cellio | (no subject)

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 from "Concerned Women for America". She got about three more words out before I said "don't call me again" and hung up. That was based on the rudeness of a solicitation at that hour, but I also had a negative reaction to the name of this group I'd never heard of before, and I found myself wanting to look them up while on the phone, with no computer immediately to hand. Every word in that name except "for" set off a warning bell (and "for" is on probation due to proximity). Taking them in the order the alarms sounded:

"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

If you want to see how I did, check Google. It's not hard.

Maybe I don't want a neural link to the internet. It's much easier to scrub the pollution from a browser cache when it's on disk.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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...