As someone who grew up in Dubai, the tourism industry everywhere breaks the soul of the place. Dubai, especially the places where people actually live and set up a livelihood, is a place like any other.
What a terrible day to be literate and be able to read into the ugly belly of self-righteousness disguised as morality.
I don't think the author was talking shit about Dubai, she was sticking up for the people who are being exploited there.
Obviously there's humanity and real lives everywhere, she's just advocating for those lives to be valued. With, ya know, human rights protected by the government.
The problem is not factuality. The problem is assuming that the entire World should now and forever be judged through the moral lens of post-war America.
Dubai seems like the peak of inequality and ostentatious luxury even to those of us who don't live in America (I assume you mean "the US", not the Americas).
There are genuinely bad places in the world even factoring out "American exceptionalism/egocentrism". Dubai seems to be one of them.
I'm going to assume based on the authors name, and the sources name that this is all very "western". We have gotten very good at exporting all the misery elsewhere while we medicate and entertain ourselves and pretend that the savagery and the suffering do not exist.
The take here is very much Brave New World, going to visit the savages, and complaining about it. And then contrasting it with the "normal" sterilized life that the author leads.
It is neither self righteousness or morality: It is an abject lack of self awareness and of sheltered existence.
What a terrible day to be literate and be able to read into the ugly belly of self-righteousness disguised as morality.