The Virtual Stoa

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.

(more…)

Chris Lightfoot, 1978-2007.

Chris was splendid, and one of the few bloggers whose contributions to the world stretched far beyond blogging. (Some details over here.)

Two trivial details: he’s the only person I’ve ever successfully identified in a pub, having only seen their South Park version of themselves ahead of time; and he will always be remembered at the Virtual Stoa for writing the code that powered the Melanie Phillips Naziometer, which used to adorn the sidebar.

UPDATE [6.3.2007]: More links, over here and here.

Here’s a new blog that seems to be concentrating on discussions of Habermas and pictures of tapirs. This seems to me to be an extremely promising combination.

… to blogger Nick Barlow, who has recently completed his John O’Groats to Land’s End walk in support of the Brain Research Trust - and, no, it’s not too late to sponsor him…

… to my brother Michael’s new blog, Closely Watched DVDs, devoted to the world of Czech cinema.

Hurry over there now to learn the handy Czech phrase, “Tomorrow I’ll wake up and scald myself with tea”*, and do remember to go back every day in January, when he’ll be presenting his Jan Švankmajer blog-retrospective.

[* The only Czech phrase I can really remember from the time I tried to learn the language is the equally handy, “I think there’s going to be a revolution in the West soon.”]

After a medium-sized gap and a transtlantic crossing, Sarah has started blogging at Just Another False Alarm again.

Welcome to the second incarnation of the Virtual Stoa.

I’ve finally left Blogger, after five-and-a-half years, not because it was irritating me, as it has irritated so many thousands of other bloggers in the past, but for a couple of other reasons. First, the old Enetation comments system that I’d been using was running very slowly indeed; and, second, I was approaching the limit of my quota of disk space on the Oxford University server, and would have had to do something before too long, anyway. I could have just republished the whole thing on blogspot.com, I suppose, and enabled the Blogger comments system, but instead I’ve decided, at long last, to experiment with a different software package for running these pages, and WordPress was the one that everyone I spoke to seemed to recommend.

I hope the transition is a reasonably smooth one. It’s going to be far too much work to move all the discussions from the old comments sections over to this site, I’m afraid, so if you’re weird enough to want to spend your time reading old Stoa comments threads, you’ll have to do it back at the old site, and you’ll just have to put up with slow-opening comments-boxes.

But I have imported the old posts to this site, to create the illusion of continuity, and I’ll tidy up these archives a bit in the days and weeks to come. (If you scratch around in them, you’ll see that the bulk of the posts have numbers instead of titles attached to them, and the foreign diacriticals have gone haywire.)

Thanks a lot to all the bloggers I emailed over the last few days with technical questions of one kind or another: I hope I wasn’t too troublesome, and the advice you all gave has been extremely valuable in helping me get my bearings in the adjustment to post-2001 blogging technology. (You know who you are.)

I expect I’ll be fiddling with the site design a bit, so don’t worry if the appearance wobbles around a bit from day to day. I’m quite pleased with this general look (or ‘theme’, as WordPress insists on calling it), but do drop me a note if it looks ghastly on whatever browser you’re using to view the site.

Fellow blogger Nick Barlow is walking from John O’Groats to Land’s End to raise money for the Brain Research Trust by way of a memorial tribute to his brother Simon, who died far too young. He’s made it through Scotland relatively unscathed and is heading South. Masochist that he is, he’s planning to add hundreds of miles to his route by following the Devon and Cornwall coastal path all the way around, when he could just nip down the A30. So good luck to him, and you can sponsor him over here. Won’t take a moment.

Hemi-demi-semi posting here may resume.

The Virtual Stoa, five today.

My goodness. Not sure how that nearly two week silence happened. It’s not as if I went away or anything. I think perhaps I just wanted to keep those magnificent pictures of Enkidu (scroll down) at the top of the page for longer. And I was listening to lots of Schubert, which is more enjoyable than reading or writing on weblogs.

Mischievous Constructions, over here.

It may be a false dawn, but it looks as if the chaps at Harry’s are finally catching up with the rest of the world with the realisation that George Galloway’s not very important, over here .

(For the depth of the obsession, use this link.)

This may be premature, of course. The very next post is Galloway-themed, and H’s P isn’t terribly good at getting over its habits - Harry said he was quitting blogging not so long ago, but he’s posting as much as anyone these days. But we live in hope.

The Virtual Stoa is still the number one Google hit for “Teenage Girls in School Uniform”, and a respectable number two for injured penis photo. How did that happen?

Antonia, profiled.

Dead Socialists over here, obviously, and Dead Botanists over here (e.g., here, here and, more extensively, here), and now some other socialist blogger is running a Dead Kings and Queens Watch over at this new blog (well, new to me), Histomat (e.g., here, here or here).

(It’s almost Fourier-esque, isn’t it? “But who’s going to remind people about the anniversaries of the day that certain kinds of people died?” “I know, the socialist bloggers will be quite happy reminding people about the anniversaries of the day that certain kind of people died!”)

I thought that while I was away I had regressed all the way back to Flappy Bird status, having been a Marauding Marsupial for a long time, bypassing the Adorable Rodent stage on my way down. But apparently this isn’t so much the consequence of a three-week blog-silence, but of general chaos in the ecosystem as major re-engineering is underway.

And, thinking of blogwidgets, do put yourself on the Map of the Stoa, if you haven’t already. Some parts of the world still appear to be unrepresented.

Apologies for the break. I was off in San Francisco for a few days, and wasn’t scribbling on the blog for a few days either side of the trip in order to squeeze in all the things I had to squeeze in.

The end of term is always a busy time, especially if you disappear off to San Francisco for a few days.