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"The Arabs are a failed culture who produce nothing"

HansMustermann said:
Meanwhile Arabic princes get massive amounts of money from the oil trade and just piss it away on self-aggrandizing mega-projects, instead of into their own country. They could have invested more than any country got in foreign aid per capita, but they didn't...
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Life for citizens in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar is pretty high quality. What are you talking about?
 
Because, really, as I mentioned before, that's the actual problem that a lot of the Arab countries have. It's not even about most of the culture. It's that a few sheikhs or various kinds of autocrats piss away the money on super-expensive status symbols, instead of investing into the economy. Which isn't even an Arab-only problem.
 
Hercules56 said:
Life for citizens in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar is pretty high quality. What are you talking about?
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Saudi Arabia pretty much just subsidizes its citizens with the oil money (under the Citizen's Account Program) instead of creating high tech jobs for them. An estimated only 30–40 percent of working-age Saudis hold jobs or actively seek work. So yeah, it's high for now, but if the oil money starts going south, it will have a big problem. For any normal economy that would be an unemployment rate of 60 to 70 percent, and pretty much cause the country to crash and burn.

UAE, same deal. And not just direct payment, but they'll subsidize your home too.

Qatar... ok, that one escaped the trap, but even that one is a wee bit more skewed than people think, because that standard of living is still mostly based on oil and the government offering very high wages to government employees and whatnot. But still, fair is fair, it did use its money better than some other states.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Saudi Arabia pretty much just subsidizes its citizens with the oil money (under the Citizen's Account Program) instead of creating high tech jobs for them. An estimated only 30–40 percent of working-age Saudis hold jobs or actively seek work. So yeah, it's high for now, but if the oil money starts going south, it will have a big problem. For any normal economy that would be an unemployment rate of 60 to 70 percent, and pretty much cause the country to crash and burn.

UAE, same deal. And not just direct payment, but they'll subsidize your home too.

Qatar... ok, that one escaped the trap, but even that one is a wee bit more skewed than people think, because that standard of living is still mostly based on oil and the government offering very high wages to government employees and whatnot. But still, fair is fair, it did use its money better than some other states.
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I see every reason to think as oil dries up, high tech and other jobs will be created so the people are less and less dependent on handouts.
 
Hercules56 said:
I see every reason to think as oil dries up, high tech and other jobs will be created so the people are less and less dependent on handouts.
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Oh? And what reasons are those? What on earth makes you think they're ready to do that?
 
Ziggurat said:
Oh? And what reasons are those? What on earth makes you think they're ready to do that?
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In fairness, I don't think the oil market is going to dry up within the next century, and who knows what the labor and tech demands might be then.
 
Hercules56 said:
Yemen has a ton of internal problems that other Gulf States simply do not. They also have a lot less oil.
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You have every reason to think that with a lot less oil, Yemen will have a lot more high tech and other jobs. But that's not the case. Why not?

And don't say "internal problems". Why does Yemen have a ton of internal problems, instead of the high tech and other productive jobs you envision?
 
theprestige said:
You have every reason to think that with a lot less oil, Yemen will have a lot more high tech and other jobs. But that's not the case. Why not?

And don't say "internal problems". Why does Yemen have a ton of internal problems, instead of the high tech and other productive jobs you envision?
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Yemen's many internal conflicts and complicated history has clearly kept their society and economy from advancing.
 
theprestige said:
You have every reason to think that with a lot less oil, Yemen will have a lot more high tech and other jobs. But that's not the case. Why not?

And don't say "internal problems". Why does Yemen have a ton of internal problems, instead of the high tech and other productive jobs you envision?
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I think if you take away a nation/cultures primary source of wealth (by a stunning percentage), they're a-gonna develop a metric **** ton of internal problems right pronto.
 
Thermal said:
I think if you take away a nation/cultures primary source of wealth (by a stunning percentage), they're a-gonna develop a metric **** ton of internal problems right pronto.
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I think what he and the others REALLY want us to say is "brown people are bad at doing stuff and their cultures are inferior".
 
Thermal said:
I think if you take away a nation/cultures primary source of wealth (by a stunning percentage), they're a-gonna develop a metric **** ton of internal problems right pronto.
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Which is pretty much the opposite of what Hercules said:

Hercules56 said:
I see every reason to think as oil dries up, high tech and other jobs will be created so the people are less and less dependent on handouts.
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Maybe I'm misreading him. It seems to me like "as the oil dries up, high tech and other jobs will be created" means that those high tech and other jobs being created will be a response to the oil drying up. They haven't been created yet, because they've still got oil, but don't worry when it dries up they'll be motivated to create something else to replace it.

That just seems crazy to me. As you point out: "if you take away a nation/cultures primary source of wealth (by a stunning percentage), they're a-gonna develop a metric **** ton of internal problems right pronto", and that will make it harder to develop other industries, particularly the high tech industries of an advanced economy.

Hans is certainly right about Dutch disease being a real and important problem for resource rich economies. But I'm not aware of its inverse: the depletion of a a major resource causing economic growth.
 
Hercules56 said:
I think what he and the others REALLY want us to say is "brown people are bad at doing stuff and their cultures are inferior".
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They might well be motivated by such a sentiment. Doesn't mean we can't address the question squarely and without racism.

I think it's a fair observation that the theocracy-led Arab cultures are behind the rest of the world, possibly because the glut of oil wealth has disincentivized innovation. The whole "when you're already rich you don't need to work hard" way of thinking.

Arab cultures in general can be breathtakingly beautiful, or oppressively cruel. But actually forward thinking, it's not.
 
Another problem I see is that that kind of industrialization doesn't happen overnight. And certainly not to an extent where you can have your own patents, instead of being just a place for some other countries' sweatshops. It really takes decades and significant investment.

So I'd feel more confident in that future if they started investing in it now when they have the money, than when the money started to run out.
 
Word. Or even investing some of that money into tech and education simply to be the best at everything here and now. But no, no real interest.

That's how I'd measure a country's contributions: how much do they invest in driving tech forward and staying on the cutting edge, endlessly pushing the frontiers of knowledge and ability
 
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Hercules56 said:
Yemen's many internal conflicts and complicated history has clearly kept their society and economy from advancing.
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That may well be true, but it still doesn't answer the question. What makes you think Saudi Arabia will make the transition successfully? It's not enough to just lack the impediments that Yemen has, what does it have going for it that will make it transition? Does it have a stellar education system? A history of entrepreneurial spirit? A deep pool of skilled labor?
 
Hercules56 said:
I think what he and the others REALLY want us to say is "brown people are bad at doing stuff and their cultures are inferior".
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When every other argument fails, just call your opponents racist. Yeah, that'll work.
 
Ziggurat said:
That may well be true, but it still doesn't answer the question. What makes you think Saudi Arabia will make the transition successfully? It's not enough to just lack the impediments that Yemen has, what does it have going for it that will make it transition? Does it have a stellar education system? A history of entrepreneurial spirit? A deep pool of skilled labor?
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It has a VERY deep pool of people who are unemployed and not even seeking employment at the moment. Between 60 and 70 percent of the population. The moment the government money to just pay them to stay at home and do nothing starts to run out, I'm not sure even foreign investment can compensate for that fast enough. If they let it for the last moment, there's a LOT of industrializing and getting into markets and stuff to do there, and fast, if they want to cross that finish line successfully. And what they're running against in that race is a revolution and possible civil war, when 20 million people end up neither being paid enough by the government to live, nor having an available job.
 
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Hercules56 said:
Yemen's many internal conflicts and complicated history has clearly kept their society and economy from advancing.
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I'm not buying it. Yemen's "many internal conflicts" just means Yemenis causing trouble for themselves and each other. And they have the same complicated history as every other state in the region.

What makes you think the other oil states in the region won't turn out just like Yemen, when the oil stops paying their way?

Why didn't Yemen turn out like Israel? Desert nation, no oil, complicated history, successful tech industry. Is it the lack of Israelis causing trouble for themselves and each other, instead of getting on with building themselves a Better Tomorrow?
 
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Roboramma said:
No, I'd say the objective of all cultures should be the well-being of their members. Or, perhaps to state it differently, the members of cultures should value that culture proportionally to how it improves their well-being.

If I were to be standing behind Rawls' veil of ignorance, I think I'd much rather be born into some cultures than others, and I don't think that view can reasonably be put down to bias based on the fact that I'm not actually behind the veil of ignorance and thus am biased toward the culture I was born into. Certainly some of it can, but not all of it.

Things like political/economic/religious freedoms really do matter to human well being, I think. And they have not just direct impact on people's lives, but indirect impact on how societies can improve overtime, correcting their mistakes and helping people to cooperate to build the sorts of lives that they want to live. The same is true of different shared sets of values.
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That's a reasonable viewpoint, and is probably the predominant one among contributors to this thread, so it's nice to have it spelled out. But it's a bit idealistic. In actual cultures, the goal of the culture is a component of the culture itself. We see people enthusiastically supporting and participating in these cultures even when they're suffering from its practices. Warrior cultures are a simple and common example. (We haven't even left behind all aspects of warrior culture in the U.S. For instance, universities and public schools are supposed to be about a culture of academia but the sports teams keep taking the spotlight and a surprising share of the funding. Bullying is hard to stop because the same administrators who write anti-bullying policies often look at actual individual bullies and perceive, from deep in their evolutionary heritage, admirable alpha leaders who will someday bring much honor and plunder back to the village.)

The purpose of Amish culture is to preserve a particular way of life. Judging its success in terms of how well it accomplishes that, I'd conclude it's not failed, but it's not fully successful either, due in large part to outside factors (an increasingly connected and technological world) that make it more difficult than it used to be.

The purpose of Chinese culture is to maintain internal order, which is at least partly understandable in light of the consequences of those periods of Chinese history when the government has failed to do so. We can view the past seven decades there as a period of success, or as a brief respite amid a longer period of chaos, depending on time frame (as Chinese history is long). Either way, continued future success is uncertain, but again that's partly due to the times we live in.

For the actual topic at hand, as far as I can tell, the purpose of Arabic culture is to exalt the Prophet. It's been fantastically successful at that; the Prophet is constantly and widely exalted in numerous ways, from elaborate daily practices to acts of extreme devotion and martyrdom (some of which are also terrorism) to the raising of unprecedented monumental structures. The goal of exalting the Prophet isn't better accomplished by giving everyone a comfortable standard of living, but rather by concentrating wealth in the hands of a few emirs and kings who can then fund lavish temples, impressive monuments, and global fatwas against dissing said Prophet, while also enforcing the laws he supposedly issued.

We say to that, what a waste, but go back 1000 years and substitute the Savior for the Prophet and that's what European culture was all about too.

But what about individual well-being? Most of the subjects of the Son of Heaven, the Elders, the Imams, or the Village Chieftain will all tell you their cultures are best for everyone's individual well-being, through (more or less respectively) an orderly society, adherence to specific traditions, rewards in the afterlife, or the spoils of victorious raiding.
 
theprestige said:
I'm not buying it. Yemen's "many internal conflicts" just means Yemenis causing trouble for themselves and each other. And they have the same complicated history as every other state in the region.

What makes you think the other oil states in the region won't turn out just like Yemen, when the oil stops paying their way?

Why didn't Yemen turn out like Israel? Desert nation, no oil, complicated history, successful tech industry. Is it the lack of Israelis causing trouble for themselves and each other, instead of getting on with building themselves a Better Tomorrow?
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Israel was given billions of dollars worth of industry by Germany after world war II. They have also received more than 100 billion in foreign aid.

How does that compare to the amount of industrial and economic aid yemen has received?
 
Hercules56 said:
Israel was given billions of dollars worth of industry by Germany after world war II. They have also received more than 100 billion in foreign aid.

How does that compare to the amount of industrial and economic aid yemen has received?
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Yemen has been receiving upwards of a billion dollars a year in foreign aid, in recent years.

It kind of seems like you're making a case that Arab nations do alright when they have lots of oil, or when they get lots of help from other more productive cultures, and even then not always.
 
HansMustermann said:
It has a VERY deep pool of people who are unemployed and not even seeking employment at the moment. Between 60 and 70 percent of the population. The moment the government money to just pay them to stay at home and do nothing starts to run out, I'm not sure even foreign investment can compensate for that fast enough. If they let it for the last moment, there's a LOT of industrializing and getting into markets and stuff to do there, and fast, if they want to cross that finish line successfully. And what they're running against in that race is a revolution and possible civil war, when 20 million people end up neither being paid enough by the government to live, nor having an available job.
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Where are you getting this figure from?
From what I can find, it's nearer 4%, and hasn't risen over 8% since at least 1999.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262524/unemployment-rate-in-saudi-arabia/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demog...i Arabia is the fourth,rate of 1.62% per year.
Moreover, around 40% of Saudi Arabia's population is expats. As you cannot get residency without a job, due to the sponsorship system, the vast majority of those people will be in employment. A 70% rate of unemployment is, I believe, simply not possible.
 
Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/article/mar...roduces-unemployment-insurance-idUSL6N0KG1VX/

And if you think that's a contradiction, remember: unemployment numbers only include those who are actively seeking employment. It does not include people who AREN'T. (Not just in Saudi Arabia, btw. That's how it works even in the USA or Germany.) That's where that difference comes from.

Also cf the same article: most of those who do work are employed by the state.

Also, Cf Bllomberg, over half of the citizens registered for the Citizen's Account Program (i.e., being paid by the government that just exist) in December 2017: https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/...t-to-begin-cash-transfers-for-poorer-citizens

And yes, not sure if that includes non-citizen expats. Probably not.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Hell, never mind the irrelevant criteria like exports. Even comparing cultures as better or worse is not something that most anthropologists do. And I've certainly not read about any such thing as a "failed culture" from an anthropologist. In fact, arguably, culture can't fail. The only way for culture to fail is if every member of society didn't talk to each other and had nothing in common with each other, so essentially you no longer had a culture. So WTH does a "failed culture" even mean?

Before going on a self-righteous crusade to disprove X, you first have to define what X is.
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Yeah this conversation is kind of stupid on premise; a culture is a thing that exists because certain characteristics are in place, it's not something that can "succeed" or "fail". The idea that there is some kind of end goal that a culture once established must meet or it has "failed" is basically white supremacist nonsense.
 
Checkmite said:
Yeah this conversation is kind of stupid on premise; a culture is a thing that exists because certain characteristics are in place, it's not something that can "succeed" or "fail". The idea that there is some kind of end goal that a culture once established must meet or it has "failed" is basically white supremacist nonsense.
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Agreed. This concept of "failed cultures" has white racism written all over it.

I smell Proud Boys.
 
theprestige said:
Yemen has been receiving upwards of a billion dollars a year in foreign aid, in recent years.

It kind of seems like you're making a case that Arab nations do alright when they have lots of oil, or when they get lots of help from other more productive cultures, and even then not always.
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Israel has received more than $100 billion. That doesn't included whole factories and industries shipped over from Germany.

Let us know when Yemen receives such amazing gifts.
 
Hercules56 said:
Agreed. This concept of "failed cultures" has white racism written all over it.

I smell Proud Boys.
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When you have a theocratic government giving the death penalty for homosexuality and blasphemy, it's clean pool to say they are backwards and need to be drug out of the stone age. I mean come on: some of its proud citizenry is rather hostile to the civilized world.
 
Thermal said:
When you have a theocratic government giving the death penalty for homosexuality and blasphemy, it's clean pool to say they are backwards and need to be drug out of the stone age. I mean come on: some of its proud citizenry is rather hostile to the civilized world.
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The USA has an incarceration rate of 531 per 100,000 people.

Saudi Arabia? .854 persons per 100,000.

UAE? 104 per 100,000.

Qatar? 58 per 100,000.



Hmmmm....

Dont even look at murder rates, its embarrassing.
 
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Hercules56 said:
The USA has an incarceration rate of 531 per 100,000 people.

Saudi Arabia? .854 persons per 100,000.

UAE? 104 per 100,000.

Qatar? 58 per 100,000.



Hmmmm....
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Yeah, we lock up too many people, largely for pissant drug offenses.

They kill you for being gay. There's a difference.

Eta: an insanely rich society does not need to lock up its poor, either, having relatively few to start with.
 
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Thermal said:
Yeah, we lock up too many people, largely for pissant drug offenses.

They kill you for being gay. There's a difference.

Eta: an insanely rich society does not need to lock up its poor, either, having relatively few to start with.
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Gays are victims of violence in the USA all the time.
 
Hercules56 said:
Israel has received more than $100 billion. That doesn't included whole factories and industries shipped over from Germany.

Let us know when Yemen receives such amazing gifts.
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Yet at the same time, Saudi Arabia earned an order of magnitude more, and pretty much just pissed it away. As in, their oil exports alone were $236 billion, and refined oil products accounted for $45.3 billion.

And still have done buggerall with it, as still most of their population who has a job at all, is working for the state.

Whining that some countries making hundreds of billions and having a waay positive trade balance ($187.67 billion as of 2022) aren't getting more donations, is just stupid. It's as stupid as whining about why don't people donate money to Elon Musk. Aid money should go to the ones who need it, not to prop some princes who are already making money hand-over-fist, and just pissing it away.


And given your weird focus on Israel again and again, if you're gonna play the "you're racist" card against whoever disagrees with your nonsense, I'll play the "you're an antisemite" card :p
 
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Anyways, this whole new concept of "failed cultures" is just Proud Boy bull ****.
 
Hercules56 said:
Anyways, this whole new concept of "failed cultures" is just Proud Boy bull ****.
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Ah, right, so you're back to textbook ad-hominem too. Well, I guess when you've run out of actual logical arguments straight from the second message, you do what you can do :p
 
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