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Dubai: Where Hope And Also Stupid People Go To Die
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Also, I really hope somone gets nailed with an infraction the next time they use 'bitch' in this thread. The way it's being used is even more cruel and derogatory than usual. The women in question went there because that's where the company her husband joined put him, and it seemed like a great place to live because Dubai goes to a lot of trouble to hide the bad spots. Are you automatically excluded from sympathy just because you live in the same area social injustice occurs in? Fuck, I'd better get the hell out of Baltimore before I try posting again. And don't even mention all the years I lived in Japan. I hope I didn't mention anything bad ever happening to me there, because apparently, fuck, I deserved it.
Nah, center for global development and the World Bank.
http://cgdev.org/
See: Let Their People Come
I wasn't being categorical. I was stating that a lot of guest worker programs do in fact create second, third or fourth class citizens. But thats still often elevating them from being seventh and eighth class. I'm not saying Dubai doesn't have problems, I'm saying the people who got caught up in them don't deserve what they got, and that guest worker programs aren't inherently bad. Dubai is apparently an exception to the latter.
Slave trading.
What is the significant-pause other, kiddo?
You don't want to try and wrap yourself in mystique while defending class exploitation. It's a good way to make lots of people imagine your yellow guts wrapped around a stick.
I'm really interested in your significant-pause other stuff. What is it?
And then there's the stuff that you would really have to be digging for, like finding out, 'an Emirati kicks the shit out of you on the street. You don't fight back, and when the police arrive, who is arrested and sent to jail for assault?'
Let us preserve its ruins as a memorial to man's hubris.
I get what you're saying, that a crappy job beats the hell out of starving to death in a third world shithole and is the first rung in the ladder out of poverty.
This is why I always ask people who are totally against globalization: Why do you hate the world's poor so much? These are fellow humans who can now work jobs making our iPods, big screen TVs, and cars and afford to buy their own food instead of being permanant dependants of food aid handouts often stolen by thuggish, corrupt governments?
Issue is that guest worker programs are *so* easily abusable and *so* often abused that little good comes from them.
I was stationed in Korea for a year and these Phillapino and Russian women that wanted honest work got their passports taken away from them and got forced into prostitution to get them back.
Even american English teachers get fucked on their salaries because the Korean legal system still has the mentality of the people which essentially is if you're not one of us, fuck you. Not knocking Koreans, it's a very human response; i.e. tribalization.
Look at how illegal mexican immigrants get treated. Because they have no legal standing, they get abused a lot.
The more humane solution is either build your office/factory in that country or have workers because outright citizens to avoid abuse. People suck; if they can abuse labor and get away with it, sadly, most will.
Margaret Thatcher
It's not really relevant unless you want to make an ad homonym.
It wouldn't occur to you to research local laws when you are moving to a different continent, with a radically different cultural heritage? It would occur to me to do so if I were moving to the UK and that is a hell of a lot less different than the UAE is. And no one is going to advertise itself as some barren hellhole, a person raised in a society as media saavy as the UK or US should very well understand these things.
I can certainly feel sorry for exploited third world workers. They don't have the resources or cultural knowledge to account for the tactics used against them.
In regards to immigrant workers, they are most certainly not the type starving to death in a third world shit hole. Someone like that would be worthless as a maid or construction worker, and if you're living in that kind of condition, you're too busy scrabbling for daily survival to be able to raise the money to get to Dubai in the first place.
If I am feasting at a great banquet and a starving man crawls up to my front door begging for food, merely throwing him a bone does not fulfill my moral obligation to that man.
Look upon my works ye mighty and etc. etc.
Seriously the city's going to collapse into dust and while I hope the underclass gets out somehow the rich can drown in it for all I care.
You'd much rather criticize the bonethrowers so that they don't or can't give anything at all. Gotcha.
Point made, was speaking more in relation to globalization, but still.....
Look at what Mexico city is like. They have fecal snow because it's so crowded the crap dries, blows around, and comes back down in flake form. With the recent nacro war, some northern mexican states are worse than Iraq right now, to include beheadings.
Fuck, I'll mow some dude's lawn in California rather than live in that. Dude is probably abusing me a little, but beats the shit out of the hellhole I was in.
Again, doesn't justify the abuse and I'm all for reforming stupid immigration laws that punish legal immigrants and encourage illegal immigration and abuse, but it's still a step up.
Margaret Thatcher
Don't post tired.
I did it once and it didn't end well.
Margaret Thatcher
I forgive you because English obviously isn't your first language, but I fail you because Jesus how can you fail so hard.
Let me dream you horrible man.
What's the alternative? Praising the bonethrowers for doing the bare minimum to salve their conscience? Clearly, doing anything to help wasn't the motive behind tossing scraps.
You're muckin' with a G!
OK so I misread one of your posts.
You're still an apologist for exploitation.
But hey that's a great reason to be a dick, right?
Actually, illegal immigrants do have legal standing as far as basic civil rights go, and if they were to show up at the police station and rat you out for the kind of shit expats in Dubai pull you'd have some 'splainin to do. The charges may not stick, but you'd have a harder time getting away with it in the future.
And our government would go out of their way to ensure that the illegal immigrant found their way back to their country of origin.
No, he responded to it. It was basically *mumble*I guess Dubai is an example of it being bad*mumble* but a little exploitation can really benefit some people! It's super!
You don't think that It would be pertinent to investigate the Goverment and/or laws of a forign country that you and your signifigant other are being transfered to for buisness reasons?
If I were to make such a drastic change in my lifestyle, I'd want to study the fucking crap out of said nation; Even if it was Just to move a hundread miles south into the US.
That is an excellent alternative. Praising them, possibly making it something common and legal so that it could be regulated. If more people get in on the bonethrowing, that would be excellent.
She gets to go home, and that's more than a person who learned about slavery in school but still did not oppose when she saw it firsthand deserves.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
I'm anti-world-poverty.
I guess you should feel awful for being on the other side of that fence.
EDIT: Bedtime now.
I know that as a believer in Robert Wright you have faith that the forces of commerce will inevitably unite the world and bring up the quality of life for everyone, but surely encouraging a bit more compassion --through law, if possible -- in the process along the way wouldn't hurt.
Now this is an interesting problem.
On one hand, you've got the "Rich man and lazurus" parable of Jesus where the rich man goes to hell, for doing just that out of scorn, giving lazurus next to nothing out of scorn.
On the other, there's a Jewish saying that "The smallest kindness is better than the greatest intent." I.E. we can write posts about the world's poor all damn day and it won't change shit, but some guy who gives $5 to a charity on a whim in the checkout line, has done more.
Guess it comes down to intent and result?
Consider this:
There was some Africa concert a few years back that raised millions for feeding starving africans. Food aid concert? I don't know. I *do* remember that very little of the food made it to the intended recipients with most of it stolen by typically corrupt government officials or rotted in the ports.
However, some guy who builds a factory in Africa and creates/provides a few hundred jobs may actually be doing more as jobs, create a tax base, which creates a tax base for building infrastructure, which creates sanitation, ect.
We all play video games. How do you improve your provinces in strategy games? Build infrastructure.
Margaret Thatcher