Author

Sten Branderne

When the next buyer can no longer borrow more
If the homebuyer can pay a maximum of six million kroner (about $750,000) for a new home, it matters little that the cost of…
Gaute Skjervø’s democratic problem
The Worker’s Youth Wing (AUF) belongs to a political tradition that readily tells the story of the labour movement as the struggle against concentration…
Alternative to what? When Norway’s media authority becomes the arbiter of reality
The Norwegian Media Authority has expressed concern about people who find themselves outside a ‘common public sphere’, and links disengagement from editor-controlled media to…
The democracy that became a theatre
The people cast their votes from below, but the governing comes from above. The political theatre depends on the audience remaining seated. NRK can…
Scandinavia's Culture of Goodness
The culture of goodness judges policies by intentions rather than consequences. It rewards moral self-image while shifting costs onto others, suppressing criticism through moral…
This is how modern-day ostracism works
The moment the accused begins to argue that he does not belong to the “far right”, he has already conceded the accuser’s right to…
The ethnic transformation of European football: Comparing 1990 with 2026
Among ten teams at the 1990 World Cup—Czechoslovakia, England, Ireland, Romania, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, the USA, West Germany and Yugoslavia—at least seven of 220…
Freedom had a two-stroke engine
In the summer of 1982, a fifteen-year-old boy stood on a ladder outside his grandmother’s house. A paint tin hung beside him, a scraper…
When "far-right" becomes another word for disobedient
When legitimate concern is labelled right-wing extremism, one is not protecting democracy but the narrative of those in power. A recent example is NTB’s…
Foraging in a studio flat
The state tells us to prepare for lean years, yet it has built homes with no room for emergency preparedness; when the potato cellar…
The triumph of educated obedience
This is not merely about Document. It is not merely about Hans Rustad, the Norwegian Editors’ Association, or a letter from a communications adviser…
If the West fails to understand the religious mechanisms of dehumanisation, it will not understand what it faces
The West attempts to explain Hamas through conventional political categories. It speaks of occupation, blockade, desperation, poverty, asymmetry, and historical injustice. All of these…
«Just another brick in the wall»
When did it become progress that a child’s waking day is, in practice, spent with strangers, while time with parents is squeezed in between…
A civilisation dies when its own children no longer know why it should endure
Those who come from a society where freedom has already been lost often see more clearly than those who are born into freedom and…
Collectivism doesn’t come in boots, but in forms
What happens when those who carry society finally discover that they are no longer carrying a civilisation, but an apparatus that lives off them?…
Norway abolished the Aristocracy – and reintroduced it as housing wealth
Norway likes to see itself as an egalitarian society: a country without deep class divisions, without a hereditary aristocracy, without closed doors. Here, hard…