My extreme arguments are generally reserved for businesses who are profiting off the abuse. People demonstrating could definitely fall into the unwanted noise category depending on what you believe, but I'm not going to go extreme on them for it.
Besides, demonstrations are easily avoided and ignored. They go to the public square to demonstrate. They don't generally go to your house. Advertisers absolutely would go to your house. They are the sort of people who would calculate the exact viewing angle you have when you look out the window of your home and then set up a billboard covering that exact area so as to mine out every last dime your eyeballs can possibly give. They're the sort of people who'd set up hidden cameras in the house across the street purely so they can monitor you to estimate the number of times you look out your windows every day, all so they can sell the chance to be seen by you to some highest bidder.
You-know-it-when-you-see-it might be a good boundary. It's different for everyone, surely.
Personally I find the Protect The Children charity workers and anti-abortion protesters in large city squares to be right on the line of "mind mild-assault."
TBH the charity people are worse than the anti-abortion protesters because they force images of unfortunate kids into my mind and makes me feel bad. The anti-abortion people are almost quaint to me.
"Mind rape" is obviously an attention grabbing way of putting it, but I tend to agree that advertising is essentially theft.
It goes something like this:
* You only have a finite amount of attention. You cannot obviously "pay attention" to everything around you.
* When someone takes your attention, they are consuming some of your finite resource.
* Taking something from someone else is the very definition of theft.
Now obviously we have social norms around attention that allow for a reasonable amount of this non-consensual attention consumption. Things like, make your signage inoffensive, unobtrusive, and generally placed in a way that it is a net positive (the hot dog prices should be near the hot dog vendor).
But what we don't have, at least in the US, are strong laws and norms that protect people from this. Why does an lawyer get to steal my attention on the beach with a plane dragging a banner? Why does a storefront get to blast an ad at me when I walk by? Does anybody really think these examples are a net societal benefit?
Besides, demonstrations are easily avoided and ignored. They go to the public square to demonstrate. They don't generally go to your house. Advertisers absolutely would go to your house. They are the sort of people who would calculate the exact viewing angle you have when you look out the window of your home and then set up a billboard covering that exact area so as to mine out every last dime your eyeballs can possibly give. They're the sort of people who'd set up hidden cameras in the house across the street purely so they can monitor you to estimate the number of times you look out your windows every day, all so they can sell the chance to be seen by you to some highest bidder.