Dubai on Empty 
Despite the fact it's one of the nicer countries to live in the region and reasonably well-governed, certain groups of people love to bash Dubai.<p>Never mind that there's mass atrocities, neglect, decay, rampant corruption and idiocy and day to day violence in a lot of the countries of the world.<p>Laos is run by bandits? Who gives a shit, and where's Laos anyways? No, let's talk about how Dubai is missing the mystical "culture" element. Class, yeah man, dude, you can't buy class.<p>If you want to point out the problems in Dubai, go for it. There's problems there, sure. But it's definitely one of the least problematic places in the Middle East, it's got a lot going for it, and they'll be fine.<p>It's funny, because the people who don't like Dubai are the same who champion for third world revolutions, but then don't want to point out how bad things get a few decades later. I'm in Vietnam right now. If the South Vietnam/United States/South Korea coalition had beaten the North Vietnam/Soviet Union/Red China/North Korea coalition, it would be a much nicer, safer place to live.<p>Instead, it's a backward wasteland ruled by bandits that's barely - <i>barely</i> - starting to get its shit together.<p>Do people want to cover that?<p>No, let's talk about how Dubai is missing culture. Yeah, screw Dubai.<p>Edit: Downvoting isn't good. Take a moment away from the hatefest here and think critically on these three points - First, Dubai is indisputably one of the best-governed countries in the Middle East. Second, there's a lot of places a lot worse than Dubai that could use the negative attention first. Third, people that love to trumpet the failure of Dubai also refuse to draw basic cause-and-effect relationships, like the fact that Vietnam is more like North Korea than South Korea since the Southern side lost to the North in that war - and it's ruined the country. Those are important points.