Not to say that I've watched nothing. I've been mooching streaming services and sailing the high seas for a while.
But I'm driving pretty much across the entire east coast of the US to visit my parents for Christmas. So I've stopped in hotels and such, and with nothing else to do I've turned on the TV. And holy shit, the propaganda is blatant. I don't know if its because I've been removed from it for so long or what.
WWF ads using 8 year old cropped videos of Polar Bears on ice. Donate now or they'll die to climate change! Be scared!
A drug ad for some drug to remove a side effect of some other brain-altering chemicals, anti-depressants probably. You finally got your mind sorted out thank to other drugs but now you've got involuntary hand or face movements. Take our drug too! "It's not fully understood how it works but it's believed to work" Literally telling you that.
Government propaganda about kids 5 and older being eligible for the clot shots. Video of children running around playing. Having fun. Being kids. And they still included shots of children in fucking masks.
Not to mention the fact that not a single commercial features solely a white heterosexual couple. I almost got bamboozled by a jewelery ad, because the first half was nothing but white man and white woman. Then they hit you with the mandatory interracial black man white woman and homosexuals.
This was all just one commercial break. People really sit here and see this shit every 20 minutes and they express no disgust or anything at all. Like damn, I knew it was bad from memery and such but seeing it with your own eyes is horrifying
We do have some kind of scepticism of simple things, don't we? A somewhat related concept, I remember once my dad was moving houses and he didn't want to drag some perfectly good furniture with him, so he posted it for free on craigslist. Nobody would take it. So he posted it for $10, and it sold in a day. They just assumed something free must automatically be bad.
I learned that trick from Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.
It's like Cartman's first law of physics, anything that's fun costs at least $20.