The Bangus Ultimatum

(Something “scary” for Halloween)

So let’s suppose you have a girlfriend. And after being together for a while you let her into your place. She tends to be a bitch every now and then but the relationship’s gotten to a point where you can accept each other freely. Besides, she’s got a Long Term Plan for the both of you that’ll make things better in the future. She wants a Strong Relationship (TM) – prosperity and security for the both of you and your future children.

But then one day you come across tapes of herphone conversations with another guy. All this time she’s been screwing around your back! Granted, the tapes are from a tainted, shifty-eyed source who probably has his own agenda, but you can’t be mistaken about the fact that: 1) it was her talking and 2) something nasty was going on.

And so you confront her with this, fuming with anger, and what she does instead of moving out is ignore the issue like nothing happened and give you the silent treatment. She doesn’t even try to offer an explanation, but insists that she’s just too busy working on your Strong Relationship.

So your anger mounts, and although you’re not really a violent person you think of packing her clothes yourself and dragging her out of your home. But you’ve got to let her have her say first, and frustrated, you wait.

Weeks later she finally blurts out a response. She may have gotten “involved” with a guy (who has conveniently disappeared from the face of the planet), but it was only because she felt vulnerable at that time and thought other women wanted to take her place – so she responded pre-emptively. The rest of her half-assed apology is a slap in the face – a legal document that really gives nothing and just shores up future deniability.

She convinces you to give her due process, because even these things have rules. She must be allowed to prove her innocence. So her friends and your friends congregate for this purpose. It turns out that she’s bought off most of your friends too, and the inquiry stops over silly procedural chickenshit without the tapes and its contents ever being discussed. The whole thing turns out to be a farce. She never wanted the truth out: all she wanted was this mockery of a process, after which she can claim that she’s been tried and cleared and now that this craziness is over, the both of you can move on to develop your Strong Relationship.

You try to convince yourself this cannot be happening, and you scream to her face that without the truth, there is no relationship in the first place, and that you still want her out of your place and your life. She digs herself in. She’s willing to change the parameters of you relationship, turn it into a new system of caring, maybe even shorten her stay – but she’s not going to go without exit plan for herself. She’s willing to have a reconciliation, have a couple of bozo’s d an inquiry in a strictly confidential and non-binding fashion.

This won’t be enough, you tell her, and so you take to the streets and raise your fist to make your point. You expect her to at least understand. This was how you met her. This was how you raised her above yourself, not too long ago. Instead she goes freakin’ paranoid nuts. She claims that you and your friends are actually out to kill her, conspiring to grab her position. She makes you sleep in the sofa and makes you pay rent. And in the streets, she sics her dogs on you, and blasts you with water (a “calibrated response”) and bludgeons your head and utterly, irretrievably, breaks your heart. And now you’re lost and confused, wondering how things have gone so horribly wrong.

TO BE CONTINUED

(reposted from the iBlog site)

Of course, if you lash out on bloggers, you can’t expect us to take it sitting down. Some great reactions online:

* From Doc Searls:

I’d like to ask Dan — and others who damn all bloggers for the sins of the few — how they’d like to read a report that calls supermarket tabloids “the newspapers” or hate sheets “the magazines.” Because that’s what happened to bloggers in this piece.

* Kurt Opsahl from the EFF has this great parody:

Printing presses are the prized platform of a public lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Ben Franklin and John Hancock.

Take the tea tax. Revenue was coming, providing much needed funding to help with his Majesty’s benevolent aims in the colonies.

Then the pamphleteers attacked. A supposed crusading journalist launched a broadsheet long on invective and wobbly on facts, posting articles with his printing press calling your King “deceitful,”"unethical,”"incredibly stupid” and “a pathological liar” who had misled the colonists.

Figured I might as well be upgrading site functionality while doing the redesign. Been updating my plugins and adding new ones. Fighting off wretched, filthy spam is a priority, so I plugged in Spam Karma 2. SK 1.2’s served me well these last few months. No spam ever got through, and no false positives so far (but then again, I get so little comment traffic).

But I’m intrigued with Akismet, which uses (I think) a global, distributed approach. Two things that stop me from using it right away though:

1. It’s tied to a central server somewhere, using data submitted by other people (I share Eric Meyer’s reservation that spammers could try to “poison the well”)

2. I had to jump through several hoops to have it installed (like getting Flock, so I can get a Wordpress.com account, so I can get a WP API key)

So right now, Akismet would have to sit idly and deactivated in my plugins manifest, until I get better feedback. Or if Spam Karma fails, which isn’t very likely.