Virginia is losing two good people in the blogsphere. The Jaded JD is signing off today, supposedly at midnight but I am unable to access his blog as I write this. His final post as it appeared in the aggregator:
If he comes up for anything, it will be to get rid of me. After that, my guess is you’ll never hear from him again.
Despite the timely decision in the open primary case and all the speculation that involved, there has been no stay of execution. This site will die at midnight.
I have never publicly disclosed my true identity, and have no intention of doing so now. I regret that my zealous pursuit of pseudonymity has prevented me from making the acquaintance of many bloggers whom I believe I would have enjoyed meeting, including Messrs. Dotson, Jaquith, Leahy, Vehrs, Bacon, Haskins, and Minor, and NoVA Scout, to name a handful. There may be an opportunity in another life.
Blogging has changed since I began in April 2004 here on TypePad, before switching to Blogger, before coming back to TypePad. I’ve changed with it to some extent, but I’m not willing to change anymore. I fear that the battle between blog qua journal and blog qua medium has been lost. The irony of course is that “journalist” comes from journal, but neither those media referred to as mainstream norblogs really seem to capture the spirit of “journal”ism anymore.
Oh well, that’s the best valediction I can muster. Thanks to the people who are still nice to one another, thanks to those who still allow unfettered academic and theoretical exploration of all sorts of questions regardless of political tribalism, and thanks to those who have respected the writing here and found some value in it.
In addition, Virginia Centrist has decided to sign off as well – at least for a while. His post announcing this:
Goodbye – UPDATE
This will be the second to last update of this blog. Other things, much more important (and family related), are captivating my attention right now. My last post will be in a couple of few weeks on Allen-Webb, and I think you’ll enjoy it…
It’s been fun!
Update: Thanks for all of the kind words, it means a lot. Perhaps I’ll be back in a few months…in the meantime, promise you won’t all tear each other apart during this campaign. We had some great bipartisan bonding at the Martinsville Conference, and I think you folks can build on that.
posted by Virginia Centrist @ 12:42 PM
I’m still relatively new to the blogsphere but both of these guys added more to the discussion than they took away from it. They will certainly be missed.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
I find it really odd that it’s the good blogs that are dropping out (not to implicate you, Vivian!!) or slowing down production considerably, while the not so super fantastic blogs churn out multiple posts per day. While I suppose it makes sense in terms of markets (if people love what you write, they’ll mind less if you write maybe only 3 posts a week because they’re so awesome, meaning less work for the aforementioned blogger, meaning a rational choice not to blog as often whereas if your blog sucks, you just keep churning the posts out…), but goodness, it’s frustrating!
I agree with you.
I really regret that I took interest in political blogs so late in the game (and that it took something like the Marshall-Newman amendment to provoke it). I just started reading Jaded JD and really enjoyed his writing.
One of the things that turn me off to politics is the game team mentality. Talkshow radio has pushed this a lot. The sides seem to often cloud the issues. Nobody wants to listen to people rant at each other… or at least I don’t. I like arguments where people debate intelligently and with some aspirations towards dignity. I only read about five or so posts from JD, but all of them seemed to express those same desires. We are affiliated with different political parties, but I could respect him. That’s the thing I like about blogging, it’s a place where smart democrats and smart republicans can converse about issues without having to use herding rhetoric. There are a lot of political rant blogs out there, but you don’t have to read them. You can skim through and find intelligent commentary from both parties. I hope these folks comeback someday, or have at least left enough of an impression on the new batch of bloggers to aspire to their level quality.
I think there are some bloggers who try to raise the level of discourse beyond the yelling. Alas, they are overshadowed by those who simply want to add to the noise.