Trym Nohr Fjørtoft

One thing that fascinates me is this: Has “the thesis of Rachel Carson” been defined with precision as a preliminary to the debate? If it has not, you will probably find that you and your opponent are talking about entirely different things. I say this because a great many people who are talking about the book have not read it; they are arguing, not about what I have said, but about what the pesticide industry wants people to believe I said. Therefore, if you find your opponent saying my “thesis” is to abandon controls and “let nature take over,” I hope you will bring him back to reality by quoting from my concluding chapter.

Rachel Carson, in giving advice to a high schooler who was going to debate Silent Spring, showed a better awareness than many contemporary Democrats of how an opponent will ascribe positions to you that you do not espouse in bad faith to win over a public too inattentive to check for themselves.

Ok, her har vi jo en ny KI-skandale. Og den innbefatter jo attpåtil Riksrevisjonen. De har gått helt god for et notat fra Menon (av alle steder) om at KI vil effektivisere staten med 155 000 årsverk. Hvordan Menon har kommet frem til tallet? Ved å spørre Chat GPT. www.scup.com/doi/10.18261...

I'm gonna try to articulate something I've been thinking about for a while, regarding *why* disillusionment, distrust, & dissatisfaction with democracy are rising.

Almost everything I read takes this phenomenon as an exogenous shock, assuming no one chose to make it so. I suspect that's incomplete.

Hallvard is in @ethicsjournal.bsky.social !!! Feasibility, Sandven argues, is superfluous or moralised in normative discourse 🤔🤔 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."

me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually

www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

Screenshot from New Yorker interview by Isaac Chotiner with Cass Sunstein

when the interview goes well: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Written with a great team of people: Katarzyna Andrejuk, Craig Parsons, Susanne Schmidt, Andy Smith, and Jarle Trondal – all part of the SINGLEMARKETS project at @unioslo-arena.bsky.social

We've done hundreds of interviews with small and large businesses, associations and officials. It's striking that Americans tend to see barriers to trade between US states as given and not a political problem. Europeans businesses much more likely to look to the EU for solutions.

Both are part of a special issue that compares the single markets in the EU and US. We find – surprisingly! – that the market in both construction services and spirits is more harmonised in the EU than the US. More American barriers to trade, and much less political will to harmonise.

American Services in European Perspective: Why Do Americans Not Care about Interstate Barriers in Construction? Abstract. The European Union identifies the sector of construction services as a priority for its agenda to remove barriers to cross-border activity. Takin

Two new publications today, both in Publius: The Journal of Federalism.

🏗️ Why Do Americans Not Care about Interstate Barriers in Construction? doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaf027

🍸 Federal Spirits: Single Markets and the Case of Spirits Drinks doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaf033

Still not as bad as Microsoft Teams

Serbia, Sprint Insight poll:

Scenario: joint government vs. student list

Student list-*: 55%
SNS/SPS+-EPP: 42%


Fieldwork: 23 June - 05 July 2025
Sample size: 1458

➤ europeelects.eu/serbia

Frontex unlawfully shared thousands of people's personal data with Europol Under the banner of fighting migrant smuggling, Frontex has collected, and unlawfully siphoned to Europol, personal data for years—quietly drawing thousands of migrants, as well as EU citizens aiding ...

This should be deeply embedded into everyone’s understanding: the pursuit of EU migration policy and the equivalent law-enforcement & surveillance agencies consistently violate the EU’s own laws. wearesolomon.com/mag/format/i...

Screenshot of the title page of linked article: "Noisy Politics, Quiet Technocrats: Strategic Silence by Central Banks" By Benjamin Braun and Maximilian Düsterhöft

🚨New article🚨 The consensus is that contestation pushed central banks to talk 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 about inequality & climate.

Our theory: At first, CBs seek to ward off politicization by talking 𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 about controversial topics.

We tested this 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐜 𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐡𝐲𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬.🧵
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Picture showing Vučić in front of the Kremlin

...endorsement of Putin's imperial war of conquest in Ukraine.

Vučić, the autocratic leader of an EU candidate country, is siding with the EU's geopolitical adversary. This is a pretty black and white affair: the EU has to react with meaningful measures, beyond mere statements.

Front page of the "Politika" daily showing Vučić arriving in Moscow

Aleksandar Vučić, treated by the EU as its closest ally in the Balkans, has arrived in Moscow to attend Putin's spectacle tomorrow, defying very clear warnings by EU leaders. Slovakia's Robert Fico is also expected to attend.

With their presence, these leaders signal their endorsement of...

Naturally this has implications for the way in which a political philosopher should communicate his ideas. One of the unwelcome side effects of turning political philosophy into an academic discipline has been the rise of the journal article as the preferred means of expression. Everything about it is forbidding to the lay reader. It has a formal structure that seems designed to reassure her that there will be no surprising turns of argument. It lays out in advance the conclusion to which she will be marched. It plods dutifully through the large literature on the topic, as though to confirm that no original thought is going to be expressed. It is weighed down with footnotes—in the worst case almost every sentence has a Harvard-style reference at the end. Everything about it signals that it’s intended only for the initiated— those who’ve already mastered the fifty-five other articles it cites. In all these respects it contrasts with the essay as a form of writing designed to convey ideas to the reader in an enticing and imaginative way and with little use of formal apparatus. For several centuries before this one, the essay was the primary means of conveying political-philosophical ideas to what Hume in his essay on the subject called ‘the conversible World’. ( D. Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, in D. Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by E. Miller (Liberty Press, 1985).

A footnote from David Miller, expressing highly recognisable reservations about the rise of the journal article.

Analysis | Trump is finally giving us the recession that Biden could never deliver.

Man, just LOOK at how everyone's reaction to Le Pen goes exactly in the quadrant my model says it would

Ekko - Ekko i P2 - NRK Radio Bankane: Venn eller fiende? Dei tener stort medan vi slit. Vi ser på kvifor vi treng bankar og korleis dei eigentleg fungerar. Norsk plastoptimist i India Korleis kan ein bergensk ildsjel og ein indi...

Hør meg og @mariannedahl.bsky.social i Ekko om studentdemonstrasjoner og demokrati i Europa 📻

radio.nrk.no/serie/ekko/M...

Agree, with the exception that I have found republican worries about arbitrary power very helpful lately

In virtue of romantically engaged individuals having mixed their labour with the night,

Of course it’s a coup Miss the obvious, lose your republic

Of course it’s a coup. Miss the obvious, lose your republic.
open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p...

Not an Onion headline

Excellent piece. Totally bankrupt EU response. And I don’t really see it changing either, unfortunately

New paper💡! My work on online dating, power and social institutions is now published in @apsrjournal.bsky.social! I provide a normative framework for what goes on in this part of the ‘digital sexual sphere’ and explore the role dating apps play in our societies.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This is #Belgrade right now. Citizens have responded to the students’ call for a 24-hour blockade and protest, shutting down one of the main highways in the city. Could this be the end of #AleksandarVučić? I hope so. I stand in solidarity with Serbian students and citizens fighting for democracy!

Big news! The EU Court of Justice has assigned our Hamoudi v. Frontex appeal to its Grand Chamber!

It will hold a hearing on the groundbreaking damages claim filed by Alaa Hamoudi following a 17-hour pushback operation by Frontex and the Hellenic Coast Guard on 28-29 April 2020.

The Banks of the Fjord at Christiania

The Banks of the Fjord at Christiania, 1895