 finally Justin says in Australia most business email signatures now have an acknowledgement to the first people nations most public events the clubs meetings arts openings and any other gathering are kicked off with a land acknowledgement you own thanks Justin I I didn't know this I guess I mean I I guess at some some recess in my mind I knew that stuff like this was happening but it turns out that in the US now many companies start with this called land acknowledgement so it's it this is now you know a practice where you are proceeding any fancy event or any business event you you name the indigenous people that were slaughtered or whose land was taken on which the event is being held and you kind of give them an acknowledgement nothing more than that you don't you don't you know give them any money you don't you don't promise to give the better land back you don't do anything substantive but you make an acknowledgement you give it a sanction and so this came to my attention because of story the Barry Weiss Barry Weiss wrote about a professor professor Stuart Regis Regis at the University of Washington he's a computer science professor I mean this guy is like he likes to he likes to you know rub it in he likes to be controversial he likes to get out there this is a guy that in the 1980s with a very early in his career made a big deal out of the fact that he was gay and it was openly gay at a time when that was not very popular and that could really get you in trouble in the 1990s when he was a when he was a Stanford he he was he was out there protesting against the war on drugs he he's written a piece about why women can't code that'll get you in trouble and he he reads he's got a poem on his website titled Fag talk so not a not a traditional anything not a traditional left not a traditional right not a traditional anything really you kind of eclectic but certainly non non conformist anyway at the beginning of the fall 2020 semester fall 2020 is when the world seemed to just give in to the left anything the left wanted yes so we give it to you this is the consequence so the the the the fact that black lives matter won the mall or high ground back then everybody just collapsed in front of them so not only on the black lives matter specific issue that they collapse but they collapse on pretty much every issue every issue out there and this is one of them so the University of Washington in the fall of 2020 suggested suggested as best practices that professors when on documents like syllabi when they published a syllabi they they include an indigenous land acknowledgement statement that is a statement that acknowledges that the University of Washington is built on land that one once belonged to some Indian some Native American tribe right you know it's it's meant to acknowledge this fact now obviously professor we just doesn't think very highly of these he says quote land acknowledgments are performative arts of conformity that should be resisted so last school year instead of we pinning the University approved language which is quote the University of Washington gone acknowledges the coast Salish peoples of this land the land which touches the shore war shared waters of all tribes and bands within the squamish tulip and whatever nations so that's it that's the that's acknowledgement just acknowledging that this is their land or this was their land is their land we just constructed his own disclaimer and he put up on top of syllabus he said quote I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property this is John Locke's theory of property by the labor theory of property the coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington and that appeared in his syllabus at the top page at the top of the page it's very educational there's the whole issue of what is the you know the labor theory of property unsurprisingly the university was passed off and they retaliated they unilaterally uploaded a a censored version of the syllabus took off his statement without any acknowledgement locked him out of being able to make any changes to his own syllabus so he couldn't access it and then they launched an investigation of Regis right they also established a competing class section at the same hour as his class section in order to siphon students away from him I just think about how petty and how childish these people are right they couldn't fire him because he's got tenure so they do all this stuff now remember the the the statement that they wanted placed there they said was a recommendation what they didn't like was the fact that he made fun of it didn't make fun of it maybe told the truth about it so we're just still teaching there but he has now filed a lawsuit against the University of Washington it's a lawsuit filed by fire so good for fire for launching this fire protects the free speech rights of or academic freedom rights of professors at universities they they tend to they tend to defend professors against university administrations to quote the writer that I'm reading from her article that she wrote for Barry Weiss she says the threats this threat comes from both left and right the threat academic freedom two-thirds of sanctions attempted from left from from the left of the present professor result in some form of sanction 42% of attempts from the right of wherever the professor is politically result in sanction they typically they typically defend these they fight for them and they've done they do amazing work in the name of in the name of free speech free speech but primarily academic freedom violating the contract that the schools the universities have with these professors it really is the situation universities has gotten so much worse over the last two years professors are expected to mouth opinions stamped with approval of some bureaucrat in the administration it is a it is you know the state of universities is truly horrific anyway so what is it about this land acknowledgement and or maybe I mean the landing management is obviously ridiculous and silly I mean you can make fun of it in a variety of different ways somebody on the chat just did you know what did he say you know I think John said he lives in a house that was that was taken from the come out of land that was taken from the Kamachi's who took it from another tribe we took it from another tribe who you know defaced it by by you know building something on Mother Nature to begin with so really the land belongs to Mother Nature and not to any of these tribes but almost everybody thinks that these land acknowledgements are ridiculous I mean I read an article in the Atlantic from a leftist who says look land acknowledgements it's just moral exhibitionism it's just it's just lip service it means nothing I mean where the reparations where is the giving the land back where's paying them money where's the recognition of the real suffering that is happening among Native Americans today where's the recognition of the fact that they are the poorest people in America today their rates of alcoholism their rates of suicide rates of depression are higher on Indian reservations than in any other place in America instead of recognized I have said we're working to fix that instead of doing anything about it people get up and they have these they have these written statements in advance that somebody's written on they might have worked five minutes to pronounce the name of the Indian tribes right and then they do it and that's it and this does bring up I think an important issue an issue that I I did a show on a few years back about the treatment of American Indians about the treatment of Native Americans which I think is horrific and a massive injustice in American history but it does bring up the question of okay what do you do about this injustice and what was the injustice exactly how do you describe the injustice how do you define the injustice was the injustice the taking of the land and what does it even mean to take land from no man's or what does it mean to take land for people that didn't recognize right to land and who exactly did he take the land from I mean I I think first of all the idea that we in the 21st century shift for sorry and apologize or do anything about and let's let's say there were injustices and there were injustices there's no question there were injustices or were treaties broken there was brutal treatment there was a horrific horrific horrific treatment of the of the Native Americans in the 19th century in America there's no question about that and it goes on to this day to this day Native Americans in the in the reservations awards of the state which is horrific and we'll get to that in a minute but there were massive injustices land was stolen you know the was that the sewers were given a piece of land and then and then gold was discovered on that land so they were taken to the most barren place on planet earth and given a given the piece of land there and so that the miners could go and mine the gold that was in the hills instead of you had a treaty giving them the land why don't they benefit from the mining anyway it's it's horrors happened the question is what do you do about it in the 21st century well you don't apologize for it because you didn't do anything your ancestors some of our ancestors weren't even on the continent back then certainly mine ancestors were not but even if they were maybe they should have apologized maybe they should have paid something and paid in some way for the evils they committed but you today it's the same thing about slavery slavery is a horrific evil Jim Crow laws were horrific evils but I didn't do them I'm not a fault taking my money to compensate people who are also not the people who suffered under slavery certainly and most of them not even under Jim Crow laws is just a massive injustice so well the first thing to do is recognize what actually happened and what actually happened is a combination of violence initiated by Native Americans against peaceful people and and then losing a war people lose wars all the time some real injustices where treaties were broken or where land was just taken or where people were just annihilated when that was not what was really needed what was not what was really necessary and also recognize as I ran did also recognize the fact that in a clash as I ran said in a clash between a growing civilization between an advanced civilization and a more primitive civilization the primitive civilization is going to lose in a variety of different ways and then add to that the fact that particularly in the Pacific Northwest let's say 90% of the Native Americans who died in the Pacific Northwest didn't die because they were murdered didn't die because they land was taken over by whites they died of disease died of disease brought to them by Europeans yes but not on purpose what kind of moral claim do you have that because you carry the disease that they not happen to be immune from and you infected them you're morally responsible that can be right does that mean the Chinese are responsible of the black death in Europe because that black death came over to Europe from China so you have to recognize all the different sources of what happened again 80 98% of the Native Americans in the North Pacific Northwest died from diseases the same thing is true covered you know unless unless they did it on purpose unless COVID was military you know militarized and then it's hard to understand why the Chinese would do it to themselves because they're suffering in some respects more than we are from COVID but yeah you can't if COVID was natural let's assume COVID was natural for the purpose of this discussion I'm not saying it was let's just assume it if code was natural that you can't blame China for it that's ridiculous you can blame China for suppressing information you can blame China for not cooperating you blame China for not doing what was necessary but you can't blame China for the very fact that this naturally arose so you have to recognize all these things and and if you really study history and you really interested in what happened to to the American Indians to Native Americans and why it was so devastating and what the source of the American injustice towards them is then that study of history is really useful because if you really study it the source of the injustice the source of the injustice is that American Native Americans were not treated as individuals now partly is therefore because they didn't take themselves to be individuals they were members of tribes but we as the more civilized we as as the as the more advanced culture what we should have done is refused to treat them as tribes and treat them as individuals and assign them property rights not as a tribe but as individuals so in that sense we should have been even more cultural colonists colonialists cultural colonialists we should have imposed our culture of individualism our culture of property rights on the Native Americans we should have refused to accept that the tribal leader speaks for the tribe that the tribal council owns all the property for the tribe and we should have at least tried to assign property rights to individuals to this day the the Native American reservations there was no private property on these reservations nobody owns anything the tribal government owns everything it's it's like it's a true statism true socialism tribal you know to this day we don't treat individuals within the these Indian nations as individuals we treat them as collectives we treat them as a group and since they have no private but but even then you know a lot of these tribes sit on mineral rights well if they want to develop the mineral rights individuals can't do it the tribe has to decide and the tribe can't decide by itself it has to get permission from the government from the US government federal government said doubly screwed if you're an individual and you happen to sit on oil you can't lease it out to Exxon or Chevron yet the tribe has to do it and the tribe can't do it unless it gets permission from the Biden administration good luck with that so we have taken these you know Native Americans and to this day to this day they have no individual dignity no property they are they receive welfare checks if the sound is weird it's because of the ethos because of the cloud it's because of the internet not because of anything on my end we treat them as you know we they are the only it's the one area in in this country where you have full blown socialism and with full blown socialism what do you get with full blown socialism you get alcoholism you get depression you get high suicide rates now it's hard for America today to encourage anybody to be an individualist when we the country of individualism are turning up back to individualism and becoming a tribal collectivistic culture so the real tragedy of Native Americans is that their leadership failed them but to some extent at least the 19th century their leadership was ignorant knew nothing the real tragedy is that American leadership that knew intellectual leadership political leadership that knew what was right it betrayed the Native Americans it betrayed them it continues to betray them the treatment of Native Americans today by the federal government is just horrific just horrific and the solution to it is to privatize to privatize the reservations to force them to divide the land up turn it into private property get rid of the reservation as a reservation make the full-fledged citizens of the United States and give them the respect that private property you know treat them with respect by giving them the private property and treating them as full citizens but unfortunately that's not gonna happen partially because unfortunately this is where their own intellectuals and their own leaders betrayed them this is not what the tribes want because the tribal leaders have power today have power which they wouldn't have if he took all their property and divided it up and gave it to individual individuals thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show if you'd like to support the show we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me you get value from listening you get value from watching show your appreciation you can do that by going to Iran book show dot com slash support by going to patreon subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those any one of those channels also if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get announcement when we go live and for you those of you who already subscribers and those of you who already supporters of the show thank you I 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