Occasionally my instincts are good.
Normally, I'm very good at seeing a trend, getting scared by it, and doing exactly the wrong thing about it (the whole .com bubble? I spent all of it avoiding the entreaties of various bubblerific startups, and ended up unemployed for two and a half years when the bubble broke. If I'd worked for a bubblerific startup, I would no doubt have ended up unemployed, but (a) I would have made a shitload more money before that happened, and (b) I would have maintained contacts with enough people to get me out of the unemployment hole long before my money ran out. It didn't help that my other instinct was to stay in Portland. Sure, it's “nice” that the value of my house has almost trebled (but since we're not selling it the only effect of that increased valuation is that our property taxes have gone way up,) but when the .com bubble popped it the tech economy up here flatlined along with my bank account.
I even backed the Democratic Party after they did that whackjob on Howard Dean's campaign. So, as you can tell, my non-technical instincts are dubious at best.
But when the Democratic Party folded on S. 3930, that was enough for me and I started returning the torrent of solicitations from the Democratic Party either blank or with a curt "please take me off your mailing list" comment. This scared off some of the fishermen, but others were more stubborn. The DSCC, chaired by Charles Schumer, was one of the stubborn ones, and it managed, as if by magic, to arrange it so that every time the Stupid Party did something particularly idiotic I'd get Yet Another solicitation under Mr. Schumer's letterhead.
This went on a long time, until the idiotic thing de jour was Mr. Schumer coming to bat to protect the tax loophole that his good friends in the financial parasite community were using to not pay any taxes on their hundreds-of-million-dollar incomes. *The* *very* *next* *day* saw the next solicitation from the DSCC, asking for my money to help “protect” the country from the Evil Party.
I snapped, wrote “FUCK OFF AND DIE” on every page of the solicitation, stuffed it back into the business reply envelope, and mailed it back posthaste.
Yes, this was a bit immoderate even for me, and I occasionally wondered if I had maybe gone a little bit over the top. Until today, when I read a news release stating “BREAKING: Schumer and Feinstein Will Vote For Mukasey”.
You know, if I wanted to support a party that was in favor of absolute monarchy, I would have voted for the Evil Party. If I wanted to vote for a party that would allow the Coward in Chief to continue torturing and murdering under the cloak of the law, I would have voted for the Evil Party.
It was not excessive to tell the DSCC to fuck off and die. It was perhaps a bit restrained, and I guess I should have used a smaller font so I could list all of the reasons why the DSCC should go commit anatomical impossibilities on itself. And my decision to not contribute one red penny to the Democratic Party until they reverse all of the horrible Evil Party policies that have been enacted since 1980? It's looking smarter and smarter every day.