Two examples of Canadian state broadcasts, pre and post revolution, and letting the air out of a jeans advertisement

This CTV report is fascinating in one aspect only.

In this gossip level report about celebrity hedonist front man for Mark Carney from 2015 to 2024, CTV insinuates that the former marionette is involved with pop singer, Katy Perry, whom they refer to as, “former Astronaut”.

Now either CTV is being tongue in cheek and thereby diminishing them both, after all she is an astronaut in pretty much the way he was prime minister, or, as a much funnier man than I once said, “If Katy Perry is an astronaut, then I’m a gynaecologist”, or this is some astonishingly surreal propaganda.
If it’s the former, kudos to CTV for a change. Maybe it’s just a tiny bit of samisdat working its way out of the fully captured station.

This next one will be a great bit of nostalgia for many Canadians.

It was a broadcast from a documentary made in 2006 by CBC. It is actually informative and for the most part, true, and contains valuable information. Some of which is the reveal that Osama Bin Laden in fact obtained a fatwa from an unnamed Saudi cleric that:

• In early 2003, bin?Laden secured a fatwa from a radical Saudi cleric that declared—if all other means failed—a nuclear strike against U.S. civilians would be permissible, even obligatory, under Islamic law.

• The fatwa stated that a weapon capable of killing millions and devastating their lands would be justified if like-scale harm had been inflicted on Muslim lands.

This is a really interesting and informative documentary.

Then compare it to anything from CBC for the past 10 years or more.

Lastly, the gossip level rage bait that has all the talking heads giving both sides of the dialectic is the good jeans/genes BS.

I think it was a few years ago here on the site when we published some ad campaigns that various companies made as a kind of showcase of what they can do, but never actually launched as adds for the products.

These companies know that controversy will sell product, at least to one side, but more importantly, will have everyone watching the add and that is their objective.

They made these adds to get attention. In other words, the same reason all advertising companies make adds.

The odd time it is genuinely political. Like with Bud Lite. And that was a disaster.

The American Eagle Denim products will likely pay for more than the cost of the campaign, + COGS and has a lot of people wasting their time talking about it like it is a real issue.

Anyone who didn’t know who Sweeney was, likely does now.

Here is the 15 second bit tucked into a rant. I think the only substantial aspect of this, is how advertising companies score and how we can use that to tell the future.

Hopefully nothing of real consequence comes of it. This isn’t news, neither is it reality. It’s a good looking girl selling jeans for a company.

There is a point of interest though. If you bother to scroll through social media and find the objections to these adds, they may offer a revealing central aspect of leftist thought.

And that would be the concept of the Blank Slate.

In Steven Pinker’s excellent book, The Blank Slate, he attributes most leftist, science-negating reasoning today to three key concepts.

The Ghost in the machine.

The Noble Savage

And The Blank slate.

In the third idea, the concept must be held that all people, and even all animals must be considered to be equal in potential. And that any perceived advantage a person may have is privilege and must be eliminated. It is in one aspect, part of the process of moving from equality to equity.

The idea that there is an objective beauty. and there really is, remains anathema to the left. This explains a lot about why women who are far to the left make themselves unattractive, and much of the ideas beyond postmodern art. Find a video of Yoko Ono singing if you feel you need to know what that means.

So if something is to be drawn from the Sweeney Jeans/genes fake controversy, it could be that the advertising company knew exactly how segments of the left would react and decided to see if they could do a reverse Bud Lite play. And why they would react that way, would the offence this add represents to the concept of the Blank Slate.