I'm surprised not to see the article mention the previous report[1] about the three men who were sentenced to death, the killing of one, and the decades long prison sentences for others over their opposition to this project.
Karmic justice requires this project to be crushed by the sand that these arrogant dictators tried to impose their steel dick over.
> I'm surprised not to see the article mention the previous report[1] about the three men who were sentenced to death, the killing of one, and the decades long prison sentences for others
It's a small number of people, who are opposing known tyrants, foolishly. The ruling class can kill and enslave, at will. The indentured servitude imposed on thousands of immigrants who built and maintain it, is much more concerning imo.
It's a barbaric country. US support has created another blemish on US history. Was it worth it to ensure safe seas to enable global commercialism, which kept most of the world stable for decades? I do not, but I'll never be in charge either way.
“ According to the Book of Exodus, Moses was born in a time when his people, the Israelites, an enslaved minority, were increasing in population and, as a result, the Egyptian Pharaoh worried that they might ally themselves with Egypt's enemies.[7] Moses' Hebrew mother, Jochebed, secretly hid him when Pharaoh ordered all newborn Hebrew boys to be killed in order to reduce the population of the Israelites.”
Which should never be quoted as a historical reference, since:
> No references to Moses appear in any Egyptian sources prior to the fourth century BC, long after he is believed to have lived. No contemporary Egyptian sources mention Moses, or the events of Exodus–Deuteronomy, nor has any archaeological evidence been discovered in Egypt or the Sinai wilderness to support the story in which he is the central figure.
It's a fictional religious story about how the people who themselves wrote the story are chosen by their diety, victims of the "other" heathens, and very cool.
No, they said that anti-Semitism originates in Europe and you countered that the text had anti-Semitism in it. You were clearly insinuating that the text is historical and disproved their argument.
Rome is in Europe. You're obviously using "European" with some meaning more concrete than just "People who live in Europe, or with a historical connection to Europe" or else you're using "Europe" with a meaning more concrete than just "The bit of Eurasia east of the Urals and north of the Black Sea". But can you clarify how, exactly, you're using it?
FTA: “However, it has long attracted scepticism and criticism, not least after the reported execution of several members of the Howeitat tribe who had protested over plans to construct on their ancestral lands.”
Indeed, there is a reason for the saying "what comes around, goes around". In this case, a prestige project that the Saudis try to market themselves to the world as modern and green and ambitious, but they still are quite authoritarian in the end.
The Saudis announced six megaprojects in 2005. King Abdullah Economic City was the only one that went anywhere. I believe it was supposed to have 2 million people and reached about 7 thousand.
They've kicked people out of the area, killed at least one person, trashed the area with initial construction efforts (I've driven past) and now the inevitable seems to be coming to pass already.
They still have time but they need to do something to diversify from oil in the way Dubai has eventually. Building a new Dubai, with a different legal framework (only rumoured for Neom AFAIK), doesn't seem like the worst idea to me, but starting with an overly ambitious design probably isn't the way to get traction. The Middle East do love a pissing contest though so starting small isn't what they're into.
Is Dubai really diversified away from oil? My naive impression is that it’s a major center for capital, with most of that capital coming from oil.
Saudi diversification from oil is a fantasy. The culture is medieval from the POV of the rest of the world, and the hostile climate is only getting worse.
In 2018 bout 67% of Saudi's exports were essentially zero-value-add extracted oil & gas. About 12% were higher-value chemicals (still mostly basic chemicals, though some amount of super-high-value advanced materials or agrichemical or specialty chemicals). Value-added chemical exports as a % of total exports increased by 2021 although the data now includes a giant block for "trade data discrepancy", so results are not directly comparable to 2018.
In 2018 "only" 43% of UAE's exports were zero-value-add extracted oil & gas. 11-12% was "Gold, Diamonds, Precious Metals"(?). The rest is pretty evenly split between very different industries - value-added chemicals, electronics, cars, metals, industrial machines, and textiles.
Overall, UAE pulls in a higher % of their foreign currency from non-oil-and-gas economic activity than Saudi does, but still leans heavily on it for 40-60% of their exports. Saudi exports ~20% more oil & gas than UAE on a nominal total USD basis. However, UAE's total exports are 30-40% higher than Saudi's on a total USD basis. So UAE sells less oil, more other stuff.
If I had to pick, I'd definitely rather be in Dubai's position than Saudi's. I've also lived in both places, and I'd definitely say that Dubai appeared to have a more diverse economy and drew from a deeper talent pool (mostly immigrant-based, though).
I'm not sure if Saudi Arabia can reproduce the success. The entirety of Arabian peninsula is pretty much immune to cultural development, but Dubai got a pass because they were the first ones in that area to try building a normal healthy economy, meanwhile whatever Saudis do, they have to compete with Dubai which is already highly developed.
My point being, why would people invest in Saudi Arabia if they can invest in Dubai.
I think Dubai has from oil production, at least on the surface. Much of its economy is in retail, tourism, construction, transport, IT and financial services, etc. Yes the initial capital came from oil, the bigger issues for them now are perhaps how much comes from debt and how much comes from neighbouring states if their oil economies collapse.
Saudi is at the mercy of it's leader and little else. The culture isn't generally medieval but the Al Saud certainly can be.
I think these projects mostly exist to funnel away / launder money, no one really thinks they will become reality. A multi-decade mega project is just a great way to divert large amounts of money without raising too much suspicion as there’s very little oversight of what’s really happening there.
my boss' guess was that it was to fund a nuclear weapons program but keep it hidden. or a climate change / fallout bunker for 1/3 of the kingdom.
like it's big, elaborate build outs, nothing delivered, and some sort of under the table deal nuclear with Trump's brother in law that got him a Billion. the Iranians have, or can rapidly enrich, and Israel is popping off again (and may have ~100 nukes), so Saudi has means, motive, opportunity.
infrastructure required to build silos, and infrastructure required to build the City Of The Future are going to look more or less the same for 3-4 years -- lots of big holes, running trenches, piping and power, etc. -- and after a few years they can call it a failure and quietly sweep it under the rug with the rationalization that it's been a failure and they're ashamed of it.
Pretty much this. The companies subcontracted on Neom all had some amount of investment or ownership from either the royal family's fund or the sovereign fund.
But is the money spent coming from different pockets? Doesn't necessarily counter your argument though, could be sovereign fund -> family, with those contractors owned by the source pocket effectively being noops in terms of that funneling.
And even that could still very much be worthwhile, as in generate business for the company, sell off the company to external investors based on those numbers and later phase out the artificially generated demand.
Authoritarian regimes aren't as unitary as people think they are - in reality you have multiple power bases and factions to keep happy (and they have their own family offices).
Furthermore, we live in a globalized world. In 2024, almost every country is dependent on international investors bringing in liquidity. Graft is fine, so long as execution happens.
This means you have multiple different firms joining in these kinds of infra investments. Some are international investors (eg. Citigroup, HSBC, Jardins), some are regional investors (eg. SNB, SAB), some are family offices, and some are the government itself.
The international investors are used to maintain international credibility, the regional investors are used as fixers by the international investors, the family offices are those regionally prominent members who can make or break procurement, and the government investment funds that act as the lubricant to manage all these different factions.
Basically, these investments are used to not only show off regional power, but also pay off regionally prominent factions via Family Offices or minority ownership.
This happens from Saudi Arabia (eg. Neom) to Japan [0] to South Korea [1] to Poland [2]. This is very common in newly developed countries as well as developing countries (eg. CCDI's crackdown on land corruption in China, the Odenbrecht scandal in Brazil, the various Adani linked scandals in India).
> as in generate business for the company, sell off the company to external investors
There's no reason to. Once a connected company executes successfully on large regional projects, they can become international players. This is what happened to Reliance in the 2000s, Adani in the 2010s, Odenbrecht in Brazil in the 1990s-2000s, Polimeks in Turkiye in the 2000s, Wanda Group in China in the 2000s, etc.
Oh, I can totally believe that Saudi's crown prince does believe in the project. After all, if you're a Saudi government officer, what are you going to do? Say no to the Crown Prince?
I'm sure a lot of underlings are making a fortune out of the budget, but I don't believe that was the initial motivation for the project. Consider yourself in the shoes of bin Salman. Why would you need to funnel money away, when you are the absolute monarch and the whole country is yours? It makes about as much difference as taking coins out of your left pocket and shoving it back to the right pocket.
Not so daft if you consider that it is easier to segment, stratify, and control people in a linear city, as the structure itself acts as a continuous and infinitely adaptable choke point. This seems consistent with Saudi elite's ideas on managing their society.
That explains why it might have been an appealing concept to the inceptor but it's still daft and it was obvious to me from the start that it wouldn't actually be made. I still don't know why anybody humored the premise of this thing getting built.
Of course it is - this is clearly prince's personal ego stroking project and wall placed across nearly the whole province looks adequate than just some 'boring' circular megacity
Is that actually true from a transportation physics perspective? I can’t imagine that a curved tram/train/etc. would be able to accelerate and decelerate as efficiently as one on a straight path.
Acceleration and deceleration aren't relevant here, the limit would be passenger comfort either way.
Curved tracks do mean limits on top speed, as the centrifugal force needs to be kept below what would be uncomfortable for passengers. It also can cause some issues for building stations, as curved stations require a wider gap between the train and the platform. But neither is a blocking issue, all train tracks in the world do have curve, and curved stations aren't unusual in public transport systems.
The grandparent probably means disk, not ring-shaped when mentioning circles anyway. Pick any 2 point at random into a 33km² circle, the average distance will be 4km, and worst case scenario 6km. Do the same thing in a 33km², 200m-wide "line", the average distance will be 85km, with a worst case of 170km. A circular city doesn't need nearly as much raw speed for it's public transport to be more efficient than transport in a nonsensical linear city could ever be, even if you throw in ridiculously fast trains and sprinkle magical AI thinking.
It's not a coincidence that all major cities are roughly circular even though they are built around roughly linear features (navigable rivers and/or coast line). It's just what naturally works.
Acceleration etc wouldn't really matter if I live at one end of the line and my
friend lives at the opposite end. It would be an annoyingly long journey that stops at every single other station in the entire city.
In a regular city that grows outwards, you'd expect there to be circumferential routes as well as cross-city routes connecting various points, making the travel time more bearable.
I sort of assume they would have express trains as well as local trains, a bit like the NY subway. I.e. one train which just goes direct to the other end with no stops at high speed.
Wikipedia article mentions "the Spine" - an underground tunnel that would host transport superfast train infrastructure connecting both sides of the complex. Traveling from one end to another would take 20mins, supposedly.
With no top speed, accelerate for 85km at 1m/s then decelerate for the next 85km/s at 1m/s and that's about 13 minutes with a top speed of about 900mph. 1m/s is the top acceleration you can have for a typical passenger train for comfort purposes.
Total area of a 170km*200m city is 34 square km, or a city about 6.5km across.
London's Elizabeth line (crossrail) covers a distance of 6.75km from Paddington to Liverpool Street in 11 minutes, with 3 intermediate stops.
The circumference of a 6.5km diameter city would be 20km. 20 cross-city lines with decent headway and interchange would give a worst case journey of
The Line (full length) is supposed to have a footprint of 34km2, that's a circle with a diameter of 3.3km/2 miles. That's a bike-sized city. You can easily add 50% of parks and waterways to get to a nice city, that makes it 4km/2.5 miles.
And you can still build mostly straight-line trams in a circle anyway.
circular/disk cities are basically line cities that are copied and rotated, you still can build straight line transport. If you talk about real circle cities and not disks-the idea is just as bad as straight line
A tram or even regular trains would not have to be very fast for those distances and for faster trains we already have the technology to lean into curves - it‘s quite common in Europe.
And why not build a radial subway to get on to the opposing side of a circular city?
(And why build this nonsense in a desert at all?)
Yeah, but it wouldn't have as far to go, since the maximum distance between any two stations is half as far on a ring city of circumference d as on a linear city of length d, and you can get even shorter if you cut across the ring.
To get the same area, you'd have to have slightly more center-line circumference on a ring city as linear distance on a line, but even so your transit distances are going to be shorter on the ring.
Right but if the idea is to maximize the open space / city size while maintaining a fast transit system, then the line makes sense to me.
I guess I don’t really understand the criticism, most of which seems to be “you should just build something that isn’t the thing you want to build.” There is plenty of aesthetic merit to the linear city idea on its own.
To use an example of a place that already exists: the city Łódź in Poland is situated along a single linear 4-5km street. Other neighborhoods branch off from it, but essentially the main road is the city’s layout. I really like it and think it’s a lot more interesting than it would be as a circle, even if the transit is theoretically not as optimal. There is something very aesthetically appealing about it.
> the city Łódź in Poland is situated along a single linear 4-5km street.
Are we just making things up? Just by a single glance at a map of Łódź you can see that this is not true. The city is clearly blob shaped.
> I guess I don’t really understand the criticism, most of which seems to be “you should just build something that isn’t the thing you want to build.”
The criticism is that there are reasons why cities are built the way they are built. "Looks good on a 3d render" is not a great reason to do something, and the reasons the proponents list don't hold up to scrutiny.
And yes, as I wrote, it is the main axis of the city, even if other neighborhoods branch off of it. This is a basic obvious fact about the city:
From the very beginning this street was the central axis, around which the city grew bigger, and its development spontaneously gave the present shape to its centre. At first the city was mainly the highway, but later it changed into the city's showcase, the leisure and shopping centre, where the life of growing industrial agglomeration could be observed.
Found it. None of that claims that "the city Łódź in Poland is situated along a single linear 4-5km street". It is not. So much so that if you look at it on a map, you can't see which one of the many streets is the one which is supposed to be the one you are talking about. I really recommend looking at a map if you want to make claims about how a city is.
What the sentence you are quoting claims is that this is the street the city grow out of. Which is a different statement than saying that the one you said. The "the city Łódź in Poland is situated along a single linear 4-5km street" describe the appearance and layout of the city today, the quote you are quoting describe the history of the city and in which order it was built out.
I’ve been to Lodz myself probably a dozen times. The city is oriented around the main long street. The street itself is probably the main tourist attraction, as well.
You can’t tell what it is on a map because you wouldn’t expect a pedestrianized street to be 100m wide. But I assure you, it is the busiest street and has the most foot traffic and commercial activity.
This argument is such a waste of time. I’ve been there, you’ve spent five minutes looking at Google maps. I brought it up as an example of a city designed around a straight line. Which it is.
>if the idea is to maximize the open space / city size while maintaining a fast transit system
Then it's Goodhart law in action. A fast transit system is desirable because it's a proxy for low-friction travel. This has the speed and the friction.
Yeah, I'm really struggling to understand why a linear city is appealing. I suppose if you set a hard limit of one train line in your city, then building it along that train line might make sense.
You'd spend a lot of time on that one train line though - and I imagine in the central bits it would get really really busy as people are trying to get to the other end. And what happens if that train line breaks?
Making a city circular takes advantage of geometry - even at the cost of having to build more than one train line. It also opens up the possibility of other forms of travel - buses, bikes, cars.
It doesn't surprise me that this is starting to fall apart. When it was announced it seemed completely unhinged.
If you have a requirement to build a city where everyone is within 1 mile of virgin forest, say, then you end up with something much like a line. You could circle it, but that's just another form of line.
A linear city gives you more opportunities for expansion. A disc one needs to be planned well from the start, but it's difficult to account for future needs.
I don’t understand how this can possibly be true. You have one only degree of freedom in a straight line. Most cities develop a natural disc pattern because it allows for expansion at every degree.
The line is the initial city design. But then in 20, 100, 500 years you have two empty sides (equally accessible from any place in the line city) which you can use for more infrastructure (e.g. airports), industry, recreation, agriculture etc.
Meanwhile if you design a disc city, you can keep expanding outwards, but that's going to be increasingly far from the center. It's going to be very difficult to build a new airport into a middle of the city (if such needs arises), meanwhile it's much easier to do that for the middle segment of a linear city.
I think your argumentation rests on this, but you should explain why it's daft and how it makes people's lives miserable. I would personally enjoy having 20 minute access to any place in the city I live (which is far from having 9 million people) and still have a vast open space nearby.
I don’t know if this applies so much to Neom, but I can think of many scenarios in which a linear city is more appealing than a circular one.
For example - if there is a natural element like a river, lake, canyon, etc. that you want to maximize city exposure to. A linear city roughly following the Grand Canyon would be infinitely more interesting than a circular one situated at one end of it.
in the end it'll still be 'disk like'. You build along the river, distances are getting big and suddenly you realize there's a lot of unused space where you can expand the building of the city while maintaining short commute time(building perpendicular to the river/expanding the width of the city), meaning even more money, more people, more economic activity. In fact most of big cities built on rivers started as small communes that gradually expanded in each direction
a) So you have people living uniformly distributed on a line of length 1. When you pick 2 at random, what's the average distance from one to the other?
b) How about if they live on a circle of circumference 1 (and you can only travel along the circumference)?
c) How about if they live on a disk of circumference 1 (and you can travel straight across the disk)?
I want to see someone seriously analyze what would happen if there was a power loss to the Line. Hundreds of thousands of people in a glass box in 50C weather with no AC sounds like a recipe for a record breaking mass casualty event.
With the caveat that all published "plans" for the thing were probably meant as a PR stunt the plan called for passively cooling it[1].
That part actually doesn't seem implausible, it's right on the Red Sea, which is quite hot on the surface, but cools down as you you go deeper into it[2].
So (and this is just my speculation) they could have a large undersea pipeline to a depth of say 1km, and use the heat the building itself to pull up and distribute that cold water through cooling ducts throughout the structure.
They were also planning to desalinate seawater, so such a system would perform the double duty of pulling that seawater into the building.
Some of it is right on the Red Sea but the "building" is proposed to be 170 km long. One end of the building will be over 100km from the sea, that's quite a distance to pump cold water without it heating up.
Also wouldn't this be like the elevator problem in tall buildings? The first few kilometers of the line will need to have pipes sized for the cooling water of the 165km behind it eating up interior volume.
Will pumping water from the sea, passing it through a heat exchanger and then pumping water 150km inland through insulated pipes even be more energy efficient than a AC?
> One end of the building will
> be over 100km from the sea,
Well, that part's easy. You put the non-citizen service workers on that end, you didn't think MBS was planning to provide them with AC, did you? :-)
Talk about a disincentive to show up to work before sunrise and leave after dark.
> Also wouldn't this be like
> the elevator problem in tall
> buildings?
No, the vertical pipes in the building will branch off from the horizontal pipes running along it, the vertical height is trivial by comparison.
> The first few kilometers of the
> line will need to have pipes
> sized for the cooling water of
> the 165km behind it eating up
> interior volume.
Firstly you'd bury the pipe, if it's at a depth of just 10 meters the average soil temperature at depth really helps, even before insulating it.
Secondly, by having it run in a loop you'd drastically reduce the energy to pump it. It'll take no more energy to pump water up 10m or 1km, as long as your outlet pipe is also at the same depth.
> passing it through a heat
> exchanger [...] be more energy
> efficient than a AC?
The whole thing is obviously ridiculous, but cost-benefit analysis doesn't really enter into what's ultimately an ego project enacted by royal degree.
I was just pointing out that once you're willing to invest the sort of money Saudi Arabia has in upfront costs, there's no reason the end result (no matter how ridiculously expensive) can't be sustainable and passively cooled.
Try to take yourself back to the past and imagine the idea of putting a seemingly endless number of electrical poles everywhere to carry telephony and electrical signals anywhere in the country, instantly. Poles that would become completely inoperable if the cable was damaged, lethal to anybody who touched them, fire hazards waiting to happen in case of natural disaster or just deterioration, and so on endlessly.
And now imagine doing this in a world where there was no federal tax, the GDP was pennies (relative to today), and state of the art technology was us being on the verge of discovering that handwashing before surgery was a good idea. Really! [1] And the big goal here was to be able to put up 'electric lanterns.' It sounds so pie in the sky as to be unbelievable. And indeed it probably would never, in a million years, happen today. But it did happen in the past, and for that we owe our predecessors quite the debt!
The point I make with this is that we have just an unimaginably vast level of economic power today, but it's mostly being squandered. We should be trying out grand ideas, endlessly. If we can make them work - awesome, we've radically improved the world and humanity - our descendants will thank us. If they fail, we can call it a jobs program -- certainly a much better one than trying to make stuff to go kill people half way around the globe.
> Try to take yourself back to the past and imagine the idea of putting a seemingly endless number of electrical poles everywhere to carry telephony and electrical signals anywhere in the country,
But that's not what we did. Folks at the start of the process might have imagined that eventual situation, but they built up small networks, then a skeleton network with human connections (telegraph), then human driven routing. You can't just point at those mega infrastructure items we already have and say oh we have that so we can just apply that to another because that glosses over the whole and very long process of getting from mini projects to mega ones.
Of course you're right that everything starts with the first step, but it increasingly seems that we're averse to even taking that step. And I'd also argue that the dramatic differences in economic and technological 'power' available today also must change what is considered a large scale. Skyscrapers, for one example, were once a visionary undertaking but have long since become completely mundane construction/engineering projects.
The Line was designed to be literally modular, being made up of 135 modules of less than a km in length each. That such a "vision" is considered exceptional, to the point of even not being realistic, is something that to me feels like a complete deterioration of the vision and ambition in society.
If we were at a point where the Line was feasible in terms of engineering and economics, we probably would be almost to the point of being able to put a colony on Mars
I guess they're would be diesel generators for that in reality. We need an engineer to calculate the flow needed because given how far away the far end is from the water that could end up behind one huge generator, not to mention the size of the pipes.
It's worth mentioning that they don't seem to be burying any massive water pipes so this isn't likely to be done in reality.
the same way that water towers work - when the pumps are running (power is on), you pump water into the tower; then, when the pumps fail, gravity continues to provide water pressure as water drains from the tower. The water tower effectively acts as a "battery" in the system, storing energy (and water) and then releasing it as needed
I didn't design the project, but I would imagine that moving water would be cooler than stagnant water. Other pre-industrial revolution pump designs like a hydram pump could keep cool water moving from the sea as well
See e.g. [1], so they could either funnel air into the ocean and back up for direct temperature exchange, or alternatively use the breeze generated top-to-bottom in the building to drive "active" pumps.
Or just have Olympic-sized swimming pools in the basement that you've actively pumped water into. If the pumps are out they'll have a lot of thermal inertia.
Lets ship all the influencers there, who peddle the luxurious lifestyle narative and sign contracts to never say anything bad about these countries. "Influencer license" haha.
Depends on how the Line is powered. A single long-distance line to a distant nuclear facility powering the whole thing? Or dozens of independent solar farms in the surrounding desert, each powering a nearly section of the Line, with both local storage and backup power from afar?
A proper fault-tolerant design will buy enough time for most residents to walk to a neighboring section that still has power.
I totally agree in broad strokes about Adam Something. He's an unserious urbanist meme YouTuber essentially.
However, battery electric buses are seriously more expensive and a bigger carbon sink than a trolley bus network. But governments don't like to build infrastructure in the west and some people don't like the look of overhead wires. This isn't economically or environmentally efficient but those preferences can cause those issues to be ignored. Until the high cost of battery replacements kick in after the initial honeymoon period...
In the Netherlands all big cities have tram networks. So we do build infrastructure all the time, including overhead wires.
We even have a city that built a trolley bus network. But it never caught on simply because it has too many drawbacks. It's worse than a BEV bus and worse than a tram but does come with the upfront investment bill.
BEV buses that replace diesel ones are working great.
How's the Saudi ski resort coming?[1] That's part of the same project.
That's supposed to be ready for the 2026 Winter Games.
Google Earth shows roads, a perimeter fence, a water tower, and some buildings as of August 2023, so work is going on.
I worked on the design of this a couple of years ago. One day we were tasked with working out how to freeze the lake over so that people could go ice skating on it.
There's a fractal insanity to the whole project. As you focus in on any one aspect, more silliness appears. The design process is driven by the Crown Prince pointing at 3D renders and saying he likes the one that looks the most cyberpunk.
The only thing the Gulf states have going for them is oil money and a good hub location on the Europe–Southeast Asia airline routes.
Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Bahrain, Qatar, they all remind me of that quote from King of the Hill—they are monuments to man's arrogance. Desert cities hitting 50+ °C air temperature at midday which means air conditioning everywhere; vapid luxury in the form of expensive garish cars, shopping malls, and weird buildings and monuments, all while local chiefs who oppose stupid and unrealistic white elephant vanity projects are executed in the back alley.
This is one reason why I would like more nuclear power: it'll take some of the money away from the Gulf.
> local chiefs who oppose stupid and unrealistic white elephant vanity projects are executed.
Let's not gloss over the absolutely appalling respect many of these societies have for human dignity. Public executions and flogging, discrimination and imprisonment based solely on gender, absolutely zero regard for freedom of conscience when it comes to matters of religion.
There's only so much you can get away with by saying it's my society's accepted practice, what's wrong is wrong. And there's plenty wrong with other countries and societies too, including my own, but it doesn't excuse human rights indifference.
Not to mention literal modern day slavery where they bring in South Asians on the promise of better pay, then take away their passports and pay them pennies.
Disclaimer: Qatar is a terrible place when it comes to treatment of migrant workers. The following is not meant as a defense of Qatar. It is meant to correct one particular thing that most reporting gets wrong.
The part where it talks about 6500 migrant worker deaths over the decade of World Cup facility construction has a serious error. It fails to look at the death rate.
Qatar has around 2 million migrant workers, and the 6500 deaths are all deaths of migrants in the country rather than just work related deaths. 6500 deaths over 10 years in a population of 2 million is a death rate of 32.5/100k/year.
A death rate of 32.5/100k/year should raise questions, especially if we assume that migrant workers in Qatar skew younger, but the question should be why is it so low?
For comparison the death rate for 15-24 year old males in the US is 100/100k/year, and for 25-34 year old males it is 177/100k/year.
It's possible that Qatar's poor treatment of migrant workers does result in an unusually high job-related death rate but something else Qatar does results in an unusually low death rate when not at work with the net result being the overall death rate is low.
In the US the top causes of death of young males are poisoning (which includes drug overdoses), suicide, automobile accidents, and homicide.
Qatar is very anti-drug, with harsh penalties and almost no tolerance, giving them a drug death rate around 4% of the US drug death rate.
They are also much more intolerant of drunk driving, which is a major contributor to automobile deaths in the US. In Qatar if there is any detectable alcohol in your blood after an accident you are considered to have been drunk driving. That threshold is so low that you would be considered drunk if you were in an accident in the morning and had one drink the night before. Also I'd expect that most migrant workers use some other form of transport most of the time.
Their homicide rate is also very low.
Are those enough to offset a high work-related death rate. I don't know. I should know because all of the articles I've seen talking about migrant worker deaths in Qatar should have looked into this.
Or the absolutely rampant corruption. Their entire way of doing business is to lie, cheat and steal, and then murder anyone who objects or tries to report on it.
Bluntly, I hope nobody comes to their aid when oil ends and their economies inevitably collapse - they can go back to bashing each other on the heads with rocks in the desert, and stop destroying the whole damned planet for a quick buck.
Unfortunately, this is the outcome when you turn tribal hunter-gatherers into billionaires overnight. The scum always rises to the top in a society built on dominance and violence.
And Joe Biden has been the first openly hostile/critical president of KSA, while Trump said he didn't know who murdered the American citizen Jamal khashoggi[1] despite clear evidence and information about it, all due to him wanting the business with KSA to continue.
Mainly because when Trump was in power the democrats and media would keep pressure on Trump. Whereas now, as a genocide is happening the media isn't providing as much pressure as it would of Trump was doing it.
Also no need to regurgitate old irrelevant news, the complete 180 from Biden is the biggest slap in the face for people who were fighting for gender/human/civil rights.
Also, Biden is yet to go after Kushner for that $2bn bribe/corruption payment.
Realpolitik is a meme used to excuse bad behaviour.
Sorry but, this is just flailing your arms around hoping to hit something, Trump didn't care one bit what the opposition nor the media said about him, and maybe just maybe the media isn't as critical of Biden because he isn't as divisive as Trump was.
And what genocide would that be?
>Also, Biden is yet to go after Kushner for that $2bn bribe/corruption payment
First of all not Biden's job to prosecute anyone and secondly they are trying to investigate him but Republicans are the ones trying to stall it[1]
>Realpolitik is a meme used to excuse bad behaviour.
The only excuse is people that say this, are unfortunately the ones who reject reality and substitute ot for their own.
Democrats hold the presidency, but not the congress. If congress decides do thwart the president on an issue, then there is very little the president can do. Basically the president has the power to veto something that congress wants to do, but has virtually no power to compel congress to do something it doesn't want to do.
We did send huge amounts of aid in 2022, including 38 HIMARS, 2,000 Stingers, 100,000 anti-armor systems, 250 artillery guns, 9,000 anti-tank missiles, and 35,000 small arms.
Then Republicans put a hard right Christian theocrat, who’s totally captured by the hard-right wing of the party, in charge of the House and everything has stalled.
Yes, huge amount of light weapons, short range. I've specifically mentioned heavy weapons. It is hard to fight against heavy weapons with light one, isn't it?
No, what we’re finding is actually quite the opposite. High volumes of light weapons is not only enough, but preferable on the modern battlefield even fighting against heavy weapons.
What specific weapon systems would you like to see sent to Ukraine?
And what bearing does this have on where blame should land for the US turning its back on Ukraine?
Didn't the US president Clinton sign the security assurances to Ukraine in exchange to their nukes?
And btw, Americans are not fighting there. Sending weapons to Ukraine creates new working place in USA while weaken army of their enemy. It is obvious win-win for USA.
We are complicit (if not responsible). Accepted practice isn’t an excuse for indifference but criticising your own country isn’t a free pass to criticise the culture of others without challenging our culpability. If we sincerely want to help the citizens of these countries that we believe to be oppressed, we have options that we choose not to take. We could offer cultural asylum, give people a route to access our cultural ideals through immigration. We don’t, though, because we only believe in human rights when it’s convenient.
You, as an individual, may do your best to contribute to the betterment of the world, but when talking about society vs. society, you’re glossing over far too many of our ills while ignoring the positives of the others.
Freedom of religion, individualism, capitalism, they aren’t “good” or “right” they’re just… different. The western individualism (seen most prominently in the U.S.) is not the majority culture, to many, even those who are just as “free” as any American, western cultural ideals are a step backward.
The way you perceive Islam is not the way it’s perceived by Muslims in Muslim majority countries, it is not an oppression put upon them by religious zealots, it’s a community that they participate in with a deep sense of pride and duty. For every Muslim in a Muslim-majority country who wants to break from their religion, there’s an unsuccessful American struggling to survive, desperate to break free from the lonely American pursuit of individual success.
You can hate public executions, flogging, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and you should, I do, but don’t compare societies. We are not better, just different.
Was slavery-era America worse on the dimension of human rights or just different?
Why does cultural relativism excuse horrors of actual modern people with access to and awareness of all modern thinking, modern technology, and modern examples of societies who achieved moral progress, but we’re perfectly comfortable saying slave owners of the past are responsible for their crimes despite being raised by slave owners in a society of slave owners embedded in a world of slave owners with a history absolutely chalk full of slave owners?
I agree with your point, but I think it's not fair to blame cultural relativism. Relativism means not prescribing a single morality applicable in all contexts. That's something on which reasonable people will differ. If you do accept it though, you're not obliged to permit everything.
For example I think that there were relatively moral people who lived in e.g. the US and Saudi Arabia ~300 years ago and accepted slavery unquestioningly. It would have been better if they had questioned and rejected it, but I don't think they are evil for not doing so. In the modern US I think that only someone tremendously immoral would accept and participate in enslaving others.
This belief makes me a moral relativist (at least by some reasonable definitions). All the same I think I'm much closer aligned with your feelings on the morality of modern Middle Eastern society than GP.
All that to say, being a moral relativist allows you to have weird dissonant views, but it doesn't require it.
Slavery, throughout history, was generally not seen as desirable. Rather, it was either seen as a necessary evil, upon which a "logical rationale" (read: cognitive dissonance) was built up to justify it, or as a form of punishment. Aristotle actually predicted its end about 2000 years before it happened [1]:
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For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, "of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods."
If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.
- Aristotle ~350BC
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He also made regular indirect mention of abolitionists and abolitionist causes, which have obviously existed for millennia. It's not just some coincidence that the Industrial Revolution happens and within about a century most of every country (that had benefited from said industrialization) had outlawed slavery. It's not that we became more moral, but rather it became comfortable enough to dispose with slavery. So we did, and then attributed that to "modern thinking."
That is an immense leap from "if we could have machines do it, we wouldn't have slaves do it" to seeing slavery as undesirable. Aristotle was a staunch believer in "natural slaves" who didn't have the faculty of rational deliberation and therefore were (and should be) guided by those who do have that faculty.
This line of thought can be traced all the way through to the modern day, and obviously well up to abolition.
There's really not much evidence at all that slaveholders saw their activities the way you describe ("necessary evil"). There's no evidence that we first had a necessity for slavery and then obviated it through automation. In fact, automation in the Americas increased demand on the labor of enslaved people.
If there was any external triggering event of abolition, it'd have been Darwin's On The Origin of Species and contemporaneous breakthroughs in science that destroyed the philosophical foundations that slavery was built upon (natural god-given supremacy, as Aristotle believed).
The abolitionist movement was an intellectual and moral one, through and through. You can just read the writings of abolitionists to hear what convinced them into their positions.
Wiki has a reasonable listing of the countless times slavery was abolished throughout history. [1] That list should be considered extremely incomplete, as it happened with quite the regularity, all around the globe. And so even calling something "the" abolitionist movement is a misnomer. Abolitionist movements, political leaders, and abolitionary successes have existed for thousands of years, and likely for as long as slavery itself has existed.
But it never remained abolished because of a simple logical problem you run into. The reality of the world - past, present, and future - is that stronger powers dominate weaker powers -- the same reality upon which Aristotle based his cognitive dissonance. And so so long as slavery provided a significant material benefit, powers that embraced slavery would dominate those that did not. And that dominance would inevitably lead to the institution (or reinstitution) of slavery in the weaker powers. The British Empire and its spread of slavery around the globe is but one of many examples.
So you saw this regular flip flopping. One ideologically minded leader would end slavery, only for it to come back later. What changed with the industrial revolution is that the latest end of slavery no longer had any particularly negative consequences, instead we saw the exact opposite. Countries that abolished slavery, which was primarily a rural/plantation based phenomena, actually started to grow exceptionally rapidly on the back of the emerging systems of industrial wage labor, while rural and plantation style production became less and less economically relevant. Slavery had become obsolete.
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There's some interesting parallels with slavery and modern day conscriptions. A country locks up its borders, prevents people from leaving, starts forcibly conscripting them into the military, gives them a gun, and sends them off to die. This is utterly barbaric, and most people would agree with such. Yet it remains a thing, and will remain a thing for the foreseeable future, for the exact same reason that slavery was perpetuated.
Countries that turn to conscription will be more powerful than those that don't. When this reality becomes no longer true (perhaps due to war becoming more mechanical in nature) we'll certainly finally abolish this barbaric behavior, and then claim it's due to some 'greater moral understanding', as if people alive today can't see with their own two eyes what an unnatural and abhorrent behavior this is. Of course we can! But trying to permanently stop something that's a significant means to power is like trying to stop a train by walking in front of it.
Sure, I don’t believe cultural relativism is itself in all cases wrong. I think it’s obviously wrong when used to excuse obviously immoral things done in a context where they are in fact obviously immoral (such as much of the Middle East in the modern day).
>modern examples of societies who achieved moral progress
But we haven't achieved moral progress.
G7/G20 countries have essentially merely physically outsourced slavery out of sight to second world factories and third world hell holes.
Through the magic of fiat money and currency exchange rates, we have deluded ourselves for half a century that we are in fact not colonizers and oppressors anymore.
Just one example are the Coltane mining wars in Congo: 1998-2008 5.2 million killed or dead from hunger (and it'd probably be higher if people hadn't more or less stopped counting after 2006). You probably didn't even know it happened,and yet millions today work at slaves to continue producing minerals for our digital comfort.
Those countries can outlaw those conditions whenever they want. When they do, they’ll have achieved some additional moral progress. I’m pretty sure you’d be crying foul if the US decided to go and enforce its laws over there.
Do you berate your parents and grandparents each day for their participation in a society that had segregation? Do you walk over hot coals every morning to repent for the benefits you reap by virtue of being born into a society built on the backs of the segregated? Do you deride and express disgust at your peers as they relish in the taste of the pain and suffering of the billions of conscious, feeling animals we genocide every year? Do you opt-out of the industries and services today that take advantage of the suffering of less fortunate individuals forced to service you in order to survive?
Slavery was bad. Slavery is bad. Slavery is not excused. However, frothing at the mouth with rage when speaking about the actions of another society because they don’t share the same moral values as you without thinking a step further is hollow, it is empty, it is meaningless.
Why is “modern thinking” (whatever that means) good? Why is maximum individual freedom at the expense of the whole good? I am like you, I believe in that, but if you interact with people from different cultures, you will discover that is not a belief held by everyone. For many people, individual freedom at the expense of the whole is not good and they have observed that from these “modern” societies. Look at how deeply unhappy the U.S is, the pain and suffering of hundreds of millions of people. Is limiting access to healthcare an example of “modern thinking”?
Where is anyone proposing berating anyone? You can say that a segregated society was less good than a non-segregated one without saying that everyone who lives or lived in a segregated society is worthy of berating/disgust/derision etc. I don't blame individual Iranians for living in a culture that is worse on many important dimensions than western liberal cultures, but that doesn't prevent me from making a fair judgment that (at least on those dimensions) it is actually worse.
Modern thinking: things like pluralism and liberalism. These are actual ideas that emerged in the late 1800s and which are responsible for immense human thriving, immense liberation from suffering all over the world. Upstream of all political and social reform is an intellectual reform, i.e. new "thinking." I am not referring to "maximum individual freedom," and in fact this idea is fundamentally in tension with pluralism and liberalism. Maximum individual freedom at the expense of the whole is a bad idea because it yields bad outcomes, just like various forms of theocracy are bad ideas because they yield bad outcomes.
The ideas that yield expanded suffrage, expanded legal protections, expanded access to prosperity are good ideas because they produce good outcomes. Yes sure, the US/the west broadly isn't perfect, etc, but note that we can discuss all the ways in which it's broken so we can get to work fixing it. That's a good outcome and it's a critical part of the path to more good outcomes on more important dimensions.
You're not arguing that other forms get to better outcomes or whatever, you're just arguing that there's no such thing as good or bad outcomes and therefore no such thing as good or bad ideas.
Try going to Qatar or Iran and asking someone for their opinion on their heads of state. I think you'll find their reaction far more chilling than the fact that our health insurance system is broken.
Good outcomes by what measure? Happiness? Freedom? Community? GDP?
I will argue that by many standards, what we view as barbaric has better outcomes. Have you met a Singaporean? I disagree with their criminal justice system (as I do the U.S. but I rank Singapore’s as “worse”) and yet it has better outcomes for the majority of its citizens by most measures. Are they the measures you and I care about? Probably not, because to you and I, hanging someone for using heroin is not a fair price to be paid for a lower crime rate and higher GDP, but that’s a moral judgement, not some objective “modern” absolute. If you don’t value human life above all else (which many cultures don’t) then killing a few drug addicts a year to make life for millions of others better, that’s inconsequential — and excellent “modern” thinking about doing the most good!
If you can’t imagine why the bad of anti-lgbt sentiment is far outweighed by the good of community-spirit from an anti-lgbt religion then you’re not considering “outcomes”.
You are aware that the existence of grey areas does not negate the existence of different ends of the spectrum, right? I’m not arguing the world is simple and entire countries/civilizations can be placed on one end or the other.
I am saying that there are countless dimensions that matter, and there are better and worse locations along those dimensions.
On the dimension of drug addiction rates, Singapore is doing better than the US. On the dimension of personal liberties, Singapore is doing worse than the US.
This observation is not a counter argument to my position, it’s a disproof of yours.
Saying we cannot make value judgments about these things implies we cannot justifiably take action that would nudge us into a different location along any of these different dimensions. How could you possibly decide to change things if there’s no such thing as a better, more preferable possible future state?
Here’s a gut check: are you comfortable with your moral system landing you solidly in the “let’s allow slavery” camp in the 1800s? After all, the disagreement between slave holders and abolitionists was one of culture and opinions, and as we know now there’s no such thing as a better or worse position to hold on such matters. Does that moral system seem like a good one to you?
If your conclusion from my comments is that I would have been indifferent towards slavery then I have either mistakenly passed my comments through an opinion-inverter or you're reading my comments in bad faith. I am very progressive, I hold fringe views that I don't think will be mainstream for a couple more decades.
I hope I wouldn't need to say it, but for the record: I oppose slavery. I oppose gender based discrimination. I oppose sexuality based discrimination. I oppose racism. I oppose the death penalty. I oppose drug criminalisation. I oppose the American prison system. I oppose the smug western superiority complex about our behaviour being "modern" or the "best" or "ahead" of the rest of the world. I oppose referring to Saudi Arabia as "not modern" (or backwards or whatever term is in right now) which I believe is patronising and a view reserved for those without the willingness to be introspective.
For the oppressed gay man in Saudi Arabia, there's a gay man homeless on the streets of the United States, dying from neglect, after being kicked out of their home as a teenager by their Christian fundamentalist parents, thrown to the mercy of a society that couldn't care less about them. Let's put them on a spectrum, how many points is "dying homeless on the streets of America because of being gay" compared to "can't be openly gay in Saudi Arabia"? How many points for "robbed on the streets of San Francisco for the 8th time" when compared to "can leave valuables out in public without concern because there's so little crime in Singapore"?
If your vision for a better world starts with disparaging Saudi Arabia, I fear you are deeply uninspired and will not have the impact on the world that you could have if you instead focused on yourself and your culture. I also hope someday you appreciate the irony of you having worked for Palantir of all companies while talking about moral superiority of the west. I wonder where Peter Thiel would land on our Spectrum Of Moral Superiority. Actually, I don't want to know, let me live another day without reading a defence of that ghoul.
No, I didn't say that you are indifferent to nor pro-slavery.
I said that you'd land on the conclusion of allowing it, presumably despite your own personal preferences. Many people who opposed abolition also personally opposed slavery, but used arguments identical to yours to oppose action against slavery. The lack of action would've, obviously, allowed slavery to persist indefinitely.
Can you explain how (or if) your moral system would prevent you from landing on that conclusion? It's a simple question that doesn't depend on theatrics to ask nor answer.
My position is quite simple: I do not believe it's possible to compare the righteousness of cultures, certainly not in a way as reductive as you've proposed, in a way that conveniently makes our culture (America) gooder and the others (Saudi Arabia) badder. Please re-read my original comment, I specifically proposed offering cultural asylum as a way to offer western moral values to others who want to live according to them. I am in favour of cultural evolution, I am in favour of taking action against our moral ills, I believe that in your hypothetical that I would have a moral duty to oppose and take action against slavery within my own culture.
My question to you is, do you believe the United Arab Emirates is more righteous than the United States? According to many measures of "goodness" like the Human Development Index (and the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index) the United Arab Emirates is a more "good" place than the United States and therefore, in your view of comparable righteousness, the United Arab Emirates is a more righteous place? Yet, the United Arab Emirates is, to many westerners (including myself and I am sure you) a place of many moral ills (including one of the most heinous: slavery). Do you believe that on your multi-dimensional most-good morality spectrum the United Arab Emirates out ranks the United States?
I'll answer that for you: no, you don't. And deep beneath this facade of objective morality, you know that morality is so deeply ingrained in your cultural upbringing that you cannot sincerely state that the United Arab Emirates is more righteous than the United States, and that regardless of what any measure, whether it's one dimension or many dimensional, whether it's black and white or a spectrum, regardless of what that measure says, nothing is above your sense of what is right and what is wrong.
Got it, so post-abolition United States is not “more righteous,” even on the dimension of human rights, than pre-abolition United States. It is, as you say, “impossible” to compare them. You don’t actually explain how you get from this position to the assertion you would be proactive against slavery, but I think the utter nonsense of the first claim reveals sufficient moral confusion by itself. You’re just trapped between “can’t criticize modern slavers” and “can’t say I accept slavers of the past,” which obviously is totally incoherent.
Not clear what point you’re arguing against by saying “HDI says UAE is good yet you don’t agree with it!” Why on earth would I defer full moral judgment to HDI?
I never claimed my moral system is objective, so I’m also not sure what facade you’re referring to.
I openly criticise Dubai for their slavery, I refuse to visit Dubai for that reason alone. However, I refuse to say that Dubai is objectively less moral than the United States because morality is relative to the culture that defines it, in the same way I refuse to say that sushi is objectively better than pizza (despite sushi obviously being superior to pizza).
You may assert it but morality is not defined by or measured in outcomes, morality is a cultural product. If your moral system is not objective, if your moral system is a culturally-influenced personal belief in what is right and wrong, it is totally incoherent to say that Saudi Arabia has not made moral progress or that they have not used "modern thinking" because by their moral standards they have, and by their moral standards you (and I) are the immoral.
If you'd like to compare the United States to Saudi Arabia on human rights, press freedom, education, crime, freedom of religion, gender discrimination, do that. They have outcomes that we can measure, and don't worry, they're influenced by morality, so you can still pass judgement.
Who said anything about America? There are aspects of society in the Middle East that are different and bad. You don't have to be a moral absolutist to prefer that people not be stoned for adultery. And you can't assume that Muslims on average have a "deep sense of pride and duty" about the way their society is run. Sure some do, but they're not aliens with some higher form of existence, they're humans just like you and usually just worry about their day-to-day and believe a lot of things because that's what everyone around them seems to believe, just like Americans who like Protestantism and capitalism.
Sorry but this reeks of someone who hasn't actually mingled with other cultures and instead have taken academic philosophy as a substitute to make up for it.
Because you whenever it was intentional or not make yourself sound very racist by effectively saying "x person from y society actually like the barbarism said society has".
Comparisons of others in this case societies is crucial to make your own society better, failing to do makes us just reinforce bad ideas and what were then once local issues or small scale become systematic.
When it then is the case that your society is "better" then another society, then you can propose change or at least show why it's better in the "marketplace of ideas", the mistake of the past was that we saw our societies as inherently superior and as such bruteforcing said our way of life was seen as morally good and not tyranny.
The point I’m making is that what’s barbaric to you and I is not barbaric in another society and vice-versa. The American culture of kicking your children out of home the day they turn 18 is more barbaric to some than the death penalty, as is a child choosing not to contribute to their family.
Many citizens of Singapore are very happy as citizens of Singapore, many of them look at the west as barbaric: the crime ridden cities of the U.S, the poverty, the abject failure of western governments to protect their citizens despite very high tax rates… if killing a few criminals is the price to pay to live in a comparable utopia, so be it? What’s barbaric about a caning? The U.S. sentences people to death!
I am from the west (despite your assertion, I live in a Muslim country) and believe in very western ideals, I believe in freedom for the individual, it’s deeply ingrained in me, however, my non-academic experience has shown me that this is not a universal truth. Many cultures do not care for the individual, they care for the family, a group of people bound by blood to be one part of the whole. Many cultures believe that sacrificing oneself for the family is noble and right and that to be an individual is to be barbaric.
Once you accept that individual freedom is a western ideal, and not fundamental to the human condition, it becomes much easier to understand that other cultures are fundamentally different.
The issue is that you're effectively using moral relativism to justify injustice or "their way of life" which is just a very shaky foundation to rely on.
Since again then the logic of "savages will be savages because they crave it" applies.
>The American culture of kicking your children out of home the day they turn 18 is more barbaric to some than the death penalty
For proclaiming to being cultured you make an example that isn't even a cultural norm in the USA but at best a trend within American household entirely predicated on whenever or not the economic situation is suitable for such norms to even exist.
Not only that but if you actually talk with said Americans during that time I would take a gander and say that the majority of them didn't feel bothered not because "their way of life" but because it isn't inherently barbaric if it's done with good intention (independence and spreading your wings).
>Many citizens of Singapore are very happy as citizens of Singapore, many of them look at the west as barbaric: the crime ridden cities of the U.S, the poverty, the abject failure of western governments to protect their citizens despite very high tax rates… if killing a few criminals is the price to pay to live in a comparable utopia, so be it? What’s barbaric about a caning? The U.S. sentences people to death!
This is so overly reductive, first of all there are plenty of people in Singapore that do not share this idea that you are presenting that Singapore is a "comparable utopia" nor can you or they be taken serious by conflating barbarism with "crime" and "government failing to protect their citizens" (whatever this means).
And I love the whataboutism at the end.
>I am from the west (despite your assertion, I live in a Muslim country) and believe in very western ideals, I believe in freedom for the individual, it’s deeply ingrained in me, however, my non-academic experience has shown me that this is not a universal truth. Many cultures do not care for the individual, they care for the family, a group of people bound by blood to be one part of the whole. Many cultures believe that sacrificing oneself for the family is noble and right and that to be an individual is to be barbaric.
And you show this enlightenment by making such crude and clumsy argumentation spoken to the point that anyone can mistake you for making some very racist statements?
And these society that "focus on family instead of the individual" has severe issues within their societies when it comes to economic, cultural, social and political concerns that is undermining what they hold dear.
But if you want to essentially cope by proclaiming "these areas aren't important, just their quaint way of life is!" then you're only adding fuel to the fire for the people's suffering.
Even then if I were to take your argument at face value, the issue with your argument is that liberalism which is the cornerstone of individualism is not inherently against focusing on the family, instead they are concern with ensure that the individual can be free to pursue their aspirations and be free from unequal treatment in the face of society, the law and the nation... In other words you can be as "sacrificing yourself for the family" as you want.
Individual freedom comes out of the necessity of it existing not from idealistic daydreaming, thousands had to sacrifice their lives to give their future (family) the individual freedoms the people can all enjoy equally.
> You can hate public executions, flogging, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and you should, I do, but don’t compare societies. We are not better, just different.
No UK supermarket will guarantee their supply chain for prawns (shrimp) is slavery-free.
This in no way mitigates anybody else's issues, but that's an issue that I, personally, wish we could solve (and when we're done with that, maybe we can tackle the calorie laundering that goes on in that industry).
I think the problem is that in a globalised economy, a local issue quickly becomes an everybody issue. Am I less responsible, as a consumer, because the injury happens a long way away?
Of course, we are responsible most directly for our own interactions with other people. Less so with other people's bad behavior.
You go down the other road, there's an indirect connection to every person on earth. Refuse to deal with everybody and anybody because of that, you're paralyzed.
I get it, that was a rhetorical question. Mine is not a rhetorical answer. It's hard enough, dealing decently with the people I come into contact with. Struggling to make every problem into my problem, there's very little gain in that.
Before anybody says I'm callous and unfeeling, well, you'd have to know what I do in my own community. But few bother to weight that, at all, when they're playing the blamethrowing game.
'Just not eat prawns' is barely more than social action theatre. That's a point too. "I'm silently protesting something" is no protest at all. In fact, it is damaging the innocent for infinitesimal gain (the supply chain, the grocer, your own food variety).
You want to seize on a cause, go ahead. That would entail work, doing research, sending letters, something! That I could get behind; in fact, as I suggest, many of us are doing something every day. And maybe get a little weary of the warriors who respect gestures over substance.
For decades, they wanted to diversify away from oil and build tech industries. The problem is they don’t have skilled labor and would have to import “slaves” as they do with everything. They have some of the lowest skilled and laziest labor in the world. If/when dependence on oil ends, these countries will go back to being poor.
Edit: contrast ME with Mexico who is running out of oil. Yet, they are able to build because they happen to have some of the hardest working labor in the world (though not notably skilled). I rather bet on Mexico revival over ME 100/100.
some colleagues worked in tech companies in middle east oil countries and they confirm what you say.
The local employees would show up for just 2h 3h a day, fake some working tasks, and leave.
They is so much money poured down on them that they don't understand the concept of work, to them it is just a hobby.
Switzerland isn't the most progressive of countries (it only gave women the right to vote in 1971) but AFAIK you don't go to jail if you fuck a man in the ass, in contrast to UAE.
Not something that directly concerns me, but I'm personally more worried about restrictions on freedom of speech, but regardless not somewhere I'd be willing to live (I currently do live in Switzerland).
I used Switzerland as an example because of its financial industry. I wasn’t making any commentary on the culture. Presumably if the UAE is the Switzerland of the Middle East and Indian Ocean, it’s more adapted for that cultural environment and not for what Westerners are looking for.
These laws are also pretty much never enforced in UAE, as far as I understand.
Government websites are known for giving warnings about lots of things that aren’t a big deal in real life. I am basing my opinion on people I know that have been there, plus topics on Reddit, etc. But of course your mileage may vary and it’s reasonable to be worried about such laws if they might apply to you.
Formally documented de jure discrimination is hardly the only available approach. For example, the term "grandfather clause" stems from Southern states applying severe voter restrictions (poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.) but exempting anyone whose ancestors had the right to vote on a particular pre-Civil War date.
Functionally? Permitted poor/uneducated whites but not blacks to vote without ever mentioning a race in the law.
"No person shall be registered as an elector of this state or be allowed to vote in any election held herein, unless he be able to read and write any section of the Constitution of the state of Oklahoma; but no person who was, on January 1, 1866, or any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under any form of government, or who at that time resided in some foreign nation, and no lineal descendant of such person, shall be denied the right to register and vote because of his inability to so read and write sections of such Constitution."
You should be worried about gay rights: some years ago, a French teenage boy was raped by some local men, and the authorities initially tried to get the boy to confess.
A number of particularly nasty elements to the response—including that the authorities knew that one of the rapists carried HIV, and had previously segregated him in custody to prevent him spreading the virus to other prisoners, but they fabricated medical tests to the contrary and lied to the boy’s family.
Which is also excellent not just for stealing, but also for murder. Half a year ago a German-born Pole killed a family in a car crash and run away to UAE.[0] They tried to extradit him but without success.
The article is from October - in the meantime it turned out he actually fled to UAE. The Polish government tried to extradite him but failed. There are many sources on that, unfortunately in Polish only.
Probably not, they'll still put the money in Luxembourg and Switzerland, but they can exchange gold and diamonds and stuff like that from shady dealings in Africa for money there.
If you look into it you'll find that it's a nice marketplace for israeli oligarchs running operations in DR Congo, e.g. for diamonds which Israel exports unexpected amounts of, and you'll also find that the Rapid Support Forces/Janjaweed in Sudan are buddies of the UAE. Unlike Switzerland the UAE is quite aggressive militarily, e.g. occupying part of Yemen.
Been a while since I last had a run through books about this and no time at the moment to go remind myself about titles, but I can give some links to start digging.
If you look into Omar al-Bashir's 'career' you'll likely find it enlightening about the degree of Gulf involvement in Sudan. The Gulf states are really, really good at PR, they can afford the biggest, most efficient firms to run it for them, but there are a lot of books about the colonial history in the region and how trade and economics have evolved over the last century.
The strategically importantly located island of Socotra has a really interesting history, lots of pirates and stuff. Since 2018 UAE is occupying it and lately Yemen news sources have claimed that Israel is in on it, and the US DoD has been asked whether they're there too. Starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Emirates_takeover_...
Think about the fact that education is pretty much free there. They even pay for Western institutions to set up satellite campuses. You’d think they should have the most educated and skilled labor in the world. At some point, you have to realize it’s cultural: they don’t want to work.
Funny you mention Switzerland because they have some of the highest skilled labor in the world.
You’re generalizing nearly 20 million people in Saudi Arabia alone. How this is even an acceptable thing to say on HN is beyond me.
The Gulf countries have more than enough expertise to manage and run their wealth for the foreseeable future. To say they’ll be poor again without oil is simply ignorant of the facts and probably related to the point I made above.
> To say they’ll be poor again without oil is simply ignorant
I wanted to reply "But Sheikh Mohammed himself said so!" but then trying to back up my claim I realized it's false. [0] It's amazing how many false things we take for granted just because they align with our world-view (and make a good story).
I won’t comment on culture but it is a fact that the majority of working Saudis work in bullshit government jobs where they basically collect paychecks for free, and actual labor is overwhelmingly performed by cheap migrant workers, no? Or is my information out of date? That’s an arrangement you can’t find anywhere outside the Gulf, to my knowledge.
You have a bunch of weasel words there that are doing some heavy lifting: "majority", "actual" and "overwhelmingly".
It's not possible to run a functioning country (which SA undeniably is) without a large number of people who are at least somewhat competent, at least somewhat hardworking, and at least somewhat loyal to the country. You may be able to rely on cheap migrant workers for the hard physical labor, but not for the planning and administration that makes the whole thing work.
According to https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/20/news/saudi-government-worke..., 70% of employed Saudis work for the government, and according to their civil service minister, "many" of them don't even work an hour a day. If you think they're structured like any other country and I'm merely singling them out with "weasel words" we can't possibly have a discussion.
The oil money printer can hide a lot of problems. A small percentage of somewhat competent people aren't guaranteed to be able to provide for a huge number of useless freeloaders if the gravy train stops. Look at Venezuela for a somewhat similar situation.
Yeah, and I went to Greece, a country with a population half the size of Saudi Arabia, a few years ago and got bad service everywhere. The economic data is also not good.
But I wouldn’t somehow think it’s accurate or acceptable to claim Greeks are all lazy and rude.
If the collective financial portfolio of the Gulf countries goes away, you’ll have much larger problems to worry about.
This project was a side project and always has been. Its success or lack thereof has very little to do with the overall financial position of the country.
> For decades, they wanted to diversify away from oil and build tech industries. The problem is they don’t have skilled labor and would have to import “slaves” as they do with everything.
Quite correct. I had people reaching out to me saying they want me to contract for Arabic millionaires -- websites, backends, a lot of stuff together -- but every time they demanded time tracking, they wanted to know my physical address, wanted my photo, and one of them even wanted me to install camera so he can track me in real time with some misguided AI-based software.
Each time I giggled to myself and responded something along the lines of:
"While the offer sounds tempting financially, and while I would love to have some tech independence, your offer falls short on the privacy front, and it also contains clauses that can nullify the independence to choose tech tomorrow. I'll have to decline and if you are open to feedback: insisting on face tracking is not how you hire the really good programmers, to which I don't pretend to belong but have known a good number of them".
So yes their mindset is apparently always 10 masters + 20_000_000 slaves and as hard as they are trying, they will not export this culture to anywhere else except maybe India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China and a few others. The West will not change for them no matter how rich they are.
The Qatari have also obviously paid off various FIFA officials but hey, that's just football.
In my experience of working with software developers in India and China, the ones who are really good would absolutely refuse this kind of privacy invasion. Good developers living in those countries have choice and are well paid.
It also makes money from construction projects. It’s one of the big reasons they offer residence visas to people who buy real estate there.
I live in Dubai but grew up in the United States. Despite what people may believe, there is freedom of religion here, women aren’t oppressed, and the government genuinely cares about having a good city to live in.
I don't want to open a flame war, but I visited the city during the Expo and its a highway with a stripe of skyscrapers on each side and slums beyond. It's impossible to walk anywhere. (To be fair, the public transport is pretty good, as long as you live next to the highway.)
When I read "a good city to live in" I imagine something like Vienna.
That is fair. I guess my comparison is San Diego (where I grew up) and Mexico, where I lived all of my adult life until moving to Dubai in 2022.
The city is building a new metro line and improving on walkability as new neighborhoods of high population density pop up. It will still be very focused on shopping malls with AC because of the heat during the summers. Official records of real estate transactions have a data point for "closest shopping mall" for a reason.
If you’ve ever had a gun or knife pointed at you, trust me that “walkability” is not going to be high on your priorities of what makes a city a good place to live. The UAE is safer than Switzerland.
I actually liked how walkable Mexico City is. It used to not be great but I feel that in recent times it's a much nicer city to live in than Dubai. Of course that's only based on living there for 6 months and being relatively wealthy (that said I'd argue Dubai is also only nice if you have the means).
"I went to <insert any major city here> and there's tall buildings and slums beyond"
Even Vienna has slum-like areas, every major city does. Not sure how that's a knock against Dubai. I'm not even sure what slums you saw in Dubai, Having lived there for a few years there's definitely low income housing in certain parts but I'd struggle to call them slums.
Solar in desert has a lot of issues including wind and sand coverage. Although the deserts of the region may seem like unchanging environments, the ecosystem and weather is hostile to solar installations (amongst other things). Moreover, solar panels become less efficient at higher sustained temperatures, which increases land and infrastructure maintenance costs.
What does "self-sufficient" even mean here? Can you power air conditioning if you build enough solar plants? Yes, but that's true everywhere. That doesn't mean it's financially viable.
Yes but the 50C ambient is at midday when solar is available.
I find it very interesting that when nuclear power is brought up, there are a lot of people who talk up how solar + wind & batteries are a perfect solution. Yet when it comes to the Middle East and conditions there, none of the back and forth about how it is not the best solution occurs.
The US believes the constitution ends at its borders and people; This is what the law is in SA.
I can't say I like it either, but I think jailing human beings and enslaving them to the benefit of others is simply not Good.
If you can agree then maybe we can work together to fix it in the US in a lifetime or two, but there's frankly little we can do about SA if we can't show the world what being Good looks like in America.
Morality isn’t a game of brinkmanship. It’s incumbent upon each country to improve itself, without resorting to their peers’ moral failures as a cheap response to observations of their own failures.
It's not like they have another option, have they? It's an interesting challenge to transform an uninhabitable piece of earth into something where people might want to live.
Also, AFAIK they are very aware that oil money isn't going to keep pouring forever and they indeed are trying to diversify. Their elites all study in UK, France, Switzerland and the USA and the questionable stuff they do is actually about the local culture they are trying to transform.
Their prince who is celebrated for pushing social and cultural reforms is the same guy who ordered the killing of a journalist in their Istanbul embassy. So, it is what it is.
BTW, IMHO they should look into what Jewish did in Israel with the Kibbutz. I'm a great fan of the idea and the Jewish culture that made it possible and it appears to work. Maybe instead of building giant skyscrapers and shopping malls, take a note from the Israeli or even work with them instead of pouring tour money into "Las Vegas". Skip the illegal settlements and genocide of the locals of course, but the Israeli have already proven methods of building high quality high prosperity communities on barely habitable lands. So, the Arabs should take a note. Maybe they don't have other option than trying to transform the environment using their fortune but they have options on how to do it exactly.
> It's not like they have another option, have they?
You always have another option than to treat people like cattle though.
> the questionable stuff they do is actually about the local culture they are trying to transform.
Is it though? Or their Western education has helped put things in perspective, they understood how good they have it and they want to double down on it and make very sure they'll never lose it?
> Their prince who is celebrated for pushing social and cultural reforms is the same guy who ordered the killing of a journalist in their Istanbul embassy. So, it is what it is.
We can also choose not to engage in business with them but money talks, apparently.
Sure, they could put money in education, research climate change and photovoltaic or other technologies and try to improve quality of life with sustainable stuff.
But to the people in power, only symbols and power are important.
I think they do all that. They have plenty of universities, also their other oil rich neighbours are pouring money into British and American educational institutions to open campuses there. IIRC some Ivy league universities from the Western world have campuses in the region.
> The only thing the Gulf states have going for them is oil money and a good hub location on the Europe–Southeast Asia
Do they need anything more? And you mentioned airplanes, but you failed to mention logistics more generally and container shipping, with Jebel Ali port being the third largest (behind LA and Rotterdam) in a list that would exclude East Asia and Singapore. [1] There's also tourism because, yes, people are actually paying money in order to visit places like Dubai, and that's because they like what they see there.
That's not really what that was about, at all. I think most don't understand the state of Saudi Arabia. Modern Saudi Arabia was only founded in 1932, but the really interesting thing is that the founding king also had around 100 children, including 45 sons. And those sons also had tons of children. So there are thousands of direct lineage legitimate princes and princesses in Saudi Arabia, in a country of just 33 million!
There is a formal succession process, but it's been regularly sidestepped for various reasons. So you basically have a real-life Game of Thrones where your family aren't your loyal and trusted confidants, but the exact people you're paranoid of. And for very good reasons. For instance one Saudi king was assassinated by his nephew (who was later publicly decapitated), then his brother took the throne, and so on endlessly.
That's exactly what I was saying. These weren't just random "back alley local chiefs" being oppressed for having different views. It was (and is) basic power struggles.
He was purging family members who were more loyal to CIA than the kingdom. He did that and then pivoted to China and Russia. (Bandar Bush ring a bell? )That is why he is vilified. Otherwise, he would be yet another Arab autocrat and US never had any problem with those, no matter what they did. This guy is guilty of being headstrong and independent..
Abu Dhabi does not belong in the list with the other ones. It has been extremely well run since Zayed bin Sultan and will probably transition quite well to a post oil future.
> Abu Dhabi does not belong in the list with the other ones. It has been extremely well run since Zayed bin Sultan
It's also governed differently from the others in being an oligarchy. That requirement for consensus-building and internal variation creates robustness; it gave Dubai the room to experiment, for example, with religious moderation.
It's not a view I hold too seriously. But I remember visiting the Emirates and Saudi Arabia--shortly after the Phillipines and India--and thinking to myself that the British were, in their time, far better at nation building than we've (EDIT: America) been in the post-War era.
If you read historical political discourses in France regarding the colonies, it's easy to see why the British were far better than the French. There was a lot of talk about bringing the light of civilizations to those poor colonies so, in general, they pretty much tore down the existing administrations and instead recreated their own administration from the top up.
The British strategy was far more pragmatic, they kept the local powers in place and played each of them against each other to maintain control over the colonies.
Of course, I'm generalizing but there's a clear difference of ideology that I do think explain the differences between the French and British when it came to managing their colonial empire.
I don't know if oligarchy is the correct word, its more like a union of 7 mini-monarchies.
UAE is doing so well for (mainly) 2 reasons:
1) The Shakhbut coup in Abu Dhabi
2) Abu Dhabi and Dubai buried the hatchet to form UAE(there was a lot of bad blood between the 2 states, but because Rashid bin Saeed and Zayed bin Sultan were way above average as far as authoritarians go they managed to avoid stupid conflicts and focused on cashing in on the oil).
> I don't know if oligarchy is the correct word, its more like a union of 7 mini-monarchies
Fair enough. And as you describe, it's more a diarchy of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Nevertheless, structurally different from the absolute monarchies around them.
It's basically just Abu Dhabi now, because they bailed out Dubai's housing sector on multiple occasion - in 2009 [0], 2019 [1], 2020 [2], and (down the grapevine) I've heard they might be providing an additional bailout to Dubai soon.
Furthermore, Saudi has started requiring companies that are operating in Saudi to operate a Saudi office, and won't give tenders to those who are managing the relationship remotely from Dubai now, so companies have started moving staff to Riyadh.
> Nevertheless, structurally different from the absolute monarchies around them
MbS is trying to remake KSA into an Abu Dhabi 2.0, as MbZ was his mentor
It still takes less energy than heating given climate differentials, so any argument that air conditioning is “garish” and “wrong” needs to be applied to heating also (and anyone living in cold climates ie. Europeans, Americans, etc).
I see the argument that air conditioning is somehow “wrong” or “unsophisticated” on HN all the time (usually from Europeans) and it’s one of the weirdest things. I see no explanation for it other than racism.
To claim you are somehow more virtuous than Arab people because you use artificial heating instead of artificial cooling is downright hilarious given this context.
I'm not European; I come from a tropical island country that is also in love with air-conditioning. I dislike it and prefer natural cool air.
At home, it recycles stale, dry air. In urban settings, air-conditioners pump hotter air into the (already) sizzling outside. There are better implementations like district cooling with cold water, but this will require ripping out every single split-aircon unit from every single flat and replacing the ducting, the cooling units, and even the controls.
This is a really interesting point that I don't think gets enough attention, so I'll call it out: in general, it takes less energy to air condition than to heat because the differentials are greater -- meaning: it's easier to air condition from 45 to 25c than it is to heat from -5 to 25c, simply because 45 - 25 < 25 - -5.
The perception might be that air conditioning is used excessively and the same arguments are used for excessive heating. I know 2 countries in Europe in one winter heating targets 23 Celsius inside for outside temperatures of 5 Celsius in average and in another winter heating targets 19 Celsius inside for outside temperatures of 10 Celsius in average.
Governments try to explain everybody they should use less heating, and I personally find comfortable (and reasonable) smaller differences between outside and inside.
Now, when I was in a country with what I think is excessive air conditioning (not middle east, but no use to name it) it annoyed me the huge difference, 38 Celsius outside and 21 Celsius inside.
I will complain about large differential no matter the country. Of course it might limit the activities I can make in some parts of the world (skiing in the desert anybody?), but that's what I find reasonable.
> I see the argument that air conditioning is somehow “wrong” or “unsophisticated” on HN all the time (usually from Europeans) and it’s one of the weirdest things. I see no explanation for it other than racism.
I do not see that. In this thread it is making the point that the cities are extremely expensive to run and not sustainable. I see the same point made about desert cities in the US.
European cities may need heating, but they also tend to have far better supplies of water, better government, and a far more diversified economy. White elephant projects are at least challenged and discussed and are rarely (if ever) on this scale. Even something like Britain's much maligned HS2 is far smaller in absolute cost (maybe by an order of magnitude depending on whose estimates of each you believe), and even more so relative to the population size of the economy.
Heat pumps are just air conditioners in reverse, so we're making the same point. The thing is, heat pumps are still very rare. The heating that is actually in use is not heat pumps.
What's the obsession with phalic towers? I would think letting toxic masculinity rule everything would result in less dicks everywhere but it is the other way around?
The points raised are a mixture of facts, fiction, jealousy and dislike.
You want them to boil in desert heat with some environmental appeal, while many countries pump the air full of pollution from factories or massive ICE cars
I haven’t heard of back alley executions over there
I don’t feel hate towards someone spending their money on 2 cars or a holiday house or whatever luxury shoes, or paint their house whatever color. Why does it annoy you so much.
Why hate on people with different taste, very strange
I get it’s ok to hate on gulf countries without backlash more than hating on say Denmark
I'm guessing people's distastefor gulf states can be explained largely by their ranking in the global slavery index [1] (three gulf states in the top ten) the global freedom index [2] (Saudi Arabia in bottom ten) and the global corruption index (gulf states are not as good at corruption as slavery or repression but they still give it a good shot).
This seems more likely to me as an explanation than hating on people with different taste. Otherwise everyone would hate Japan for example.
Most of earth’s 8 billion people are unaware of (1) and shouldnt paint a whole region, I see only 2-3 gulf countries in the top 10 of (2) which painting the whole region for is convoluted reasoning. Not vested enough to decode 3 to see how it relates to hating a region.
In summary, there maybe reasons for an informed person to have an issue with a specific government, there is no reasonable reason to hate on countries because the are adjacent to a government you dislike and lastly the individuals in a country are free to live in reasonable temperatures with their own taste in buildings
I'd say that there are specific reasons to have an issue with each and every government in the region.
I'll call the gulf states Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. Which of these would you say has a good record on human rights, personal liberty, and equality?
Btw none of the points you are raising are the ones the OP has issue with.
I responded to the issues they raised which boiled down to. They don’t like their taste in building or how much air con they use in 50 degree heat and a bunch of other hate spray against the ethnic group‘s wealth
An issue can be found in any government, how does that move the conversation forward ?
Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in "what about…?") is a pejorative for the strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of a defense of the original accusation.
In Saudi Arabia specifically, atheism is a capital crime. I think it's pretty sensible for atheists to hate a country that literally wants to kill them; do you find that strange?
You're technically correct in that the executions there are generally proudly done openly and often in public, and that backalley assassination of Khashoggi happened outside of the country.
"Saudi Arabia" is not an ethnic group. I don't hate Arabs. I hate the state called "Kingdom of Saudi Arabia" and its rulers. If anything, Arabs are among the victims of this state.
The above replies did not mention an ethnic group, rather a geographical area. The main ethnic group in that area is also very present in north Africa, and there is much less general "mistrust" (or negative feelings) towards that area than to the other.
Not sure if "geographic discrimination" is in any way better than "racism" but using terms correctly is required for good communication.
The implication of using "632 CE" appears to be a reference to the proliferation of Islam after the death of Muhammad (I didn't know this until I Googled)
So if that individuals distrust towards the Arabian peninsula begins in the exact year Islam began to spread, it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that OP is an Islamaphobe (and it would include a number of North African countries as well)
I have a problem when governments decide it is perfectly alright to interfere in how citizens should conduct their religion or even what religion they should follow, which I believe is a deeply personal affair. I have a problem when there is no separation of state and religion, and when said governments regularly criminalise (up to capital punishment) things like apostasy and blasphemy, which are decidedly mediaeval attitudes.
It so happens that the large majority of these governments are in Muslim-majority countries, where Islam is the 'state religion' (I have a problem with 'state religions' too). Therefore, a reasonable conclusion: it is that particular religion that demands these of its adherents (and worse, non-adherents), and therefore, I mistrust it.
> a number of North African countries as well
For the record, I have little problem with Tunisia.
> criminalise (up to capital punishment) things like apostasy and blasphemy, which are decidedly mediaeval attitudes.
Another HN post today motivated me to look up the history of British blasphemy law and it turns out it was not medieval. Criminal blasphemy laws appeared right at the end of the Middle Ages (at least in England and Wales) so are mostly modern. Before that the punishment for blasphemy was excommunication.
I never mentioned "an ethnic group". I mentioned "main" and "very present" - neither absolutes. The main point: comment was not racist. It was discriminatory based on other topics than race (geography or religion).
No. It's neither about race nor ethnicity; it's about culture and religion. It's not about the people, either, since the differences from person to person are as pronounced there as everywhere. It is, though, about the society built with the culture in question as a foundation. You can criticize societies everywhere, starting from your own - it's normal, healthy, and has nothing to do with racism.
Saudi Arabia has this weird affinity for these completely ridiculous sci-fi projects that are proposed as actual non-fantasy developments. See the Mukaab for another example.
Bingo. The boondoggle is meant as a cover for naked cash transfer. It's a thinly veiled excuse and it's meant to fail. Maintaining it doesn't generate the cash transfers of the desired magnitude
What would be the motivation for a boycott? That the Saudis spend their money on stupid vanity projects? In general I think this is one of the better uses of the cash - hell, a vast amount of the money spent on this is going to flow straight out to western companies who have the experience and expertise to actually deliver these complex infrastructure projects.
Think of the alternatives, top 5 oil producing countries: US(13bb/day), Russia (13bb/day), Saudi (9bb/day), Canada (5bb/day), Iraq(4bb/day).
We all know what's currently happening in Russia. The US and Canada have good production, but they're a long way from Europe. So how exactly do you expect Eastern Europe to heat their homes during winter?
Let's be clear, they can't even really afford to boycott Russia at the moment - Russian oil is pumping out to India and getting re-badged. So the idea they'd pick a fight with Saudi Arabia seems ambitious to say the least.
> That the Saudis spend their money on stupid vanity projects?
I guess over human rights transgressions. But the collective West is very selective on whose transgressions they are willing to overlook and whose not.
And, indeed, at this point, in no position to play hardball with the Saudis.
The problem with The Line was not that it was a line, it was the scale. It's so ridiculously large it is akin to Altman's request for 20% (?) of the world's GDP. Not only it wasn't happening, it literally can't happen.
If you go to Google Earth (the app), it lets you see historical imagery from the site and for the past three or so years you can see continuous progress on digging out The Line; that alone is quite impressive on its own! But then again, digging it is only like 1% of it, and the easiest part. It's an impossible project.
Are there any forums like HN but for architecture, and not prone to devolving into sociopolitical criticism, and instead focusing on the structures themselves? I find experimental architecture fascinating and would rather discuss the merits and flaws of the design itself.
Neom reminds me of Łódź, a city in Poland that is built around a single 5km long street. It’s quite cool and the simple geometry is aesthetically appealing in a way I’ve yet to find elsewhere.
> and not prone to devolving into sociopolitical criticism
Some years ago I occasionally read a German architecture forum [0] that may be compared to HN (mainly professionals). For example, I remember the thread about the reconstruction of parts of the historic city center of Frankfurt [1] being really interesting, with a lot of excellent pictures and insider knowledge. The discussion was mostly centered on the aesthetic quality of the quarter and the use of historic construction methods (and how this use of traditional craftsmanship highly motivated the workers), while bigger media outlets often completely ignored this and focused on a strange political discussion that went along the lines of "reconstruction of something destroyed in WW2 = revisionism = supporting neofashists".
thing is, such projects do affect sociopolitical edges of the society. The architecture can influence how people meet, how they protest, how they receive/buy the goods, how easy is it to suppress people that doesn't follow what central party says, etc...
Physically, if the environment allows it, there are no reasons to not expand in disc/square form compared to a straight line. You get more economic activity per sq km, more viable public transit, more options to reach same destination and more options to create different business activities and all of this is due to higher density while maintaining high commute speed. It also makes maintenance and infrastructure cheaper(because you are not limited to a line)
I find there are corners of facebook where you can find good discussion of some topics. Birdwatching is fairly easy, lots of interesting discussion even on big groups. Public transport is contentious but local city groups often have posts from insiders or serious hobbyists which are high quality. For weather I am finding a mix of subreddits and storm chasing facebook pages to be ideal for avoiding both the doom and gloom and conspiracy crud that comes with that topic.
Economics explained YouTube channel has a good coverage on the rationale behind the crazy projects like this. In short, while the project itself might not make much sense, the infrastructure created to build it will stay and it makes it more accommodating to build other, more rational projects.
That's a rationalization, not a rationale. Every project can have useful byproducts, and nobody's rationale is to start a dumb one trillion dollar project rather than a smart one.
The reason why this exists is obviously that these projects are started by absolute rulers who want to build themselves vanity monuments the same way their ancient predecessors did.
Maybe I'm cynical but I really doubt that the Crown Prince is smart enough to have thought about it like this and even then, they could achieve the same (supposed) end result while also pursuing a more achievable mega project and get more out of that $1.5T.
If you're only building a mega project so you're forced to develop the infrastructure around it, why don't you choose a sensible megaproject instead? Answer: because that's not why they're doing it, you just made that up.
There are two types of such big projects out there.
There are those grandiose mega projects purely for the rich, purely for vanity and showing off wealth and meant attract outside attention... like "The Line" for example...
...but there also are more sensible projects, that are actually meant to help the local populace, improve conditions, and fight poverty... like "The Al Baydha Project" just for one example.
It's totally possible to do something ambitious and impressive, and with historic significance without becoming completely detached from reality.
I doubt that. It would be somewhere in London, and no way anyone making decisions would allow their property values to drop by building that much anything.
> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Lol. No it doesn't. It's a nightmare of inefficient transportation, corruption and crime. The most violent city in Brazil (!) is just outside the Federal District around Brasília.
Pity that the constructors cannot extract more money for this vanity project. Maybe they should pivot, reduce the length of the line a bit, to the length of an average penis.
Oh the bias, quiet unfortunate. So many comments against ME countries with so many false pretenses, you can easily tell many haven't set a foot on ME soil let alone actually lived there - holiday doesn't count. Having lived in ME for a long, long time I've had many liberals and atheists friends jump on the first ship to ME on a 'good' salary - slavery you say. I'm an Englishman, not a middle eastern.
This is so true, give them a good salary and all these people would be willing to come here, just plain shallowness and you end up feeling pity for them. No real backbone
> No one "signs off" on an absolute monarch's design
Nitpick, but MBS isn't the sovereign. His father is.
Given MBS isn't acting as regent, he's actually--in the most technical way--a tyrant: "the tyrant was Very Obviously but not formally in charge, because he ruled extra-constitutonally, rather than abolishing the constitution. This is what seperates tyranny, a form of extra-constitutional one man rule, from monarchy, a form of traditional and thus constitutional one-man rule" [1].
MBS is formally in charge from the perspective of anyone but the King since being appointed PM (a title normally held by the monarch), and arguably even before that as First Deputy Prime Minister.
His power is not (as far as anyone not privy to the private preferences of King Salman
can say) extraconstitutional, since it flows directly from royal decree giving him the position and authority he holds, and Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy where any delegation of authority the King makes is, ipso facto, constitutional.
> since it flows directly from royal decree giving him the position and authority he holds
Do you have a source for the decree? (EDIT: Nvm, Salman delegated various affairs to MBS [1], as well as made him PM [2]. Salman remains the head of state.)
I'd still argue that MBS is not formally in charge. The President can delegate their authority to a rando, that doesn't make it lower-case constitutional, e.g. Edith Wilson [3]. (Granted, that was done without formal decree.)
Going back to the Greek analog, tyrants would usually gain some instrument from the formal leader technically legitimising their actions. But the formal leader wasn't the one deciding. The tyrant was.
Nope, this isn't the difference between tyranny and monarchy.
Monarchy is telling you "who" has the power, and tyranny is telling you "how" the power is used.
Not even mentioning the existence of constitutional monarchy. It's the political system of many countries, including Norway and Sweden.
So, in order to really convey useful information, one would have to use different words, such as "democracy" (which can be "liberal", or the extreme opposite "illiberal"), "dictatorship", etc.
There is plenty of Historical precedent for a regency in monarchies. It's not necessarily a departure from the constitution, and in fact I cannot think of an enduring monarchic regime that has not had regency periods, that is, periods when someone rules in the stead of a nominal sovereign.
> plenty of Historical precedent for a regency in monarchies
MBS isn't acting as a regent, though. Salman remains the formal head of state.
Dragonwriter made a compelling point, however, in Salman having formally delegated a lot of powers to MBS. So maybe MBS isn't a tyrant, though it's difficult to argue either Salman or MBS are absolute monarchs at this time in practice. (Their "crown" retains absolute power. But that's slightly, and very meaningfully, different.)
So MBS is a prince with governing authority in an absolute monarchy. The position is grooming for he is the heir apparent. It would appear that what he decides - such as building a desert boondoggle to transfer cash to supporters - is not signed off by anyone. He makes it so by fiat. Semantic excursions are interesting but seem to have carried us in a wide circle around the point that started this thread.
> No one "signs off" on an absolute monarch's design.
Its not the monarch's design, its the prime minister’s (the PM is also the heir; which is also a break from earlier tradition, as previously the monarch was also PM.)
Though at the time of the design, MBS wasn't PM, the King was still PM, and MBS was Crown Prince (as he remains) and First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense.
The likely reason they want to do NEOM, besides basic hubris, is to jump start a modern economy. All the insane projects bring in foreign engineers, manufacturers, etc. At first your local industry feeds materials and labor into them, but in time you work your way up the value chain and replace them.
It's a time tested strategy. The main problem is SA is doing it in the most useless and bloody way possible.
That comes unexpected. I really would like to see how this works out. It's a possible way of living in the future. If the earth becomes more fiendly, such cities would offer autonomous compounds for the people. Now i would like to know if somebody is building the ARCs ...
the project was/is as feasible and advanced in renderings compared to classic cities as hyperloop was compared to classic high speed rail. It's not a possible way of living in the future, because there are examples of line cities that did exist and some exist today and these cities do have drawbacks that disk/square cities do not have while advantages are minimal and this line project approved by the dictator even in project phase. It's much more expensive, much more inelastic to the economic and people demand, much less economically profitable (per sq km compared to classic cities that expand in all directions) and much worse for commute options too (if you want to use a bike instead of pub transport, you'll have to travel more compared to a med/high density mixed use city developed in all directions with proper and much cheaper infrastructure set in place. This project is nothing more than a dictator's fantasy and should be treated as such. If you want to see a line city-there are several that exist today across the world and you can compare by yourself what's good/bad in these compared to a 'traditional' developed city
No I want to see how the project and it's problems are overcomed. Like how to get needed concrete, how to manage infrastructure, how to build the whole, what to do inside to make it a City.
There might be line cities. But none of them is a concept like this, or are they in a desert and are 170km long and 500m high? So you absolutely miss my points.
We're now. We know more. We have more experience (like "line cities are problematic" but where exactly?)
It's not about traditional city vs line city. And here too, your dislike is stronger then your thinking of opportunities. You don't like dictator there? Ok. I wrote it down.
Not necessarily you have to travel longer, it's ineffective and all the points you say. We (and they too) still don't know how, and where. Having a circular automated highspeed transport in the ground, it's possible. "What work where" will also be regulated, the plumber won't live in the end of the line city and also won't be the only one.
Just think of "silo" (series). I don't see the impossibilities here, like many of you do. I see opportunities.
imo it's more abt limitations, not abt opportunities. You get all the stuff a line project provides, but better, if you build in all directions. You get higher density, cheaper housing, more businesses, less segregation, less maintenance cost. And you'll definitely need to travel longer depending on the needs that are usually nonconstant for people, at some point youll need something from the other end while in a dense classic area,because of density, there's more stuff that you may need that's also closer to you.
All this project is just about creating a lot of limitations and thinking about ways to reduce those limitations with a huge cost while not having a clear defined benefit. You get the same stuff as in this project by just living close to a subway with the advantage that you still get more stuff because of density while the city remains much more flexible to dynamic demand (buildings can be easily adapted for businesses or for living, you get more area to create parks, etc). Inelastic cities are very vulnerable to the demand change (when demographics are changing(aging or ppl having more kids, the demand for specific infra changes too) or when some businesses that do employ a lot of ppl are closing and unemployment rises quickly because the gap can't be filled that fast) And I've just barely touched the surface - the maintenance cost and knowledge and custom parts needed for this project are not sustainable in any way
That is not the word I or most of HN would have used…
It’s a sad state of the world that this delusional lunatic is dictator of a $1T GDP country instead of everyone else that understands this is a stupid idea.
Yes, you can mix your dislike into your opinions, but they still stay your opinions.
I'm interested in the technology, in the achievements that are possible, the problem solving and solutions found to do something of this scope.
It's not about lunatics or the ** arabs dictators or killers ** say what you want.
For example, the need for the special sand for the concrete. Their sand, which they have plenty of, is completely not suitable for this. It's too fine. So, how this will be solved?
The world could learn a lot of it - just imagine, you can use the Sahara sands instead of the special sands that need to be somehow and somewhere resourced atm. That would reduce the house building costs a lot and enable affordable housing everywhere. I'm talking about the proper way of housing, like in the story of the three pigs and the wolf.
So can you explain why you dislike technology and advancement in city buildings, experiments and new learnings? I don't quite get it.
But opinions don't matter here. If you are logical and factual, that city as vaporware from the beginning.
You don't need the many debunks available online to see that this project is unfeasible, whether you are talking budget, architecture, maintenance or transportation.
If your logical and factual then you don't judge it by it's feasibility. You rather take known facts and problems and try to resolve them logical - to make it better. To learn from it. It's an opportunity.
Burji (highest building) was also doomed by kings and horses. Learned a lot. Next will be even higher.
Budget talking is not my point. This somehow will be overcome. If not, it's not my problem. There are ways for getting money. You know it, I know it.
Maintenance and transportation can't be judged right now, as we didn't see it in function. You and I don't know anything about the plans.
You're speculating it will be shitty, I speculate it's possible. If you use modules. Do we have experience with modular buildings? (Yes we have..) Can we use this made experiences? (Yes..)
So you see problems before they're actually emerged. That's foresee of the future.
All the debunks will be wrong if the line proves the opposite. I see the same problems as you do, but I don't think their unovercomeable..
>he need for the special sand for the concrete. Their sand, which they have plenty of, is completely not suitable for this. It's too fine. So, how this will be solved?
As usual, either the sand gets bought from poorer countries or outright stolen and sold on the black market. You can't use desert sand for building.
They have a lot of rocks there. The sands are because of the weathering of the rocks. And they have a lot of sun. Which would make grounding of rocks feasible. That could allow them to use desert sand too. Or they might find a mix between traditional and desert sand.. and some special ingredients. who knows!
if you never try, you won't find it out.
It's a way of creative problem solving. If they build it. In the "middle of", suddenly, something is not enough, then you do have to find a solution.
The sheer arrogance of Westerners is one of the reasons I'm so biased against them and letting them enter any of the Muslim countries, like come on are we supposed to be taking lessons from people who gave us the Holocaust, the World wars, the Iraq war, the forceful displacement of Palestinians so they can create their own country. Are you people really that blind that you think whatever you think or values you have are the right ones? If that's true why do your governments still have a presence in defense contracts with these countries, if you're such upholders of these values why do you sell weapons to countries like Saudi Arabia, Israel etc which have proven that they cannot uphold human life. I have worked with the Westerners and someone who's born and raised here, I can tell you this much, there is good and bad in every nation but your bad is the worst every time and the arrogance you have has blinded you to accept your faults.
We might have our faults but our people are working towards progress, it takes time but we don't go bashing Western people and how they are the worst examples of humanity, even knowing their history and countless examples of genocides conducted by them and then denying it. Shame on you people and those who think they are the best examples. Next time when you're offered a job in a Middle East country, don't accept it simple as that instead of coming here, bashing and then saying money talks. Greed is all you guys know.
Karmic justice requires this project to be crushed by the sand that these arrogant dictators tried to impose their steel dick over.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/03/un-rights-expe...