The Virtual Stoa

The Virtual Stoa, nine years old today.

A new blogmeme’s doing the round, to pick the theme-tune of your blog.

Here at the Virtual Stoa, there can only be one choice — this complex yet sensitive meditation on the dialectics of national identity in a globalising era, as performed at the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest by Scooch:

An indication of the extent of the crisis  that the Labour Party finds itself in is that the Virtual Stoa has been included on a list of the “Top 100 Labour Blogs” that has been compiled by some outfit I’ve never heard of called Total Politics.

An indication of the extent of the crisis that Total Politics finds itself in is that they’ve included the Virtual Stoa on the list twice, at #67 and at #86.

Perhaps it’d be for the best if I could roll my rankings into one, come in at #153, and fall off the list altogether?

Reading this reminds me of the slogan with which Life of Brian was marketed in Sweden: “The Film That Was So Funny, They Banned It In Norway.”

As everyone should know by now, today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so please feel free to Talk Like A Pirate in the comments box here, or, indeed, elsewhere. Suggestions over here. Ah, Jim lad.

It’s also the Jour de la raison, according to the version of the French Republican Calendar installed at this site, one of the holidays that brings the old year to a close — and it is appropriate, I think, that a day celebrating human reason should fall on International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Over here [thanks, SM]

See the maps over here, and the comments for important considerations about how burning more witches may help to stop climate change. [Thanks, SM.]

When you’ve won a prestigious Ig-Nobel Prize for Literature it’s hard to know where to go next. Here’s the latest:

I wish to inform you that the New President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Alhaji Amaru Musa Yar’adua has Mandated that all money fraudulently collected by Nigeria Faudsters should be Paid to the beneficiaries not Letter than 10th of April 2008.

We are indeed happy to inform you that your email address was found among this set picked by the software companies in charge of these excersise and we have been mandated to settle you through the nominated bank by the Federal Government of Nigeria.

It has become imperative to settle you to redeem the Nigerian Image which has been tarnished abroad.

Mr. President Has also Promised the International bodies in the G8 Summit Meeting held in Germany, that he will make sure that all the Payment fraudulently collected by Nigerian fraudsters will be paid to the Foreign Beneficiary without Further Delay.

I want to also bring this to your notice that A Draft of ($2,50,000.00) two hundred and fifty thousand dollars  or ATM Card will be Made available to you, We therefore Request you to Reconfirm the  Information Bellow:

(1) YOUR FULL NAME/ADDRESS.
(2) YOUR DIRECT TEL/FAX NUMBER.
(3) YOUR NATIONALITY
(4) YOUR AGE
(5) YOUR OCCUPATION.

You should respond to this mail Immediately with the Information if you want to receive this Draft before the Closing date.

Thanks For Your Understanding,

Dr. Donald Harrison
Oceanic Bank Nigeria Plc.

[Thanks, SM]

I just googled the word “gittishness“, in order to find out what the rest of the interwebnet made of this important concept, and was pleased to see that Google asked me straightaway, Did you mean: britishness?

OK, this is old, but I hadn’t seen it before [thanks, JQ]:

Over here [thanks, SM].

Someone recently arrived at the Stoa while searching on this question. Stoa-readers! Do any of you know the answer?

Public reason may be possibly the most boring topic in contemporary political philosophy, which takes some doing, but it is also the name of a new blog by a bunch of political philosophers which looks as if it might become quite good. They’ve got a distinguished line up of contributors, not all of whom have yet contributed, and I suppose those of us with a sense of history will worry that this looks a little bit too much like the old Left2Right blog, which looked so promising at first, but never seemed to me to do that much beyond hosting some great posts by Elizabeth Anderson on Hayek and other related topics, and rather ran into the buffers. Anyway, I’m particularly pleased to see my old-friend-whom-I-haven’t-seen-in-years Alyssa Bernstein on the roster, as she’s great fun, if not a little Rawlsian.

Thinking of Rawlsians, this thread over at Brian Leiter’s place could become great fun, and possibly quite heated. In my balanced splitting-the-difference kind of way, I’m comfortable with the thought that Rawls was both a political philosopher of the first rank and that much Rawlsian thought is very possibly deep down “a generalizing [of] one’s own local prejudices and [a] repackaging [of] them as demands of reason”. And I think I’m comfortable with that thought because it seems obvious to me that much top-notch political philosophy has always been that, but the good stuff has never been just that, and one of the reasons progress gets made in philosophy, if it does, is through thinking about the extent to which this might in fact be the case and what, if anything, we might do about it. What’s funny is that philosophers sometimes get quite so defensive about the idea that their work might just be a little bit more parochial and a little less universal than they like to think it is, and that historians too often use their discipline’s own distinctive and not always attractive prejudices as a way of avoiding thinking hard about the difficult, interesting stuff.

Thanks also to this thread from Harry B at Crooked Timber, who asked the important question, “are philosophers scruffy?”, thereby reminding me of one of my favourite bits of De Civitate Dei, at the start of Book XIX, in which Augustine discusses Varro’s demonstration that there are 288 logically possible sects of philosophers, 144 of which are scruffy (“following the habits and fashions of the Cynics”), which I suppose follows naturally from our discussion of bearded philosophers from a few days ago.

Right: back to work.

It’s the International Talk Like A Pirate Day today, so if you’d like to talk like a pirate, the comments box is open. The British section is here, and I had fun last night examining the German phrasebook with a German friend, who is flying to the States today, and therefore gets an extra five hours in which to Talk Like A Pirate. Arrrrr!

Not bad, really. [From over here, via]

Here‘s a handy chart from The Times showing how tall Hazel Blears is, as compared to (i) hitherto well-documented and in some cases actually-existing varieties of penguin and (ii) the Extinct Giant Tropical Penguin discussed below. [Thanks, David E.]