Comment by troyvit

Regarding ads as free speech:

> Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you "GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY" with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment.

The same argument could be applied to the homeless people I see on most corners these days with cardboard signs designed to pull my heart strings. It's a different brain chemical, but it's actually real and it affects my re-uptake inhibitors a lot more. Should we ban them? Or just their signs?

Here are a few of the many defenses against advertising that are all free:

- Ad blockers for browsers

- Kill your television

- Listen to and support public media (unless those sponsorship messages count as ads which is a valid argument)

If literally everybody applied just those three things, advertising would die a natural death without having to ban anything.

<rant>

I'm a bit of a free speech zealot, and so I'll pull the slippery slope fallacy and just ask: after ads, what do we ban next? Sponsorship messages like public radio uses? Product placement in movies? Would we be allowed to have _any_ real products in movies or would everybody drink Slurm instead of Coke and drive around in Edisons instead of Teslas? Are movie previews allowed? What about product reviews where the product is given to the reviewer for free? What about Simone's presence on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert years ago? That was entertainment, but it also clearly advertised her YouTube channel. Is that allowed?

</rant>

We humans are one of the few animals that have within us multiple ways to kill ourselves. While that's mostly thanks to our awesome thumbs, our speech is another powerful tool. We're also one of the few animals that can, with much work, transcend our weaknesses and be more than the goop that makes us up. Finding out whether we do is the whole reason I'm sticking around.