(Untitled)

[cellio]

I used to think I wanted the internet in my brain, but I've
reconsidered.

The phone rang around 8:30 this morning. That was early enough to be
plausibly important, so I answered. The caller butchered my name (my
last name doesn't even have several of those morphemes); my
suspicion that it was a junk call was soon confirmed.

She was calling

Comments

[stevemb]

"high correlation with rabid right-wingerss"

That pretty much sums up this outfit.

[cellio]

Oh, definitely. But even with all that, I don't want to expend my precious brain cells on storing their tripe.

[cellio]

For phone calls, I assume they just hit everyone. For physical jumk mail, I seem to get stuff from all parts of the spectrum, though I've done nothing to encourage most of it. Both the Democrats and the Republicans send me mail that starts off "dear fellow [party]". Aside from the month I spent as a Democrat for tax purposes [1], I've never been registered in either, nor have I given them money.

[1] I once crossed party lines to vote in their primary, which locally was the election, trying to prevent a reckless spender. This raises all sorts of interesting questions both ethical and practical; I felt fine on the ethics part because I did it after the Dems mounted a campaign to get their people to cross-register as Republicans to influence that primary. Sauce for the goose and all that...

I am familiar with the group

[rob_of_unspace]

You don't want to get me started on them. I wish I could do a brain scrub, but stuff seems to be in there permanently.

Sometime I should tell the story about Phyllis Schlafley and the Washington University Lecture Series sponsored by the Student Union -- and her comments about us a couple years later.

Snarl.

[thatcrazycajun]

>># America": in a political context, high correlation with rabid right-wingerss
# "Women": you're going to try to categorize my beliefs, interests, and priorities, and you will be wrong
# "Concerned": you have a crusade.<<

Nailed it in one. CWA was the group Beverly LaHaye (wife of one of the coauthors of the LEFT BEHIND series of Revelation-as-written-by-Tom-Clancy novels) back in 1979 to help Phyllis Schlafly stop the Equal Rights Amendment (which, sadly, they were all too successful in doing) and has stuck around ever since to go after basically anyone who disagrees with their constricted, literalist reading of the Bible and application thereof to social policy.

A crusade, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing; what you want to be careful of is just what the crusaders in question are crusading for. Personally, I'm on a crusade to stop people from putting an apostrophe where it shouldn't be because they think it means "beware of oncoming 'S'." But that's just me. :-)

[cellio]

A crusade, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing

Right. You need to look more closely, as you say; it's a warning bell, not a full-blown "run away now" siren. I approve of your crusade, and think it might be slighly less doomed than one of mine: to stamp out use of "email" as a counting noun.

[thatcrazycajun]

>>to stamp out use of "email" as a counting noun.<<

I wasn't at all aware nouns could even think, much less count. :-) Splainy?

[stevemb]

I think that means the usage "I got three emails today".