The Virtual Stoa

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.

No posts since the weekend, I’m afraid, and no more for about a week, probably. So come back then.

Big feature on UK political bloggers over in G2 today (though the online version doesn’t have the pictures; I’ll have to pick up a copy later today). My spies at tehgraundiad-HQ tell me that the most popular topic of conversation among the various assembled bloggers was Star Trek.

The silverdollarcircle.

Don’t forget to add yourself to the Virtual Stoa World-Map, if you haven’t already.

It had to happen. I’ve created one of those nifty frappr maps for this blog, in a vain attempt to demonstrate that not all of the people who glance at this blog live in Oxford or London.

Go and add yourselves, readers of the Stoa, especially if you, um, don’t live in Oxford or London…

Nick Cohen’s got himself a blogsite. It’s already doing a service by hosting his recent New Statesman article, as the NS has one of the most frustrating websites around, but with luck it’ll do a bit more than that. [via]

Someone has just arrived at the VS looking for “oliver-kamm dsquared penis picture”. For some reason, this blog occupies the two top spots. Perhaps Google images might help? Actually, let’s hope it doesn’t.

Harry, the keystone in the arch of British political blogging, bows out.

Marc Mulholland’s back in the land of blogs, with a new blogaddress. The Moiders (no longer Daily, alas) are here.

Update your bookmarks and blogrolls, boys and girls.

PooterGeek has the photographic evidence.

Thanks to those who enquired after my health:, and especially to one correspondent who wondered whether I’d stopped blogging, and observed that “It would be a shame if your last post was about Horkheimer of all people”. I’m pleased to report that I haven’t, so it wasn’t.

There was only rather slow dial-up internet access where I was staying in Paris. And when the bombs went off on 7 July, I was more interested in using the short periods I was online each day for catching up on news reports than for saying anything in particular in this space. I’m not sure there was a great deal to say, anyway, and everyone else seems to have said it.

And for the rest of the month, it was more fun to concentrate on being in France.

I’m writing from Paris, where I’ll be spending most of July.

By pure coincidence (yes, really), I travelled out here on the first day of the Tour de France, and I’ll be at the Gare du Nord to catch my train home while the riders are busy circling the Champs Elysées at its very end, and in between, I’ll be reading a lot of copies of L’Equipe.

There is an internet connection where I’m staying (as well as a magnificent panoramic view of the centre of the town from this 13th-floor apartment, which I’m told will provide splendid views of Bastille Day fireworks), but it’s a slow dial-up, and I suspect I’ll be doing and thinking about other things, so expect light-to-non-existent postings at the VS, and go and read other people’s pages instead.

“Interactive, restlessly conscious of its own transient nature”.

Well, he was talking about blogs and other online media, but he could have been talking about a lot of other things, too, including all of our lives in this world (if not in the next, assuming that he’s onto something with this Christianity business).

Some people are reporting difficulties with the comments boxes right now, especially, I think, for Firefox users. Please be patient. I hope it’ll sort itself out soon. Sometimes reloading the page with ctrl-R or whatever it is seems to work.

It’s strangely satisfying to learn that while I was sitting in the Bodleian Library this afternoon reading James Tyrrell’s 1693 Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature (very dull) and Samuel Parker’s 1681 Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and of the Christian Religion (much more interesting), the usual suspects were discussing natural law theory over at Harry’s (David T isn’t a fan).

Well, I was reading in the English, Protestant, slightly-voluntarist, late-seventeenth-century variety of natural law theory, whereas the discussion over there, when it isn’t about gay marriage, is about the transformation of more straightforwardly Thomist theory at the hands of people like Finnis, Glendon, and B-16. But that’s close enough for the World of Blogs.

If people want to carry on organising their blog discussions around what I’m reading, tomorrow would be a good day for an argument about the changing character of Dutch republicanism in the middle of the seventeenth century, as I work through the second half of Blom’s book (see below). Good luck!

… Socialism in an Age of Waiting. They’ve done a disappearing act before, but this one has got some solid reasons behind it (though Canada is on the internet, last time I looked), and it really could be the case this time round that an open-ended break becomes, well, open-ended. A pity.

Paul Anderson writes:

“Jeez! I’ve been looking for Brit blog comment on the French vote all day and there’s sweet FA from the Brit left blogs.”

Perhaps he missed posts shortly before the vote from Phil and Jamie, and posts after the result was clear came from Lenin, DML, Raj and SIAW. And if PA’s version of the left side of the World of Blogs extends to rightist maniacs like Pollard, then he’s got a bunch of idiotic posts up, too.So there’s a bit more than sweet FA. The two reasons there might be a bit less than there otherwise would have been are (i) that the result wasn’t a surprise, so anyone who had anything to say could have said it days ago and (ii) it was a Bank Holiday today, and bloggerage is always down on Bank Holidays, for reasons which might reflect badly on the work ethic of Brit Bloggers.

I’m just curious as to which blogs PA was visiting in order to draw his blanks? It’s pretty obvious that Harry’s has little interest in this kind of thing, when there’s Hitchens and Galloway to blather on about, and Matt T’s on holiday.

In any case, even if there wasn’t any comment (which there was), why is it any kind of failure if those of us who write on weblogs don’t choose to write about the same kinds of things that journalists get paid to write about? We’re interested in other things. Maybe those other things are more interesting. Maybe there really isn’t that much to say.

I’ve just trimmed twenty-five blogs off the blogroll — a bit more than a fifth, a bit less than a quarter — in the interests of efficiency, productivity, streamlining and other words from the lexicon of the modern manager.

On the whole, blogs were removed that (i) aren’t very interesting, (ii) seem fairly or completely defunct, (iii) used to link back to this page but don’t anymore, or (iv) can get along perfectly well without a link from me — though I’m sure that’s a non-exhaustive set of reasons.

If you think you’ve been unfairly removed and would like to stay on the blogroll, or if you think there’s someone else out there who deserves a Link from the Stoa, please remonstrate either in public (comments box) or private (email).

And if your site is still on the list, you can congratulate yourself for having survived the purge.

The Virtual Stoa’s four today. My goodness. How old.

Blogger tells me there’ve been 1,182 posts here over those 1,460 days; Sitemeter tells me that there’ve been 117,590 visits to the Stoa since it was installed, though I don’t remember just when that was (quite a while ago, though); TTLB tells me that I’ve evolved from being an adorable little rodent to a marauding marsupial over the last twelve months; and my email folders tell me there have been 2,578 non-spam comments posted here since I installed the enetation comments boxes twenty-five months ago (which is about as many as Harry’s gets on a slow day).

A few months ago, Nick Barlow commented that the VS was the only blog he could think of that had been going for a while but which never had a major facelift or redesign. That’s not quite right — there wasn’t a sidebar once upon a time (here’s a view of the front page from three years ago, with the first anniversary post at the top) and the reason there wasn’t a sidebar should be obvious: back in 2001-2 there were hardly any blogs out there worth linking to (another snapshot, from August’02 shows what a short blogroll it was when it finally appeared), and a vanishingly small number of decent UK blogs. But the general visual design is still pretty much the one I assembled back in May 2001, and while Blogger has been frustrating at times (especially in that first year), I’ve never become so annoyed with it that I’ve seriously investigated a different blogprovider.

Thanks for reading and commenting, as ever, and the traditional birthday greetings go out to the unusual suspects, the people who populate this particular corner of the World of Blogs, and who make it a worthwhile and interestingly argumentative place to be: to Mischievous Michael, Alarming Sarah, Worrying Raj, the Normmeister, Backword Dave (get those comments working!), Bloody Jamie, Sloop John B, Natty Visual Display of Information Chris, “Excel” Matt, Peter the Great, Early Modern Sharon, Operatic Gert, the King of the Silver Dollar, Chris, Daniel and the rest of the Crooked Timber gang, Harry and Friends, the Waiting Socialists, Polling Anthony and Gambling Mike, the Leninologist, and Colchester’s finest, Nick Barlow and Hal Berstram.

And greetings also to the fairly recent wave of brand new OxBlogs, to Considering Robert, Citizen Bance, Tea-Drinking Kate, two varieties of salmon, PopTexting Abby and - the newest arrival - Cllr Dan.

And finally to those fallen comrades whom we hope will return to the fray before too long — the Moidering Marc and the Pootering Geek.

(And apologies to those who really should be in that list, above, but who’ve been inadvertently left out of this unscientific sample.)

I couldn’t do it without you. Well, actually, I could, and I did, 2001-2003 or so, but it was less fun.

It’s exam season in the universities, so let’s have a suitable question for anyone to attempt while I’m trying to finish off the lecture I’m giving later this afternoon over at the Maison Fran�aise.

(I’m standing in for Alain Badiou, who has cancelled his visit to Oxford, so I am officially now a celebrity-French-philosopher-substitute.)

Q: “Blogs get the comments boxes they deserve.” Discuss.

Not much blogging recently, I’m afraid. My brother Michael asked me about ten things I’ve never done, and three of them are reading Paradise Lost, completing my first book, and preparing a lecture to give next week at the Maison Française at rather short notice, and these three are filling up my time at the moment (with good progress, I’m happy to report, on all fronts).

There may be seven other things I haven’t done (voted Conservative, learned to drive, that kind of thing), but I’m blanking on most of them — well, at least five of them — right now.

Apologies for the silence over the last few days. I’ve been in the Bodleian reading Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae. I don’t think many people blog while reading De Legibus Naturae, but I may be wrong.