Satire · first published 2023-01-31
The Erdoğan cartoons, and three different positions on tax | Weekly Wiseguys, 31 January 2023
Sami Miettinen and Joakim Vigelius, chair of the Finns Party youth organisation, on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 31 January 2023. The two best passages are disagreements. The first is about a left-wing youth organisation's Erdoğan cartoon competition: two speakers treat it as a free-speech question, Miettinen treats it as a question of national interest and reaches for a wartime precedent — and neither side moves. The second is about tax, where three right-of-centre speakers arrive at three different positions, from abolishing progression to conceding that there is no public mandate for dismantling the welfare state. It opens with Vigelius's first-hand account of being removed from a university lecture.
The Erdoğan cartoons, and three different positions on tax | Weekly Wiseguys, 31 January 2023
Summary: Sami Miettinen and Joakim Vigelius, chair of the Finns Party youth organisation, on Ivan Puopolo’s Weekly Wiseguys, 31 January 2023. The two best passages are disagreements. The first is about a left-wing youth organisation’s Erdoğan cartoon competition: two speakers treat it as a free-speech question, Miettinen treats it as a question of national interest and reaches for a wartime precedent — and neither side moves. The second is about tax, where three right-of-centre speakers arrive at three different positions, from abolishing progression to conceding that there is no public mandate for dismantling the welfare state. It opens with Vigelius’s first-hand account of being removed from a university lecture.
This is a summary on Neuvottelija AI. The episode itself is on Ivan Puopolo’s channel and is his — watch the original. The appearance is catalogued at neuvottelija.com/media, which is the canonical home of this content.
A note on reading this. Weekly Wiseguys is a tongue-in-cheek political panel, not a news broadcast. The speakers are right-of-centre commentators and politicians talking in their own names, sharpening for effect and joking as they go. This article sorts their arguments and marks who said what; it takes no position on who is right, and it does not reproduce the personal jabs. Speakers are named only where the recording itself identifies who is talking: the transcript carries no speaker labels, so uncertain passages are attributed to the panel or to “one of the guests” rather than to a name. The opinions are the speakers’ own.
The panel
Ivan Puopolo hosting, with Sami Miettinen — introduced as the “classic member” — and Joakim Vigelius making his debut, chair of the Finns Party youth organisation. The episode also notes that the programme has expanded to two shows a week.
The first five minutes are paid content — an interview with the publisher about the book Omistajan tahto (“The Owner’s Will”), one of whose authors is Harri Saukkomaa. The segment is separate from the rest of the episode, and is flagged here so a reader knows it is an advertisement. The content is interesting nonetheless: the state as an owner is unclear, variable, political and “skittish”, while people are owners without knowing it through co-operatives and pension funds. The same subject is covered in Neuvottelija’s own episode 174.
Vigelius’s case, told in the first person
The most documentary passage in the episode is a detailed account of a sequence of events, and it should be read as what it is — one party’s description, whose details are in principle checkable.
Vigelius says he was on a course run under gender studies, in a remote lecture with some 200 students. The lecturer spoke of “men who have periods” — on his account not trans men but men — in the context of gender-neutral toilets. He questioned this in the lecture chat.
The consequences, as he describes them:
- He was removed from the course.
- The lecturer messaged the other students to say that confidential discussions had been leaked and that the atmosphere had been compromised.
- The student union chair described him as transphobic.
- He was removed from the organising role of an event he was putting on, on the grounds that his presence was a safety risk.
His own argument is administrative, and it is the sharpest thing in the episode: removing a student from a course is an exercise of public authority, resting on the disciplinary provision of the Universities Act. He took it forward as an administrative complaint, and the lecturer’s response revealed that she had regarded the question asked in the lecture itself as endangering equality — that is, before anything had been leaked.
A second precise point concerns confidentiality: a 200-person mass lecture is not a confidential occasion, and a university lecture is not one by default.
Word magic — and a fair account of the other side’s move
The vocabulary argument recurs here, but Vigelius adds something unusually fair: he explains why the claim can be true inside its own frame.
If man is defined so that a man is anyone who experiences himself as a man, then the sentence “men have periods” is true by definition.
He calls this word magic and does not accept it, but he states the mechanism correctly instead of treating the other side as simply irrational. Puopolo’s answer is that the Universities Act requires teaching to rest on research, and that a biological claim is therefore a different kind of thing from a definition.
Miettinen’s suggestion is pragmatic: invent a new word for biological sex and let the old word go. Puopolo rejects it: the words already exist. The disagreement stands.
The gender law: criticism and concession, back to back
Vigelius’s criticism is a ratio argument: people experiencing gender dysphoria are on the order of one per mille of the population, and yet changing the registered sex is being opened to the entire adult population by declaration, with a month’s reflection period, once a year. On his account no human-rights obligation requires that particular procedure.
And immediately afterwards he makes a concession worth noting: “it is entirely possible that this is needless hysteria around the law, and that nothing very dramatic happens when it comes into force.” His actual objection is to the culture of the debate — that problems cannot be raised without a label — rather than to the outcome.
The disagreement that does not resolve: the Erdoğan cartoons
This is the best passage in the episode, and worth reading in full, because three right-of-centre speakers arrive at two opposite positions.
The set-up. A left-wing youth organisation had announced a cartoon competition about the Turkish president while Finland’s NATO membership awaited Turkish ratification.
Position 1 — a free-speech question. Puopolo and Vigelius treat this as unambiguous. The youth organisation has exactly the same right to provoke as Quran burners and cartoonists of Muhammad. “Exactly the same right to provoke, to irritate, to behave tastelessly — and I would grant that right to everyone.” Vigelius adds that from their point of view it is not even tasteless: they oppose NATO membership, so they are acting consistently with their own objective. And: if the cartoons of a marginal youth organisation are enough to block accession, the problem is at the Turkish end, not the Finnish one.
Position 2 — a question of national interest. Miettinen separates personal principle from the state’s tactics. His analogy is historical: Risto Ryti signed an agreement personally so that parliament would not have to. He notes himself that NATO ratification is not of the same order, but regards the spirit as the same: “sometimes at a personal level you have to let go of the idealism.” He says he argued on television that Finland’s leadership could flatter Erdoğan for tactical reasons — personally distasteful, nationally justified.
Puopolo’s reductio. How far do the demands go? If the next demand is that the Turkish system may not be criticised at all, or that no other religion may be practised here? Miettinen’s answer is honest: a line has to be drawn somewhere, and he would draw it further out.
Vigelius’s refinement is the most precise thing said. An individual may be inconsistent; a state may not. If the state begins restricting speech so that a foreign power is not provoked, that is a different matter from a politician choosing his words tactically.
The game-theoretic counter. Vigelius notes that a concession buys no certainty: submit to the demands and more may follow — and in fact the organisers of the cartoon competition and Turkey may share the same strategic interest, each for their own reasons.
Nobody moves. The episode leaves the disagreement open, which is the honest resolution.
As a side thread, a concrete proposal then circulating is discussed: parliament ratifies membership but the instrument is not deposited in Washington until Sweden is ready. Arguments for and against are both given.
Finland as a negotiator
Short but sharp. The claim: Finland does not seek side deals or reciprocity but trusts that being agreeable will be rewarded later. Miettinen’s image is a poker table — the player whose jokes everyone laughs at and whom everyone wants to keep in the game. The proposal is concrete: if Finland is dragging Sweden along, that could be traded for something in the next EU package.
This is a reading of a negotiating culture, not a documented finding.
Sweden’s violence: a mechanism rather than a row
Miettinen’s argument is structural and is the most analytically interesting side road in the episode.
The purpose of a penal system is to break the cycle of revenge: when the state punishes, the victim’s circle has no need to retaliate. In Sweden this has partly failed, because the parties have no interest in entering the justice system and the police lack the capacity to bring them into it. The result is a drift toward a tribal society.
Vigelius supplies the legislative side, and this is his expertise: Denmark has defined vulnerable areas in law, where different rules apply — harsher sentencing, broader exclusion orders, and powers to change the housing structure of the area. Sweden has no comparable instruments.
On the political trend he makes a checkable observation: the Danish social democrats adopted a strict immigration line in the 2019 election, and the same shift appeared in Sweden’s next election — though the Swedish version still emphasises social policy over criminal justice.
The Swedish explosion and shooting figures are given from memory.
Tax: three right-wingers, three positions
This is the episode’s second real disagreement, and it shows that “the right” is not one position in this studio.
The starting point. A left party’s election programme contained a 0.5 per cent wealth tax on assets above a million euros, excluding the home.
Miettinen’s answer is arithmetic. On his estimate the tax would raise on the order of 200 million euros against about 140 billion of public spending. He adds a scale figure that recurs across the series: the equity wealth privately held by Finns is roughly the same size as the government term’s 40-billion deficit.
Vigelius’s answer is political-science and deflating in a good way about his own opponents: the proposal is utopian rhetoric, it will not be enacted, and its purpose is to offer a route to balancing the books without having to name any cuts. He does not regard it as a threat.
Then comes the property-rights paradox, on which Puopolo concedes he agrees with a left-leaning economist:
Property rights require a state. A state requires taxation. Taxation is an infringement of property rights. The protection must therefore be violated in order to exist at all.
As a distinction he argues that free speech carries no such necessity: a state can exist without infringing it at all.
And here the positions diverge:
- Puopolo would write the limit down: no tax rate should exceed 50 per cent — or preferably 30. He regards progression as unjust in itself.
- Miettinen is pragmatic: “I don’t believe we will get rid of progression” — but its steepness can be reduced, and a 50 per cent ceiling would be a realistic ten-year goal.
- Vigelius goes furthest in the other direction: a flat tax is not compatible with the Nordic welfare state, most Finns do not want it dismantled, and if that is the public’s will, progression stays. He says he would himself dismantle “mildly”.
That a visibly right-wing programme contains a guest appealing to the public’s will against his own preference matters more to the episode than any figure quoted in it.
Miettinen adds his own boundary condition, which is cultural rather than fiscal: the Nordic bargain is that parents are not responsible for their children and children are not responsible for their parents in the way they are elsewhere. Give that up and the cost appears somewhere else. Those are his two limits.
Scale figures from the closing section
These are given from memory and should be checked, but they frame the discussion:
- Development aid around 16 billion over 15 years, and on the order of 25 billion since 2000.
- The public broadcaster around 2.2 billion over the government term.
- The recovery package a net −4.5 billion for Finland.
- Carbon sink compensation estimated at up to about seven billion.
- Health and social spending on the order of 20 billion — the item next to which the others are small. The panel concedes this itself: “all the rest of these are small change.”
On political debate they make an observation that is fair in both directions: an opposition leader’s awkward attempt to name a cut drew criticism it deserved — but he tried, whereas the government’s roughly 300 million in final-year savings were matched by more than 300 million in new spending.
Claims presented as claims
- Vigelius’s account of the university case. One party’s description.
- All the billion-euro figures in the closing section. From memory.
- The Swedish explosion and shooting statistics. From memory.
- The estimate of what the wealth tax would raise. The speaker’s own calculation.
- Readings of the cartoon organisers’ real motive. An inference about intent, and the episode questions it too.
What survives
Two genuine disagreements. The Erdoğan question and the tax question both end with the panel not agreeing — and in both, each side states the best version of the other’s position before answering it.
One administrative observation. That removing a student from a course is an exercise of public authority rather than a lecturer’s discretion is a question independent of what anyone thinks about the underlying dispute.
One democratic concession. When a speaker says there is no public mandate for dismantling the welfare state and that progression therefore stays, he subordinates his own preference to the electorate’s. That is rare on any programme.
How the episode runs
- 00:00 — A commercial opening segment: ownership, and the state as an owner
- 05:05 — The panel, and Vigelius’s debut
- 06:21 — What happened at the Tampere lecture
- 08:15 — The consequences: removal from the course, an event cancelled
- 09:08 — The administrative complaint, and the university’s response
- 10:49 — Is the claim knowledge-based teaching
- 11:36 — The Universities Act and research-based teaching
- 12:24 — Word magic: a definition that makes the claim true
- 13:22 — Campus, faculty, and who self-selects into them
- 14:55 — How far a moral wave can go
- 15:41 — Merit and representation in sport
- 17:20 — The gender law: a minority of one per mille, and the whole adult population
- 18:08 — A concession: perhaps this is needless hysteria
- 19:34 — A youth organisation’s Erdoğan cartoon competition
- 20:40 — The free-speech view: the same right for everyone
- 22:14 — Finlandisation in reverse
- 23:01 — Miettinen’s counter: national interest, and a wartime precedent
- 23:52 — A reductio: how far do the demands go
- 26:18 — An individual may be inconsistent; a state may not
- 27:05 — Quran burning, religious peace, and the Swedish police line
- 28:41 — The game-theoretic problem: what does a concession buy
- 30:29 — Should Finland wait for Sweden
- 31:17 — A proposal: ratify but do not deposit
- 32:59 — Finland as an international negotiator
- 33:46 — Sweden’s violence, and the cycle of revenge
- 35:39 — Denmark’s legislation on vulnerable areas
- 37:18 — Denmark first, Sweden after — and Finland
- 39:06 — A party’s election programme, and a millionaire tax
- 39:55 — What the tax would raise, to scale
- 40:46 — The paradox of property rights
- 43:19 — Why the proposal is made even though it will not happen
- 46:37 — Where the line runs on tax — three different positions
- 48:27 — GDP as a wealth signal, and wealth at the individual level
- 51:48 — On whose mandate the welfare state would be dismantled
- 52:39 — The Nordic bargain between generations
- 53:28 — Development aid and other items, to scale
- 55:03 — A politician’s awkward answer, and who at least tried
- 57:22 — Mindset: whose money are you spending