re making an effort to attract game developers, for some reason. But yeah, supremely dumb.

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Sure, but it’s not true of all of us.

Yes, and I tend to be really sensitive to that, as it’s a deep strain of western bigotry baked into our society - Said’s Orientalism and all that. And, again, this is a Daily Fail article, so that needs to be taken into consideration.

But that doesn’t mean that these rather oppressive states can’t be criticized at all by people who live in the west. I’d much rather see a criticism that takes the global nature of incarceration and policing in a modern state, wherever it is, into consideration.

Here are the overall stats for UAE:

https://prisonstudies.org/country/united-arab-emirates

It is a kind of clickbait, however I think it also shows it’s a global problem with regards to prohibition.

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This reminds me if when Gigi Gorgeous decided to go to Dubai or was it some other city over there but none the less she got stuck in the airport because she’s trans and they were seriously thinking of arresting her. This is why I don’t overseas for the most part you just don’t know what hare brained law is gonna snag you. It’s not worth the hassle. Heck, I rarely go out of state. Like if I had to go out west, I’d dodge all of Mormon country (Utah) entirely. Just not worth the headache either.

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Covid put an end to my 25 year run of travelling UK to Vegas every April for the NAB show. The last few years I’ve made a point of staying on and doing something different after the show.

  • Hiking in Red Rock Canyon is great
  • One year I kayaked the Colorado for the day, starting from the bottom of the Hoover Dam - https://www.blazinpaddles.com/ - absolutely incredible
  • Shooting all sorts of guns out at Bullets and Burgers
  • Zipwires in Bootleg Canyon are v cool
  • Trip for 2020 was meant to be a couple of nights staying on the south rim of the Canyon. Didn’t fancy the long drive, so figured out flights with Grand Canyon Scenic Airlines each way.

Next NAB is meant to be happening this October, we’ll see…

(ETA: NAB = National Association of Broadcasters, one of the two biggest broadcast equipment shows - the other being our IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) in Amsterdam, usually September but might be December this year…)

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I might sound Midwestern on main here, but I think you go to Dubai to go to a place where everything is expensive, so you can tell people you went to a place where everything is expensive. Do I have that right?

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That’s probably not true.

Some of the best technical rockclimbing in the US.

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THC-9 isn’t really detectable in urine, they are actually testing for the metabolite THC-COOH in urine. For regular cannabis users, this remains detectable in urine for up to 30 days after complete abstinence. If you are such a person, don’t even think about going to Dubai or probably any other middle eastern or totalitarian country with draconian drug laws.
https://www.mayocliniclabs.com/test-info/drug-book/marijuana.html

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And has plenty of rock climbing that’s very newbie friendly that require no special equipment, just mindfulness of your footing, the direction you’re going to and where you’ve been, and beyond that it’s a blast. They do have some parts where people can use rock climbing gear though :smiley: last time i went me and my friends were watching a group of rock climbers go up a really challenging overhang

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It’s absolutely the case. It’s somewhere between 30 and maybe as many as 50 million people in some form of bondage. Just because it doesn’t look like antebellum chattel slavery doesn’t mean it’s not slavery.

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Slavery/SRSlavery/Pages/SRSlaveryIndex.aspx

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California.

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