Ban music in political campaign advertisements. Music has no logical or factual content, and only adds emotional bias.
Here’s an example of an ad with music intended to give two different emotional tones (optimistic/patriotic in the first six seconds, then sinister in the rest).
Why only in political ads? Product consumption and lifestyle choices have orders of magnitude more impact on most people’s lives than political choices, why not start by banning manipulative messaging there?
My thinking with that—not that I’ve thought about it very hard or actually endorse this beyond “interesting crazy idea”—was that one’s emotions about a product can genuinely affect one’s enjoyment of it.
Maybe a certain food or other product is designed to evoke a cowboy’s frontier life, or an archetypal grandmother’s cooking, or something like that. Music would help create that association. Overall the effect might still be pernicious but I’m not sure about that.
Fair enough. My thinking is that voting has severe effects on others, while one’s choice of consumer product mostly affects oneself. Maybe a particular well-marketed beer can make one feel strong and virile; a well-marketed approach to foreign policy might do the same, but with worse consequences for others.
Ban music in political campaign advertisements. Music has no logical or factual content, and only adds emotional bias.
Here’s an example of an ad with music intended to give two different emotional tones (optimistic/patriotic in the first six seconds, then sinister in the rest).
Why only in political ads? Product consumption and lifestyle choices have orders of magnitude more impact on most people’s lives than political choices, why not start by banning manipulative messaging there?
My thinking with that—not that I’ve thought about it very hard or actually endorse this beyond “interesting crazy idea”—was that one’s emotions about a product can genuinely affect one’s enjoyment of it.
Maybe a certain food or other product is designed to evoke a cowboy’s frontier life, or an archetypal grandmother’s cooking, or something like that. Music would help create that association. Overall the effect might still be pernicious but I’m not sure about that.
I’d argue that emotions about politics genuinely affect one’s enjoyment of government as much, if not more so, than any other product.
Why don’t you want us to be happy?
Fair enough. My thinking is that voting has severe effects on others, while one’s choice of consumer product mostly affects oneself. Maybe a particular well-marketed beer can make one feel strong and virile; a well-marketed approach to foreign policy might do the same, but with worse consequences for others.