An early entry in the schadenfreude sweepstakes was the Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff, who called Dubai a “real-life Truman Show: a sunny, shiny, sterilised low-crime haven for anyone itching to get rich or stay that way.” The influencers of Dubai, she wrote, have watched their “fantasy explode in a puff of intercepted missile smoke.” Jackson Hinkle, the foremost American Putinophile of his generation, was less restrained than the Guardian columnist. “God willing,” he wrote on X, every “crypto-scamming, OnlyFans whoring, Labubu-collecting, Dubai Chocolate-eating fat sleaze in Dubai will abandon their anti-human rituals under the pressure of incoming Shahed-139’s.”