The Virtual Stoa

I’m in Oxford for all of July, and Josephine has just disappeared off to Tunisia for a month, to improve her Arabic, so it seemed like it wasn’t a bad time to scribble in this space again, in case anyone’s paying attention. (If you are reading this, do say hello in the comments–I’ve no idea how many people are likely to stumble across the blog, after being quiescent for so long.)

To get things started again, I’ve given a light dusting to the blogroll, and I’ll mention a few of the entries here.

First of all, my brother Michael’s been dabbling in the world of blogs again. Three months ago he posted a number of pictures of Ships With Rude Names on a tumblr, so if you want to see what any of SS Beaverburn, the Happy Entrance, or HMS Spanker looked like, wander over there and have a look. More recently, and more substantially, he’s started a new blog–Bock! Bock! Bock!–in order to document his family’s new experiment with chickens.

Now for a couple of book-blogs. Marc Mulholland’s blog has started up again, this time posting snippets to discuss the themes of his new book, Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear, which is coming out from Oxford later this year. I think what happened here is that Marc’s full draft was much, much too long, and so the bits that had to but cut out are being exploited as a resource for the blog. There’s already some very interesting stuff up there, including this post, arguing against the conventional wisdom that the Second International ‘betrayed’ the European working class in the Summer of 1914.

And another old friend with an interest in Trotskyist historiography, Dave Renton, has a new blog to support his new book, Lives; Running, which is about, um, running. I didn’t know Dave was quite so interested in running, but it looks as if he really is, and he has various things to say about the Olympics, too.

For those of us who have been blogging for too long, it will always be 2002-4 or thereabouts. So in addition to Marc Mulholland’s return, it’s good to see that Nick Barlow has stepped back from his Lib Dem Council responsibilities in Colchester in order to post a lot of stuff about the Tour de France. And Jamie Kenny’s indestructible Blood & Treasure just goes on and on, and he now promises a parallel book-blog sometime in the not too distant future, and that should be great fun.

I’ll leave you now, with a chicken video from Mike:

The Virtual Stoa is practically moribund these days–though as a friend wrote the other day, “the Stoa isn’t so much defunct, I feel, as crepuscular, brooding in a Mediterranean twilight”–but posts do still appear here from time to time (mostly about beavers, admittedly), and this one is just to note that the blog is ten years old today, which is quite old, in blogyears.

Thanks to all of you who have been reading, and especially to those who have stopped in to chat.

I read in the directory bit at the end of the 2010/2011 Total Politics Guide to Political Blogging that the Virtual Stoa is a Portuguese blog. How exciting! And this, from the same people who in 2009 declared this blog both the 67th and the 86th top Labour blog…

Pissup. Brewery.

Thanks to everyone who alerted me to a spam infestation at the Virtual Stoa, which was showing up in Google stuff — the search engine, its cache and in the Google Reader thingummy.

The exhortations to buy Vicodin and Cialis and the like were probably more stimulating than the actual content they replaced; nevertheless, in the interests of restoring the usual service, I’ve delved deep into the bowels of the WordPress installation, zapped a few lines of extremely dubious-looking code, killed a few files that popped up in the plug-ins folder that really oughtn’t to be there, wiped from the memory banks a couple of unauthorized users and, finally, changed the passwords. It was all quite a lot easier than I’d anticipated — I get a bit nervous in the face of MySQL databases. And so, with luck, that hack’s been dealt with.

But, just in case anything does recur, please could my vigilant readers report any further unusual sightings: I don’t use Google Reader (I’m a Bloglines man myself), so I don’t tend to notice it when my readers all drift off in search of new opportunities to purchase these valuable drugs.

Testing

The Virtual Stoa, eight years old today.

No idea what that was about, but apparently the comments have been screwy for a while, and yesterday the whole site collapsed and all the archive pages disappeared. But it all seems to be back working again now, I think.

UPDATE [27.5.2009]: And I’ve even remembered to turn off the “must be logged in to post comments” feature, which somehow managed to switch itself on.

Go here (and also here and here and possibly later also to other pages on Ted’s blog) for the one, the only, the first, the last, the very special Death of Oliver Cromwell 350th Anniversary Mini-Blog-Carnival!

There’s a lot to dislike about Harry’s Place [no link, read on], and its comments threads are often a disgrace to the entire interwebnet (which is saying something) but if you want to have an argument with them, you can have an argument with them, and you can do it in public, either over at your site, or at theirs, or at a great many other places in cyberspace. Running to their ISP to shut them down because you don’t like something someone’s said about someone is pretty low, and the person or people who did it should be ashamed of themselves.

Daniel Davies, no stranger to internet flamewars, explains why blogs are likely to spell the death of both far-left and far-right politics in the UK:

Blogs are rather like sodium pentathol or Stella Artois in their effect on social inhibitions, so when you add them to a scene which is largely composed of people with poor impulse control at the best of times, then you are basically lighting the blue touch paper…

To watch the SWP/Respect bust-up, Socialist Unity is the place to go; the BNP is self-destructing in blogland over here.

… to the Liberal Conspiracy.

Neil Clark is even more objectionably stupid than Stephen Pollard. In fact, it’s not even close. He’s been ahead of Pollard in the stupidity stakes ever since he started conversing with a spambot in the comments section of his own blog (18 months ago or so? not sure), but he’s now way, way out ahead of the rest of the field.

And remember: this isn’t just about 91 interpreters, and nothing, but nothing has actually yet been achieved. This campaign is about everyone who is in in fear of their lives owing to their links to the British forces in Iraq, and their families: i.e., quite a few thousand people. If you haven’t already, write to your MP. Especially if your MP is Hugh Bayley, who doesn’t seem to have much of a clue.

Campaign video over here. (It’s both funny and gruesome, so be careful.)

UPDATE [5 minutes later]: Jamie Kenny says it so much better than I ever could.

Over here [via]

Chris Dillow, over here.

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday, dear Stoa,
Happy birthday to you…

Chris Lightfoot, in The Times, a few days ago.

Also, over the fold, the text of a recent article from the Morning Star.

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