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well, host has presented an argument that they are illegal actions.
ultimately, to decide the matter would require a legal action and a decision, yes?
ethically, it seems to me that war is not a product but a state action and that there is a distinction in kind between the two. efforts to generate support for a war are not marketing--but they are a type of public relations, which i take as bigger than simply marketing, more like bernays described it as engineering opinion (i could be wrong about the wording--something unnerving, though)--so if you assume that generating support for an action is part of the action, it follows that public relations is an extension of war in this case. if you assume that there is a distinction between the state and a private firm, and between information and advertising, it would follow that there *should* be distinctions between political actions (marketing war is a political action by necessity as it involves the state) and private firm pr campaigns--which would obtain across the board--so for example a government representative might appear as a talking head on some goofball roundtable program and advocate the position of the moment on smoking---but he or she would be operating in a clearly marked capacity as a representative and would speak from that position---others who interact with the official position of the moment would probably treat it as one alternative amongst others and engage in an evaluative action---which is fine obviously--this gets confusing though, doesn't it--a private citizen can advocate a position symmetrical with that of the official state line of the moment and that's ok--so i guess the distinction comes down to identifying state representatives as state representatives and so marking their speech as originating from, effectively, the state.
this is clearer in the case of the "experts" who were used by the "news" networks as neutral commentary sources on matters pertaining to the war in iraq--who were effectively instruments of the bush administration--they were not identified as such, did not identify themselves as such, and this seems to me a problem. like a Problem.
it is easy peasy to manipulate public opinion if you don't make distinctions between types of information sources and present ideological positions as matters of fact. perhaps because it is so easy to do--if you control or have systematic access to the repetition machinery that shapes aspects of collective worldviews--that it bugs me that this sort of practice is happening.
particularly given the still-incessant self-congratulations in the states over how "free" everyone is politically.
this seems to me, hperbolic tho it may be just written down this way--an indication of the extent to which the states is a soft totalitarian system...no distinction between ideology and information means that the ability of the polity to make informed judgments is incapacitated. that is a form of domination.
my argument works backward from this general premise to this particular type of situation.
it's much stickier a question framed as you do it, sir.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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