>>78704227Soon after meeting someone, mention Dubai. If it provokes a smirk, and a jibe at the crassness of the place, that is useful. You can filter that person out.
Knocking Dubai took over long ago from knocking LA as the blandest opinion in the world. The case for the Gulf city? The transfer of power from the west is visible there as it is nowhere else: in the Asian big-spenders, in the Russian sanction-dodgers. You needn’t like the place, but to not find it stimulating is to not find this century stimulating.
Lots of places are diverse. Dubai is cosmopolitan, to an extent London alone among western cities can touch, and that spirit infuses the old quarter near the airport as much as the bling centre. Looking down at the city, and at new-money Brits who love “Doobs”, has come to characterise a certain kind of box-ticking, not-very-elite elitism, like having an Elena Ferrante on the go.
Of course, someone can be anti-Dubai and interesting, but we don’t have hours on end to find out. We need heuristics, rules of thumb, to triage the original from the generic, and none works better than the Dubai test.
