2/11/25: "Advice for Nike and the NFL; It's okay to just make girls sports ads about wholesome parental involvement" (note: in this post, Ethan also references Don Draper's Carousel speech)
You say these ads are not bad because of the "why", they're bad because of the "how".
Given the circumstances with which you were forced out of the advertising industry, I think you're missing a more important piece here, which is that these ads are bad because of the "who".
When you force out all the talent, and you hire unskilled people to replace them based on diversity criteria, and you force what few talented people are left to pick up the slack, you no longer have the people necessary to create art, whatever message you want to convey.
I think it was you on a podcast with Astral, where you were talking about True Detective, and you mentioned that the film and television industry up until 2014 was designed to find and nurture talents like Nic Pizzolatto, and post-2014, was designed to keep talents like Nic Pizzolatto out.
That's a great point, and worth remembering here. If you starve an industry of talent, the "why" and the "how" don't really matter. At the end of the day it always comes down to the "who".
[processing my notes] I get the impression that the Borg is global, amoral Big Money, and it senses that the woke Left is burned out and the Right is now the ascendant market. At the Super Bowl, the outburst from the woke Left was Kendrick Lamar's halftime show featuring his hit song, "They're Not Like Us," an overt dig on white people. In contrast, in the ads, "sentimental Americanism is creeping in. This will be the tone for the next ten years of American culture, as the Borg learns to produce vaguely Right-coded sentimentality via a new set of signals. The problem is that this American sentimentality is hollow. As the woke Borg rotted, so did its ability to create art. It's not enough just to clean up the woke stuff and replace it with lame, hollow sentimentality. There has to be fertile ground to make great art. Democratized Creativity destroys that fertile ground. The sensitivity-coach environment results in hideous product. Back in the day, the people who loved Hollywood loved it because it was completely fucking insane, and that insanity led to the creation of amazingly transcendent works. Today, the commitment to transcendence has been corroded by inclusivity, a loss of the transcendental flow, the result being hollow fluff and bullshit. When you don't allow creators with backbone into the system, they go rogue." The bureaucrats' inability to "accommodate the rebels" condemns their product to artlessness.
Why is the half-time show relegated to an “overt dig on white people”? Kendrick Lamar is an example of how the people in the revolution in the past four decades foretold that “it would not be televised” meaning that they can have to try to control and change the narrative of history and the truth about how we were and are treated like $hit 💩here since the beginning of the story but due to the lack of a transparent and truly appreciated historical context of the Black American 🗽 the first time in a way that it always gives birth to a very different account according to who is telling the story. The story of the Middle Passage is one of unspeakable horrors of my ancestors and it will not be able to be erased as the unspoken stain on the birth of the country by pretending it never happened or by somehow saying that I have no reason to say that I have suffered from the results of the institution of chattel slavery. On the other hand, the white race has benefitted from the results of the institution of chattel slavery. It will not be able to be resolved until the facts about how the institution that you have created has had lasting and generational effects on the descendants of my ancestors. Because of the fact that they not like us… they have not been beaten down at every turn to only rise again like the Phoenix from the ashes… the time is coming when the revolution will not be able to be stopped…
During the Super Bowl halftime show, I (White) felt the vibe of the performance... Black Power. In cases like this, I have to wait for someone to explain to me what I witnessed. That person is columnist Karen Attiah (Black) of the Washington Post.
Kendrick Lamar's "message at the Super Bowl was a warning and a threat. With an unmistakably white supremacist administration at the helm, this is the right time. Black dancers were clad in red, white and blue, wearing various versions of Black-coded dress... hoodies, durags, grills. Black Uncle Sam chided Lamar... too Black, too ghetto, tone it down. Samuel L. Jackson's Uncle Sam was trying to dictate the boundaries for Blackness in white spaces. The raised fists of the dancers were reminiscent of the 1968 Olympics, when Black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists in a Black Power salute." Trump exited the stadium before he got the message.
Isaac--
When it comes to Nike talk, the "Isaac Simpson / Ethan Strauss" podcast episode needs to happen in 2025
9/20/24: "Fall of a Nike CEO; We discuss why Nike struggled under now deposed CEO John Donahoe"
https://www.houseofstrauss.com/p/nate-jones-fall-of-a-nike-ceo
11/19/24: "Winning isn't for Everyone; Nike Loses Ground"
https://thecarousel.substack.com/p/winning-isnt-for-everyone
2/10/25: "Red Queen Culture; Super Bowl Special"
https://thecarousel.substack.com/p/173-red-queen-culture
2/11/25: "Advice for Nike and the NFL; It's okay to just make girls sports ads about wholesome parental involvement" (note: in this post, Ethan also references Don Draper's Carousel speech)
https://www.houseofstrauss.com/p/advice-for-nike-and-the-nfl
i'd love to have him on but he's probably scared
You say these ads are not bad because of the "why", they're bad because of the "how".
Given the circumstances with which you were forced out of the advertising industry, I think you're missing a more important piece here, which is that these ads are bad because of the "who".
When you force out all the talent, and you hire unskilled people to replace them based on diversity criteria, and you force what few talented people are left to pick up the slack, you no longer have the people necessary to create art, whatever message you want to convey.
I think it was you on a podcast with Astral, where you were talking about True Detective, and you mentioned that the film and television industry up until 2014 was designed to find and nurture talents like Nic Pizzolatto, and post-2014, was designed to keep talents like Nic Pizzolatto out.
That's a great point, and worth remembering here. If you starve an industry of talent, the "why" and the "how" don't really matter. At the end of the day it always comes down to the "who".
[processing my notes] I get the impression that the Borg is global, amoral Big Money, and it senses that the woke Left is burned out and the Right is now the ascendant market. At the Super Bowl, the outburst from the woke Left was Kendrick Lamar's halftime show featuring his hit song, "They're Not Like Us," an overt dig on white people. In contrast, in the ads, "sentimental Americanism is creeping in. This will be the tone for the next ten years of American culture, as the Borg learns to produce vaguely Right-coded sentimentality via a new set of signals. The problem is that this American sentimentality is hollow. As the woke Borg rotted, so did its ability to create art. It's not enough just to clean up the woke stuff and replace it with lame, hollow sentimentality. There has to be fertile ground to make great art. Democratized Creativity destroys that fertile ground. The sensitivity-coach environment results in hideous product. Back in the day, the people who loved Hollywood loved it because it was completely fucking insane, and that insanity led to the creation of amazingly transcendent works. Today, the commitment to transcendence has been corroded by inclusivity, a loss of the transcendental flow, the result being hollow fluff and bullshit. When you don't allow creators with backbone into the system, they go rogue." The bureaucrats' inability to "accommodate the rebels" condemns their product to artlessness.
Why is the half-time show relegated to an “overt dig on white people”? Kendrick Lamar is an example of how the people in the revolution in the past four decades foretold that “it would not be televised” meaning that they can have to try to control and change the narrative of history and the truth about how we were and are treated like $hit 💩here since the beginning of the story but due to the lack of a transparent and truly appreciated historical context of the Black American 🗽 the first time in a way that it always gives birth to a very different account according to who is telling the story. The story of the Middle Passage is one of unspeakable horrors of my ancestors and it will not be able to be erased as the unspoken stain on the birth of the country by pretending it never happened or by somehow saying that I have no reason to say that I have suffered from the results of the institution of chattel slavery. On the other hand, the white race has benefitted from the results of the institution of chattel slavery. It will not be able to be resolved until the facts about how the institution that you have created has had lasting and generational effects on the descendants of my ancestors. Because of the fact that they not like us… they have not been beaten down at every turn to only rise again like the Phoenix from the ashes… the time is coming when the revolution will not be able to be stopped…
Loving these. I'm going to steal these points about art and free climbing and try them out on my shitlib friends.
I didn’t know you were involved in the Michigan Man piece. I loved that.
During the Super Bowl halftime show, I (White) felt the vibe of the performance... Black Power. In cases like this, I have to wait for someone to explain to me what I witnessed. That person is columnist Karen Attiah (Black) of the Washington Post.
Kendrick Lamar's "message at the Super Bowl was a warning and a threat. With an unmistakably white supremacist administration at the helm, this is the right time. Black dancers were clad in red, white and blue, wearing various versions of Black-coded dress... hoodies, durags, grills. Black Uncle Sam chided Lamar... too Black, too ghetto, tone it down. Samuel L. Jackson's Uncle Sam was trying to dictate the boundaries for Blackness in white spaces. The raised fists of the dancers were reminiscent of the 1968 Olympics, when Black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists in a Black Power salute." Trump exited the stadium before he got the message.