i can understand why a private enterprise has to come up with indirect, misleading, uninformative marketing techniques to get their products to sell. they have to pay a lot of money to put those advertisements out, they need to be as effective as possible, and its apparently really difficult to write laws preventing the kind of ambiguity, double speak, and subconscious cultural manipulation that take the place of useful product information (or its really easy to bribe all of the people who first made those laws? or we are supposed to be ok with uninformative, misleading advertisements for some capitalist reason?).
anyway, whatever, let those jerks be less than completely honest, they do it all the time in much worse ways.
but not the government. that thing is important. and the most important part of a government ruled indirectly by the voters is the information that reaches the voters. how can we expect people to go research the voting records of their congresspeople, or analyze the specific causes of the failures in iraq? we cant expect them to do that because a lot of them live on farms or dont yet know how to use the interweb. and on top of that they are lazy fucks.
they are, however, presented with a lot of information, and maybe 1% of it is facts that you can blindly believe when watching the biased tv ad.
what if we were talking about american idol, the tv show. and instead of singing for the judges, each singer explained exactly what their favorite parts of their own singing were, and what was wrong with their opponents. and the judges decided based solely on each contestants biased information.
wouldnt you think that was the stupidest thing youve ever seen in your life? obviously. american idol has higher standards than the most important group of people in the world. doesnt that just make you want to blow yourself up for allah?
dont you want to smash your tv everytime you see that stupid fat jerk talk about how crappy kerry was in vietnam without saying why he thinks that and without mentioning that bush didnt even go to war in vietnam at all?
how many political ads can be summed up by “The organization who paid for this ad, of which you know nothing, ambiguously feels either good or bad about policies of which you are only vaguely familiar. you should agree or else you are wrong”?
how can we even possibly consider allowing marketing to be utilized in election campaigns in lieu of naked objective facts? i mean marketing is literally described as making your facts sound better than they actually are. instead of simply saying “bush did stuff to prevent terrorism” you put a video clip of nasty looking wolves stalking you from the edge of the woods and subconsciously remind the viewers of just how scary terrorism really is.
shouldnt you be reminding viewers of how effective and comforting bush is? because those terrorists are just as scary if kerry is in charge, but its less scary to elect an incumbent, even if you dont have the slightest clue about his policies. as far as you know, he didnt totally ruin anything yet, and you dont know that kerry wont.
but you cant say that in an ad because thats retarded, its an irrational behavior that americans and probably anybody exhibit. electing the incumbent in times of war, it always happens because people are irrationally afraid of changing in mid battle. but you cant advertise directly about why it happens because its irrational. but you can subtly subconsciously play on that irrationality to make its effects bigger.
subtly and subconsciously play on the irrational feelings of trusting the incumbent. instead of saying “bush’s policies in iraq will be more succesfull than kerrys because -facts-” those people pay hundreds of millions of dollars to say “heee’s the incumbennnnnt… you muuuust re-elect the innnnncummmmbennnnnnt. you can trust bush. look at him smile. happy bush. strong, confident, stay the course, never waver, must have resolve, never admitting mistakes is a gooood thinnnng, not a bad thing. mission accomplished.”
why cant it be actual objective information? why is that so hard? is it really too hard to do? or is there some secret selfish benefit that the secret rulers of our country gain by being less than completely honest in the election campaigns? well its not that hard, i can think up a better, more accurate election campaign information system in about five minutes. so can you. so can any idiot.
it would be cheaper than the current practice of spending more money than has ever been spent on an election every time theres another one (we are up to about $250 million per candidate). and it would give our citizens the freedom to chose accurately. it would motivate pissed off anti-voters like me to give a shit. why dont they have accurate election advertisements with no spin? why doesnt anybody notice or care besides me?
im not joking when i say that its seriously, obviously a conspiracy. SIEG HEIL!
…well, not all the time anyway)