I have an ancient AOL account – my very first email address actually. It's now my designated online petition address. Warum?The Just FYI and Please Send Money emails that pour in after signing can be totally monster overwhelming. I'm a freelance-babe and, as much as I can manage, need to keep the inbox clean and uncluttered. I gots to be able to see and respond to work correspondence all lickety split-like. Impossible if I'm buried in a thousand pleas and alerts.
Once a day, I sign into AOL to see if there are any important messages or missives from old chums who don't have my new, real address.
So much of the plea and alert mail is badly thought out marketeering. Such as:
Paul Ryan just announced:
When I opened it I found that, yup, it’s a Please, oh please send us money! missive. Nowhere in the message does it finish the damn subject line’s sentence. Unsurprisingly, it’s from the DCCC – Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. These are the same folks behind all of the painfully condescending, daily Jon Ossoff donate-or-we-all-DIE emails. At this point, I’m wondering if the PR widgets over at the DCCC are actually Republican (Russian?) plants.
Some of the mail is just odd, odd, with a side of weird:
The rest of the message? It links to Shoutyface page with the full headline being
People Are Furious Over A Video That Appears To Show The Chainsmokers Joking About Chinese People Eating Dogs - #TrendingViralHub #Trending #Viral #Popular #Hot
Why am I getting this? So I can be furious too? What's the point? Assholes are being assholic. I’m already rockin’ a near constant rage, Sorry Trending Hub, your shit doesn't make the cut.
Do I get nothing but crap and beg-a-thons in the mail?! Ah...no, not entirely.
What Slaughterhouses Don't Want Us To Know
Is there more than what Upton Sweetie covered in The Jungle? Are the killing yards still so obscenely heinous?
The message had a link to a petition which begins with:
When undercover video of animal abuse in UK slaughterhouses went viral, public outrage prompted a movement that made abattoirs accountable for the cruelty committed by their employees. From 2009 to 2016 an anti-cruelty animal group filmed inside 11 randomly selected slaughterhouses. What they found was disgusting.They went on to give examples which were damned horrifying. The animal killing companies may have rules in place which forbid the revealed heinously vile abuses but still they happen. Closed-circuit TV is compulsory in UK slaughterhouses now. That should be the case in the US too.
The text of the petition:
We cannot stop the world from eating meat, but we can ensure that those animals that give up their lives so that others may eat, are not tortured before they die. Sign the petition and ask Congress to demand oversight in slaughterhouses. Demand CCTVs.
This next missive was from Amnesty International. They were right up front in the subject line too – dough, we need some. I appreciate their honesty.Donna, Trump has abandoned human rights: Your gift doubledThe email didn’t go into specifics beyond a brief statement about fighting injustice and oppression. Amnesty International is straight up fab but giving a few examples of the Orange Menace’s disregard for us pesky, little, non-rich humans might go a long way toward loosening more purse strings.
And then there are the emails which tell me things I already know, like Trump nominating radio talk show idiot Sam Clovis, who has NO background in agriculture or science to be chief scientist at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Ah, but the porcine dimwit’s a birther and a racist piece of diseased pigeon shit. I guess those are the only credentials one needs to head up a big, important agency in von Clownstick's administration.
Conclusion? I should at least briefly scan this shit instead of just mass deleting what lands in my inbox.
I get a lot of that. Petitions which no one ever hears of in any context except the e-mails. Fund-raising pleas that always cite some impending "deadline". And the ones that insult my intelligence by purporting to be from some prominent individual like Barack Obama or John Lewis, as if people like that actually sit around sending personal e-mails to hundreds of thousands of people.
ReplyDeleteI've gotten pretty good at deleting all the spam at the sender level without losing real messages, but having a separate address to give fund-raisers and suchlike might be a good idea.
It helps limit the spam and other assorted horseshit though it's not perfect.
DeleteDuring the goat gang rape (gang goat rape?) last year my original issue invitation only beta gmail account became so overwhelmed I had to abandon it. Chapped my hide, it did. DKos, a blog community I've been a background part of since the start was the worst, but there was about ten of them multi-spamming daily. If I had had my own server it would have been a denial of sevice attack.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's the whole belttling, condescending denigrating "if you don't do this now trump will win and it will be ALL YOUR FAULT Republican Liteness about it. The dems aren't doing a very good job of reattracting the vote they threw away last year.
Gang goat rape? Geez, I totally missed out on this!
DeleteBelittling and condescension is a really stupid way to argue a case. In shaming people you don't convert them to your thinking, you instead make sure they'll never listen and become even more entrenched in their stand.