You might not believe it

[conuly]

but I actually am terrible at writing persuasive letters.

At least, I think I am, and therefore I never really do it.

This is a bit of a vicious cycle, but not one I'm going to fix today.

Does anybody have any forms to send to my various legislators, state and federal, about... everything?

To repeat, today's cases - dropped on a Friday, like the fucking cowards they apparently are - are regarding gun control, abortion, and Miranda rights, and I know that last one is really slipping under the radar, but man, it pisses me off almost as much as the other two.

Comments

[james]

Try looking at https://resist.bot/ they have examples of what others have written in regard to issues and it does all the work of finding your representatives and sending texts. You basically answer a few prompts and it fills in all the blanks.

[lightbird]

And not a coincident that they made the ruling about Miranda rights the day before they were going to overturn Roe because they knew there'd be protests.

[silveradept]

As well as ruling that the state has no business regulating who is allowed to carry concealed weapons.

[conuly]

It is enough to make you scream.

[malinaldarose]

Wait, Miranda, too? Clearly I need to go read Scotusblog.

[conuly]

They didn't torch it, but they sure nerfed it.

[reynardo]

I was in a citizen's lobby group and we wrote a *lot* of letters to MPs. Handwritten letters apparently put the fear of God into politicians. Anyway, it was

A) I am writing to you today to express my opinion about X (with a small expansion of how I feel about it).

B) Clarification of the basic reason why it's bad, with particular examples of the effect it would have /has already had for actual people (especially people I know).

C) Appeal to the reason and sense of the MP. (That might be difficult).

The overall theory is that when 1000 people hear of an issue and think "That's not good", 100 think "I should do something about this", 10 think "I should write a letter", but only one actually does. So every letter a member of parliament receives also represents 1000 people's views (roughly). And a computer-typed letter could be from a form site, but a handwritten one? That's serious business.

[(Anonymous)]

I was a Ministerial correspondence officer, for a short while, and often worked with that office for a couple of years (in Canada, about twenty years ago so your mileage may vary).

I would not argue with those numbers. However, I will note that large campaigns of letters that are identical or near identical, other than the name and address can be treated differently inasmuch as they may receive a form response. Groups of letters that are sufficiently similar in content can also be grouped for form response. A large part of the fear is the amount of work that it takes to craft individual responses. If you want to distinguish your letter, do not use a template that provides more than the elements, above.

Letters received by e-mail could, sometimes be treated somewhat differently from letters received on paper. Hand writing was not treated differently, even when it was annoyingly hard to read (though this might slightly bias response letter drafters). I will say that some of us had a running joke that, even though it was very, very hard to get permission to refrain from response to a given letter and/or writer, the advice that we would give was not to use more than three colours of crayon to hand-write letters to government officials.

[pauamma]

I got the impression the last one was more about Qualified Immunity than Miranda rights. Did I misunderstand something?

[conuly]

No, but the very phrase qualified immunity makes me wanna puke nowadays.

[pauamma]

Fair enough. For me, it's the concept and the process for deciding what qualifies or doesn't (both need to DIAF), not the words themselves.