{"id":3312,"date":"2010-07-30T06:00:12","date_gmt":"2010-07-30T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/?p=3312"},"modified":"2010-07-30T13:36:12","modified_gmt":"2010-07-30T18:36:12","slug":"on-dubai-bashing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/2010\/07\/on-dubai-bashing\/","title":{"rendered":"on &#8220;dubai-bashing&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Todd Reisz and Rory Hyde, who are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/todd-reisz\">writing<\/a> about research from <a href=\"http:\/\/almanakh.org\/\">Al Manakh<\/a> at the <em>Huffington Post<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/todd-reisz\/abandoned-cars-and-memori_b_651448.html\">describe<\/a> what they call the phenomenon of &#8220;Dubai-bashing&#8221;, and argue that the phenomenon reflects Western insecurities more than it does actual conditions in Dubai.\u00a0 While I have no doubt that Dubai is indeed a more complex entity than the articles they briefly quote allow (Reisz and Hyde&#8217;s most recent article in this series, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/todd-reisz\/two-idols-a-song-and-some_b_659730.html\">&#8220;Two Songs, an Idol, and Some Money Transfers&#8221;<\/a>, is one small piece of evidence of that), I&#8217;ll admit that I finished this article unconvinced that the bashing Dubai has received (and it has undoubtedly received a bashing) is really so unwarranted, or solely a product of what Koolhaas calls &#8220;[the need to] maintain and restore our own confidence in terms of the crisis we are now facing&#8221;.\u00a0 It is true that the financial crisis has as many roots in New York and London as in Dubai (easy evidence: foreclosed homes in the States), that Dubai is not exactly the only place in the world which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hrw.org\/en\/news\/2009\/05\/18\/uae-exploited-workers-building-island-happiness\">abuses immigrant laborers<\/a> (look to the States, again), and that it&#8217;s always worth examining one&#8217;s own errors before pointing out those belonging to others, but it&#8217;s not clear to me why those things, even cumulatively, make criticism of Dubai wholly dismissible as a product of a collective desire to &#8220;get [ourselves] through a hard spell&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Regardless, you ought to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/todd-reisz\/abandoned-cars-and-memori_b_651448.html\">read their argument<\/a> for yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Todd Reisz and Rory Hyde, who are writing about research from Al Manakh at the Huffington Post, describe what they call the phenomenon of &#8220;Dubai-bashing&#8221;, and argue that the phenomenon reflects Western insecurities more than it does actual conditions in Dubai.\u00a0 While I have no doubt that Dubai is indeed a more complex entity than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[437,436,34,18],"class_list":["post-3312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asides","tag-al-manakh","tag-crisis","tag-dubai","tag-rem-koolhaas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3313,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3312\/revisions\/3313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}