Fucking Saudis

[fumster]

@Bear_Nenno

So you are shunning Saudi Arabia for it’s unequal treatment of women? You are saying that they need to join the 21st Century?

A little misguided and hipocritical, I think, considering the United States’ views and treatment of homosexuals.

yeah, Saadis treat gays so well :rolleyes:

[BrainGlutton]

@sh1bu1

yeah, Saadis treat gays so well :rolleyes:

Well, at least their favorites.

[PrettyVacant]

The deafening silence from those bleating about Libya when they drove in to quell the democratic uprising in Bahrain was pointed.

After the now on trial President Mubarak of Egypt, is the House of Saud the USAs longest and certainly most valued client in the middle east?

[Testy]

That’s a weird article. I know there is an entire floor of a mall in Riyadh that is run and staffed by women and they seem to do OK. (Third floor, Faisaliah Tower) Likewise, there are a lot of issues with men running lingerie shops. The women, at least Western and Asian women, are creeped-out buying lingerie from men. There were also a couple of instances of lingerie salesmen boring holes in changing room walls and the like.
One part of the government wants lingerie shops to hire women. Fine idea. The problem is reigning-in the religious police. Staffing a shop with women is probably a great idea but not worth the attention you would get from the Mutawwa. Constant harassment of the shop, customers and employees by the religious police would put someone out of business in pretty short order.
I wanted to hire a Saudi female programmer once and checked into what it would take. Supposedly, I could hire the woman programmer but would have to give her a private office with high, opaque walls and also hire an older couple along with my programmer. The older male would sit outside the office and pass any documents or whatever to his older wife inside the office who would in turn pass them to my programmer. This just wasn’t going to work so I had to pass on female programmers.

Testy

[Miller]

@Bear_Nenno

So you are shunning Saudi Arabia for it’s unequal treatment of women? You are saying that they need to join the 21st Century?

A little misguided and hipocritical, I think, considering the United States’ views and treatment of homosexuals. At least Saudi Arabia doesn’t claim to be “Land of the Free”. Saudi Arabia will be straight up and say women are not equal. While America likes to pretend it is the moral authority of the planet Earth and everyone is and should be treated equally. But in practice we fall far short of those “ideals”.

We can criticize Saudi Arabia as soon as we’ve lived up to our own stated morals, values and our Constitutional ideals. Until then, we should be ashamed of ourselves and should try to not bring attention to this by openly condeming other countries’ behavior toward women and minorities.

What an appallingly ignorant and self-centered attitude. I mean, just comparing the treatment of gays in the US to women in Saudi Arabia requires some breath-taking chutzpah, but the implication that the suffering of fully one half the population of Saudi Arabia should be ignored until we’ve sorted out the whole “civil unions versus marriage” issue is simply abhorrent.

And it’s spelled “hypocritical,” for fuck’s sake.

[Darth_Panda]

@constanze

Because a failed state like Somalia is obviously better than trying to work to get an existing country to change. :rolleyes:

If the OP really wants to do anything (besides just ranting), there are two options:

1. Get involved with human right groups that are already trying to change things there and work with them.

2. Change everything in your household to renewable energy; lobby your city, state and congress/ senate man to switch to renewable energies.

If the West stops pouring oil money there, it’s easier to tell them what behavior is unacceptable.

Just as an aside, very little electricity comes from oil in the US - about 1%

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t want to be independent of oil - we should; or that we shouldn’t want to move to more renewable sources of electricity - we should.

But you’re mixing apples and oranges here - the two are pretty independent of one another. To get away from Middle Eastern oil, we need to convert cars to run on either natural gas or electricity (or drive less). Changing how we generate electricity will not have any impact on oil dependence. Going green on electricity has many benefits, that just isn’t one of them.