Conservatism Is the New Radicalism
I have just read a bizarre article by Björn Elmbrant, who might very well be Sweden’s most nostalgic socialist journalist. In an online leader, he writes that the Swedish blogosphere must establish ethical rules about the publication of public material. Not because the blogosphere itself has violated any ethical rules or mishandled any public material, but because it defends current rules and regulations.
The background is that a district court granted an individual access to autopsy pictures of a murdered child. The pictures came from the public prosecutor’s preliminary investigation, and like most material of the sort, they are available to anyone under Sweden’s open-records policy. What made this case special was that the person who was given the pictures decided to share these with others online via the well-known file-sharing website The Pirate Bay. Perhaps an act of poor taste and questionable ethics, but not an illegal one.
As an established journalist, Mr Elmbrant knows all this. So, in the debate sparked by the mass-duplication of these gruesome pictures on the Internet, he blames bloggers for defending legal file sharing and The Pirate Bay against those who wish censorship. By this libertarian approach, bloggers are somehow collectively responsible for any future laws that might threaten the open-records policy.
It doesn’t make sense, does it? I mean, I don’t know of a single blogger who doesn’t sympathise with those who are upset over the publication in the particular case. It’s easy to get very emotional about the whole thing. No one would want pictures of their dead loved ones online. But to defend the websites that make file sharing possible has nothing to do with this. It’s not even a matter of violated copyright. Weirdly enough, Mr Elmbrant depicts the blogosphere a threat to the current legislation because it defends the law against an angry mob that demand the law to be changed. This makes me wonder if the table has turned; is being a conservative now the utmost radical position in this country?
A number of other Swedish bloggers have commented on the article. I link to a few of them: