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.
https://africanarguments.org/2024/03/go-gulf-is-ethiopia-sac...
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.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/26/why-intel...
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.
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.
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2024/03/21/jared-ku...
6 months ago they stopped sending limited amount of weapons to Ukraine.
Current foreign policy of USA clearly sends a message that other countries can do anything they want to both their citizens and their neighbors.
Israel-Gaza is a more complicated breakdown for sure, but it’s also a much more complicated conflict.
Morocco received few hundred US tanks recently. Do they fight for survival?
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/What-are-some-yxB.yA2.SzS7M...
There’s not some big mystery here. Democrats are proposing bill after bill after bill, and republicans are loudly and proudly blocking them.
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.
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?
Russia is evil for invading Ukraine, which is a non EU, non NATO nation.
Europeans should be the one fighting for freedom in Europe not the Americans.
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.
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.
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?
For example I think that there were relatively moral people who lived in the e.g. 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.
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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."
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.
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.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
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.
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”?
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.
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”.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
A large number of immigrants opt to bring their culture with them and retain it in their host country though.
Not giving people fundamental rights such as freedom of speech or freedom of worship is just wrong.
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.
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.
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.
Not quite - but you do need to be a moral universalist.
You are literally comparing societies.
I really don't understand what your point is.
It is after all much easier to change hearts and minds in a democracy.
> Let's not gloss over the fact that we in the west do the same.
I'm curious where in the "west" you're from. At least in my part of the "western world", we absolutely don't do any of this.
Totally: Norway and Saudi Arabia are exactly the same in terms of humanism, it's just a matter of optics, right?
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.
"They enslave their children's children, who make compromise with sin"
I think about that quote a lot. It sets an unachievable standard. But I don't think it's wrong.
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.
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.