this is your vanishingly rare politics post

[melannen]

Today I:

• Went through my spam-and-mailing-lists email inbox and unsubscribed to a bunch of things that had been sending me excessive and annoying fund-raising emails.


• set up a recurring donation to Wonkette because their continued existence has been a major comfort to me these past few years. And because I sent them a one-time donation last week, and got a heartfelt and profane personal 3 AM thank-you from the editrix, even though she is still on maternity leave, which works 100x better at convincing me to give again than any carefully-focus-grouped form letter ever will.


• spent the afternoon writing Postcards to Voters with friends, on the basis that a personal and heartfelt (although not profane, as tempting as it is) note is also more likely to get through to other people.


• joined the Industrial Workers of the World, because my work is forbidden by law from unionizing, my work needs a union, and I want to be a person with a membership card for the Wobblies.


• pledged to the Fuck Susan Collins fund, because fuck Susan Collins


• donated to Planned Parenthood with an 'in your honor' card sent to Susan Collins, because I know they'll use it for real stuff and they were one of the only ones whose mailing list wasn't super-annoying (Their post-confirmation email appeal included links to self-care tips for survivors right next to the donate button!)


• joined the ACLU because I've been meaning to finally do that since W was in office.


• donated to the OTW, because I've been lazy about keeping up my membership, and reading through a new juggernaut slash pairing has also helped me a lot this week


• donated to the National MS Society, in memory of an old family friend whose funeral I attended on Friday


• signed up for the volunteer opportunities/mailing lists of the hyperlocal democratic club, the local League of Women Voters chapter, Swing Left, and a couple of County Council candidates


• joined the local a-spec meetup.com groups, because neotoma reminded me they existed, and local in-person community matters


• checked my voter registration status


• did a first read of the LWV voter guide for my district


• also attempted to give people some DW points, but I'm still not sure it worked. If you're one of the people I owe DW points to, can you let me know if you got them?

This was several years worth of arrears.

I should have done all of those a long time ago, but one of the insidious things about all this is that it just makes one tired.

And there may be better places to give/join, or more effective ones, but those are the ones I did. And that is better than doing nothing because I can't decide.

I guess I finally got to the level of fuck-its where I just do it, because fuck it.

(I probably should have kept better track of who I signed up for recurring with and how much I gave total, but fuck it.)

....my mailing-lists-and-spam email address is not going to have a chance to recover before it fills up again. (I wonder if charities ever actually factor in how many people don't give because they don't want to be hassled for life because of a one-time donation? Because based on a quick poll of my friends, it's a LOT of people.)

Comments

[lannamichaels]

I have to say, the monthly thank you e-mail newsletter from Wonkette gives me life, and if all monthly newsletters were like that, I'd read them.

I'm just sad that their new donation interface won't let me give them multiples of $18 anymore :(

[melannen]

I'm looking forward to it!

Also it's likely that you're the person responsible for the Wonkette feed being on my network page, which may have literally saved my life two years ago when I was avoiding all the internet except for DW because reading anything political made me want to vomit, and I stumbled over wonkette on my network page and it didn't do that and I started to think maybe we could all make it through together.

[lannamichaels]

I am glad to have provided that service! I don't even remember when I got onto wonkette (during the last owner? I think?) and there are definitely times when it is all I can bear to read. When I can't even handle watching Maddow, at least Wonkette is there for me to skim through my fingers. (When I reach the point where I am skipping even Wonkette posts, I know I should probably get off the internet.)

[melannen]

I think I was aware of them back in the Dubya days, but they fell off my radar after that, and the style has changed a lot since they left Gawker (mostly for the better, I think.)

[beatrice_otter]

Better late than never! I set up a TON of small monthly recurring donations after Trump got elected. Mostly $10/month, but it adds up. Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood Action Fund (i.e. the political action arm that can actually do political campaigns), ACLU, Anti-Defamation League, DCCC, DSCC, several others.

[melannen]

Yeah, I'm wary of recurring because, like you said, it adds up fast in both directions (and I'm doing all right financially right now not because I'm making a lot of money - I am not - but because I have relatively few ongoing expenses, so I have to be careful there.) But at some point you just have to do it!

[beatrice_otter]

Whereas I'm one of the rare millennials with a good amount of disposable cash, so I figure I have responsibilities to use it for good. Most of us can't. I can. So I do.

[lynnenne]

Wow, that's fantastic! Go you!

[melannen]

We'll see if I actually follow up on any of the RL stuff, but at least I took the first step a year after I said I was going to!

[lilysea]

Thank you for all the donations/volunteering towards making the world a less-bad place! ^_^

[lilysea]

I wonder if charities ever actually factor in how many people don't give because they don't want to be hassled for life because of a one-time donation? Because based on a quick poll of my friends, it's a LOT of people.

Ye fishes and little gods, yes.

I was SO, SO angry with Arthritis & Osteoporosis [geographical location] because I donated to them, and then they on-sold my postal address to a gazillion totally unrelated charities, so I had to spend forever telephoning, say, animal rights charities and saying "Please take me off your mailing list, I do not want to receive your letters with gruesome pictures of sick/injured animals on the front of the envelope."

I think it was 20 or 30 unrelated charities in total! :(

Grrrrr.

I really think that on-selling addresses of donors to unrelated charities should be ILLEGAL.

[oracne]

THIS.

[cyprinella]

I somehow got onto a pro assisted suicide mailing list from my name getting sold and I was incandescent with rage. Most of the mailers I'll just chuck in the recycling and let them waste their money but those assholes got a call.

[melannen]

SO ANNOYING.

And even the ones that don't sell your name never. shut. up. - I have places I donated to once, five years ago, and I still get at least one junk mail a month from them. I would probably have given again by now if they weren't so annoying.

[(Anonymous)]

B

[oracne]

Go you!

I am wary of several otherwise good political things because they slap you on a [frequent! demanding! begging!] mailing list if you so much as sign an online petition or make a small one-time donation. I unsubscribe as those arrive, but it never happens instantaneously and some days it makes me full of rage.

Wonkette thus sounds like a good place to donate, so thanks.

[melannen]

Wonkette isn't activist like most of the others - they're a journalism/pro blog site. But they're kind of like Dreamwidth, in that they're run by one owner on a shoestring of voluntary subscriptions with the only goal being to pay as many writers as she can a fair rate and keep the site up. So if you like that sort of thing, I think it's a good place to give.

[princessofgeeks]

You win the internets!

[melannen]

There are a lot of people who've been doing this all along, I am not the winner! But I figure it can't hurt to point out that never is too late.

[treewishes]

You are my hero! I should do all of these things, some more than others, and so I will try to do at least one, which is more than I did yesterday.

[melannen]

That was why I made this post! And my own accountability- I need to write some more postcards tonight.

[swingandswirl]

/waves pom poms/ Go you!

And I'm reminded of a quote. The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. That you did stuff now is awesome.

And yep. I always wonder how much of the donated money goes to those stupid mailers. Like, I would happily double my donation - and so would a ton of people I know - if I could be assured of not being buried under a pile of glossy paper and/or emails.

[melannen]

Yeah, my mom has a rule that anyone who sends her an unsolicited "free gift" in the mail will never get her money.

I'm sure they do get some results from it, or at least they did at one point, but I feel like less is more there.