Posts, April 2005:

Kultur, bare en vare?: Det er en utbredt oppfatning at det å behandle kulturen som en vanlig vare er å redusere den til noe kaldt og innholdsløst. Vi ser det i motstanden mot den halvhjertige liberaliseringen av bokmarkedet, hvor bl.a. William Nygaard i Aschehoug [...]

Is culture only a product?: [Also published in Dagbladet's political blog.] There's a popular belief that to treat culture as an ordinary product is to reduce it to something cold and empty. We see this belief in resistance to the Norwegian government's half-hearted attempt to [...]

Den solidariske egoisten: Det skal ikke mye til for å bringe ut egoisten i en nordmann. Under et skall av felleskapsfølelse og sosial samvittighet ligger han og venter. Egoisten er smart, han har lært seg at man ikke lenger bare kan si "jeg [...]

Hayek: Responsibility and Freedom: [This is part of a series of posts on Friedrich A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Here's the full list.] The word responsibility is often used as a synonym for duty, something others tell you to do. In this sense [...]

The solidaric egotist: [Translated from Dagbladet's political weblog.] It doesn't take much to bring out the national egotist in a Norwegian. Beneath a layer of communitarianism and social conscience the egotist lies in hiding. The egotist is smart. He has learned that you [...]

Openness in election coverage: [Dagbladet is launching a political blog to cover the election this year, with me and a whole bunch of interesting Norwegian bloggers. Should be fun. I'll be writing shorter entries than usual, so I don't plan to halt this blog. [...]

Åpenhet i valgdekningen: La oss begynne med å være litt ærlige. En gang i blant er det noen som påpeker at det er sleipt av mediefolk som dekker politikk å late som om de er nøytrale observatører, som ikke bryr seg om ideologi, [...]

Integrity and the Progress Party: Morten Magelssen from Morbus Norvegicus asks me why I consider voting for the Progress Party when their liberalism is so inconsistent. The Progress Party combines a liberal core ideology with increasingly social democratic rhetorics, and it often seems as if [...]

Responsible piracy: Debates about music and movie piracy tend to center on whether piracy hurts CD and DVD sales. When record sales go down, some use this to show that piracy is harmful, and when they go up others argue that piracy [...]

Are left-wing journalists a problem?: Another survey has confirmed the obvious: Norwegian journalists are more left-wing than the rest of us are. 67% say they support left-of-center parties, 3% support the Progress Party. As I've written before, I don't believe left-wing dominance is the real [...]

A reactionary blogosphere?: Paul Bjerke has written about blogging in Klassekampen, a far-left newspaper. (Article not online). He questions whether bloggers can truly challenge the power of big media when so many of them are on the right. The precise term he uses [...]