 Okay, wow, just all the difference in quality between using my iPhone and using the Oppo 15, the cheapest phone I could get. I would have thought that spending money on a phone would produce higher quality. So, what are you here? Could you each distribute in Sydney's eastern suburbs? So, I'm reading an essay here in the Atlantic, Land Acknowledgements to Just Moral Exhibitionism. So, is all moral exhibitionism automatically wrong? So, I would think that in some cases we're actually signaling it's a good thing. Right, if you're trying to raise money, then you get someone on board who then provides a matching grant. And so, when other people start donating or when you promise us to match whatever you donate, then that seems to me like a positive example of moral exhibitionism. Knowing that someone else has chipped in doesn't make you more likely to chip in. So, I don't think moral exhibitionism or virtue signaling is in and of itself bad. Like, sometimes it's stupid. So, Thanksgiving relies on a cartoon version of the settlement of the Americas. So, the English is settled in the United States. When it came to the United States, they did not want to repeat the harsh treatment of the Spanish in the United States. That's what's happened in the United States of Israel. That seems to be the nature of the human condition. So, Thanksgiving focuses on that moment of concord between the victor and the victor. So, now, if the settlers had just been nicer, they would have been wiped out. So, it's like, if Israel was 25% nicer, it wouldn't exist anymore. So, it's all very well and good to talk about how people need to be nicer. But sometimes, when you lose, and I think it's more. Land acknowledgments are created to stroke the sentiments of mostly non-indigenous audiences by enabling their preening self-criticism. This is great more than right here in the Atlantic. So, Microsoft's annual Ignite conference began with the land acknowledgment, so bewildering the viewers that it went viral. But it was not abnormal among land acknowledgment statements of this sort. The MC acknowledged that the company's headquarters, one square mile of land outside Seattle, was occupied by the Samamish, the Duwamish, the Sunnokwami, the Saqquamash, the Mokkushu, the Snowhomish, the Tullalip and other coast-sillish people. Since time immemorial. Yeah, but who did they displace? They didn't grow up out of the land. They would have had to displace someone else and then use force to keep control of their land. She noted that the tribes are still there, but offered no connection between the past and today. So the effect of this parade of names was to suggest that for thousands of years, indigenous people were crammed onto the Microsoft campus uncomfortably like Ken Salmon, doing who knows what until Bill Gates arrived in the late 20th century to turn them into computer programmers. So maybe this is a victory for these indigenous tribes who would be named at a Microsoft conference. So the fence of land acknowledgment statements is that they harm no one. And the educated Americans about a hidden history. I just, I don't see a lot of wisdom in the moral approach to land ownership, right? If you can take it and you can defend it, then it's yours. If you can't take it and you can't defend it, then it's not. I mean, you can't exaggerate the superficiality of these statements. Like, why do members of the acknowledged group, what do they hold sacred, what makes them unique? Who are they, where do they come from, where are they going? So the speakers making these acknowledgment statements, they demonstrate no knowledge of the people whose names they read carefully on the left. Good day, May 40 here. And the speakers don't make anything but the most general connection between the event and these people, other than this ancient one. And no one grows up out of the land, right? Everyone took the land from someone else. Some people claim that these land acknowledgments are statements of respect. Land acknowledgment is an easy way to show honor and respect to the indigenous people. So would you feel respected if someone took your wife and then, you know, acknowledge, hey, I took your wife, man? No, it wouldn't feel terribly respectful to me. So sharing the respect, the easy way, is just as cheap as it sounds. Yeah, it's cheap grace. Like, if you really want to do something to the indigenous people, learn to rattle off these incantations. And they're alive, but could you beat your life? See these eastern suburbs. Real respect occurs only when accompanied by time, work, effort, giving you something of value. So most of these land acknowledgments are considered by the speakers and much of the posh audience is moral acts. They bear witness to crimes perpetrated against native peoples and call for redress. I always thought Australia was a sun-drenched land. That's what I want to know. Like, Sydney in November is supposed to be warm, but it's rain every day that I've been here. It's been overcast and rainy every day that I've been here. I don't think we've gotten above 73 degrees Fahrenheit since I've been here. So we've hit lows of about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. And we've hit highs of about 74 Fahrenheit. Many, many things are named after the Indian... Yeah. And how does that make them feel? If you enjoy a moral exhibitionism, say nothing of moral earnanism, land acknowledgments in their current form will leave you pleasured for years. Art and history serves this purpose well. Reality, not so much. These land acknowledgments never include any actual material redress, which is the return of land, meaningful connection, corrections or wrongs against Indigenous communities. There's sophisticated moral reckoning, and there's no easy way to reckon with the past, right? If you want to take a land, then you're going to have to subjugate, if not expel, if not destroy the Indigenous inhabitants, and then you're going to have to use force to protect your land. So, most Native Americans were wiped out by Europeans, not so much through active genocide, but just through the spread of disease. Yeah, does China owe Europe reparations for the black debt? Or for COVID? Or should China take two opium wars, two opium wars and call it even? Yeah, to acknowledge these are Indigenous homelands, that someone else used to move here. It's just rhetoric without action. If Microsoft truly felt bad about the location of its offices, it could move its operations to soil less blood soaked, if indeed there is any. Is there any soil that's not soaked by blood? So, it just seems like moral preening and fostering and exhibitionism. I mean, if you want to go and do something for Indigenous peoples, that could be noble. But in the final analysis, Indigenous peoples are going to have to work out their own destiny with fear and trembling, just like all of us. So, for Jews in the West of the world now, our primary problems are with the Jews. Chinese in America, their primary problems are with Chinese. No one's going to come along and rescue African Americans or Mexican Americans or Chinese Americans because of the height of smugness. I think that you can be an outsider, come along and rescue some people. I remember a synagogue one day, a friend asked me, did you do anything for the Aborigines? No, I haven't done anything for the Aborigines. I barely know any Aborigines. My end acknowledgments are just empty words and hollow and nauseating. Probably in most ways, Australia, in its official organs, its media, its elite are even more politically correct than in the United States. But yeah, the fireworks could be spectacular. If you have the illegal, as fireworks are often happening in the Interest Nation, or South here, South from Fujian, distant suburbs. So really posh shops here by the beach. So, this ice cream, it's like $5, $7 a scoop.