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Satire · first published 2023-06-08

What is a woman, who funds Pride, and what happens when the majority goes | Weekly Wiseguys, 8 June 2023

This is a summary on Neuvottelija AI. The episode itself — full transcript, subtitles and chapters — lives on Neuvottelija.com, which is its canonical home.

Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and the writer and journalist Matti Virtanen on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 8 June 2023. The episode works through Matt Walsh's documentary What is a Woman and the definitional fight around it, the first instalment of Tucker Carlson's show after its move to Twitter — whose media criticism the panel accepts and whose author it dismisses in the same breath — and the public funding of Helsinki Pride, on which the panel genuinely disagrees with itself. It closes on its most ambitious idea: that the legitimacy of Finland's state monopolies and of universally binding collective agreements is pinned to majority support, and that the majority is going.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: Political Satire + AI and the Economy + AI and Society

What is a woman, who funds Pride, and what happens when the majority goes | Weekly Wiseguys, 8 June 2023

Summary: Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and the writer and journalist Matti Virtanen on Ivan Puopolo’s Weekly Wiseguys, 8 June 2023. The episode works through Matt Walsh’s documentary What is a Woman and the definitional fight around it, the first instalment of Tucker Carlson’s show after its move to Twitter — whose media criticism the panel accepts and whose author it dismisses in the same breath — and the public funding of Helsinki Pride, on which the panel genuinely disagrees with itself. It closes on its most ambitious idea: that the legitimacy of Finland’s state monopolies and of universally binding collective agreements is pinned to majority support, and that the majority is going.

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 hosts; the guests are Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and the writer and journalist Matti Virtanen. It was recorded on 8 June 2023, the day HBO released a documentary about the five party leaders of Sanna Marin’s government and Pekka Haavisto announced his presidential candidacy.

Three main subjects and one hypothesis — the most ambitious thing in the episode, and probably not the part the panel thought would be.

1. The definition fight: What is a Woman

The panel works through Matt Walsh’s documentary, which had just gone out on Twitter and, the panel says, passed a hundred million views. The method is simple: the same question, put over and over to experts.

The panel’s argument from philosophy of science is the cleanest thing in the episode, because it has nothing to do with gender:

In science a hypothesis is subjected to systematic attempts at refutation, and only when it survives them does it become a theory. That is why a theory can take criticism from outsiders — it has already been through worse.

From which the panel draws a general marker: if a body of doctrine rejects criticism on the grounds that the critic is an outsider, it is not science. The comparison offered is closed religious communities. The argument is formal, and it turns against the panel too where applicable — which they do not point out.

A second observation concerns the shape of the answer: “a woman is a person who identifies as a woman” is a tautology that defines nothing, because the term being defined appears in the definition. That is a linguistic observation, not a position.

The panel’s own answer

Asked directly, the panel gives a definition and then qualifies it itself:

“A woman is a human being who produces large gametes.”

And immediately afterwards a fair correction: a man is not defined by the Y chromosome, because chromosome combinations other than XX and XY exist — XXY, XYY and XXYY are named — and gamete production can be absent altogether without the person ceasing to be a man or a woman. So the definition is biological and is conceded to be incomplete in the same breath. That is a more honest presentation than the episode title would suggest.

The distinction the panel says settles the whole debate

The panel’s position is stated precisely and is worth taking as stated: the question is not about adults’ rights, it is about minors.

Two claims here need marking: the documentary’s own telephone stunt, in which a dysphoria diagnosis was allegedly obtained in a little over twenty minutes, is the documentary’s claim and is not verified here; and the claim that permanent effects remain is made without a research citation.

The early-years claim that needs checking before anyone leans on it

One panellist says he is quoting directly from the National Agency for Education’s early-childhood guidance. The quotation could not be verified here, and since the whole argument — that this is what finally produces a parental backlash — rests on it, it is marked as uncertain. The same goes for a reference to fights outside a school in the United States: it is presented as news without a source.

A prediction that did not land — and is said out loud

The funniest and most honest moment in the episode: Sami Miettinen had predicted a couple of years earlier that “peak woke” was already behind us. The panel reminds him, and compares the prediction to end-of-the-world forecasts that get postponed rather than conceded. Matti Virtanen is credited with the opposite observation. They bet on when the turn actually comes.

With hindsight it is worth marking that neither prediction has been settled; they are opinions about a cultural direction, not measurable claims.

A newer prediction is offered in the same breath and it is more precise: the movement breaks up from the inside, not from outside. The evidence given is a fault line in the organisational field — associations have been founded in several countries advocating for gay, lesbian and bisexual causes separately from the trans question. That observation is checkable; the prediction drawn from it is not.

2. Tucker Carlson, and an argument the panel accepts despite its author

Tucker Carlson’s post-Fox programme had just started on Twitter. The first instalment was a ten-minute monologue about the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.

The claim the panel accepts: the US military and political leadership said publicly that they did not know who blew the dam, while the press reported that it knew. The fair question, the panel says, is why certainty is higher in the press than among those holding the intelligence.

The counter-explanation follows immediately, and it is the panel criticising itself: intelligence would be pointless if it briefed its sources to the papers, so a public “we don’t know” is not proof of ignorance. Both readings are left open.

And then the author is dismissed. The panel’s verdict on Carlson is direct and unsoftened: he is not a news reporter but a columnist and a propagandist who presents probably untrue things persuasively. One guest sums him up as “Alex Jones with a university degree.”

That combination — accept the argument, reject the man — is the methodological lesson of the episode, and it is rarer than it should be on either side.

On reporting things one is supposedly not allowed to report

From which comes the episode’s other durable claim. The Finnish press had been criticised for reporting what the Kremlin had said about the dam. The panel’s answer:

“We all know the Kremlin’s communications lie. But we have to know what they are lying about.”

The reasoning is practical rather than principled: recognising a lie requires seeing it. The panel also notes that a story can be shared with a comment attached — sharing is not endorsement.

Alongside it comes an observation about how labelling works, offered in general terms: once enough labels are in circulation — Putinist, disinformation, tinfoil hat — any deviant remark suffices for the list. The panel admits its own version of this too: one speaker says he keeps a few people on his block list, and states plainly that the reason is not political but that arguing with them is exhausting. The episode’s own norm is clear and it applies to their own side as well: ask, argue, and if you can’t be bothered, say nothing — but don’t try to shame.

3. Funding for advocacy organisations — and a disagreement that stays open

The panel goes through a figure published in a business magazine: some €1.9 million in public money to the Helsinki Pride community over a few years, plus individual municipal grants and the size of the organisation’s balance sheet. These are a magazine’s numbers and should be read as such.

And then the panel disagrees with itself — the most valuable moment in the episode, because it is a question of principle rather than taste:

The panel offers its own test for the disagreement, and it deserves noting because it turns the question against the panel: what if the same money went to an organisation with the opposite politics? Position A does not change and Position B does not change, but the reader notices which side they are on.

The disagreement is left unresolved. That is the right outcome.

The same stretch carries an observation about the structure of Finnish fundraising: public collections require a licence, which makes private fundraising harder than in many other countries and pushes the centre of gravity towards public money. The observation is checkable; the recommendation drawn from it about the tax treatment of donations is a position.

Wordplay that is not an argument

The section offers as a “compromise” the definition that taxation is legal theft, and goes looking for more descriptive names for transfers. This is rhetoric, and the episode itself supplies the best answer to it at the end: changing the words does not change the thing. The panel makes that point about the government’s own terminology — “green transition” became “clean transition” in the programme for government — and the same observation applies to their own renamings.

The same goes for the episode’s constitutional observation. The claim that the fundamental rights provisions rule out a night-watchman state and “criminalise” the far economic right is a figure of speech, not a legal claim — nothing has been criminalised. The panel corrects itself mid-passage by recalling that property rights are in the constitution too, and the exchange is left open.

4. A hypothesis worth reading twice

Late in the episode a claim is made that generalises and can be tested:

The legitimacy of Finland’s state monopolies and of universally binding collective agreements is in practice pinned to having majority support or more than half the market. When that line breaks, the legitimacy goes — and the institution has no fallback.

The examples are the gambling monopoly, alcohol retail, and the universal applicability of collective agreements. Two observations are offered in support:

  1. Polling on political strikes. According to the panel, a majority of Finns would restrict the right to political and sympathy strikes. If so, the hypothesis says the trade union movement’s “we represent the majority” argument turns against it.
  2. The gambling monopoly’s market share is falling below half as play moves to offshore platforms.

This is the part of the episode that travels furthest, and it is made without labels. Two caveats are still needed: the poll is not named, and the claim that EU law requires a monopoly to hold more than 50 per cent of the market is stated live and is not correct in that form — the consistency requirement concerns a monopoly’s actual capacity to channel demand, not any fixed percentage.

The policy recommendation drawn from the hypothesis is the panel’s own position: dismantle all three.

5. Civil service preparation and scenarios

The last stretch is about who prepares the evidence base for a political decision. The panel’s claim is that civil service preparation can carry a politics of its own, and that it shows up in the assumptions behind scenario modelling.

The example is alcohol policy: according to the panel, an official assessment forecast that liberalisation would sharply raise consumption and harm — hundreds of additional deaths is the order of magnitude cited — whereas realised total consumption turned downwards. The direction is right: total alcohol consumption in Finland has trended down since the early 2010s. The individual figures, and exactly what was forecast in which report, are given from memory and are not verified here, so the claim about the size of the error remains open.

The structural argument holds anyway, independently of the example: if you choose the assumptions of a scenario, you choose the scenario. The panel concedes that good modelling is also done, and names the finance ministry’s impact assessments as an example of competent work. That distinction makes the argument more credible than blanket suspicion would.

The proposal — a US-style civil service that turns over with the government — is offered as the fix. Its obvious cost, the loss of administrative continuity and independence, is not addressed. That is worth marking, because it is the furthest-reaching proposal in the episode.

Claims presented as claims

What survives the episode

  1. A body of doctrine that rejects criticism on the basis of who the critic is is not science — whoever’s doctrine it happens to be.
  2. You can accept an argument and reject its author in the same sentence. The panel does exactly that with Carlson, visibly, and it is the best single thing in the episode.
  3. If an institution’s legitimacy is pinned to a majority, losing the majority is an existential question — and that is a testable claim, not an opinion.

How the episode runs

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