(no subject)

[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 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.

Comments

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

"high correlation with rabid right-wingerss"

That pretty much sums up this outfit.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

No internet without quality firewall and spam processing.

Not to my computer, definitely not to my brain.

[hlinspjalda.livejournal.com]

I've read about these people. Two words: "bad craziness." Kinda makes you worry whose list they had to hijack in order to get your name, doesn't it?

I am familiar with the group

[rob-of-unspace.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

>># 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. :-)

[sebastianm.livejournal.com]

Ugh. After the election in 2004, I started getting lots and lots of mail from all sides -- and I only ever actually supported financially one.

The "Concerned Women for America" website is scary.

[(Anonymous)]

i know this is off-topic, but i wanted to let you know i finally posted a little bit about High Holidays in Alaska.

hope you're well!

http://zahavalaska.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html