Satire · first published 2023-05-26
Pride and the Coalition, moving defamation to the civil courts, and the arithmetic of coalition talks | Weekly Wiseguys, 26 May 2023
Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 26 May 2023 — recorded in the middle of Petteri Orpo's coalition negotiations, on the day the Finns Party had set a deadline on immigration policy. Three items: Helsinki Pride's decision to end its partnership with the National Coalition Party, Sammallahti's own deliberation about filing a criminal complaint over being called a Nazi online and the proposal that follows from it — move defamation out of criminal law and into the civil courts — and Miettinen's reasoning for why he does not expect the talks to collapse. Two places where the panel openly disagrees with itself are left in.
Pride and the Coalition, moving defamation to the civil courts, and the arithmetic of coalition talks | Weekly Wiseguys, 26 May 2023
Summary: Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo’s Weekly Wiseguys, 26 May 2023 — recorded in the middle of Petteri Orpo’s coalition negotiations, on the day the Finns Party had set a deadline on immigration policy. Three items: Helsinki Pride’s decision to end its partnership with the National Coalition Party, Sammallahti’s own deliberation about filing a criminal complaint over being called a Nazi online and the proposal that follows from it — move defamation out of criminal law and into the civil courts — and Miettinen’s reasoning for why he does not expect the talks to collapse. Two places where the panel openly disagrees with itself are left in.
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 Tere Sammallahti, Sami Miettinen and Onni Rostila, a Finns Party MP. It was recorded on 26 May 2023, in the middle of Petteri Orpo’s coalition negotiations, on the day the Finns Party had attached a clock deadline to the immigration items. The outcome is not known at the time of recording, and the panel says so.
Three subjects: Helsinki Pride’s decision to end its partnership with the National Coalition Party, one guest’s own case on the boundary between free speech and criminal defamation, and a negotiation-theory reading of the coalition talks.
1. Helsinki Pride and the National Coalition Party
The background: the Pride organisation ended its partnership with the National Coalition Party. The stated grounds, according to the panel, were how some of the party’s MPs voted on the trans law and a claim that some had spoken in transphobic terms.
Tere Sammallahti — identifiable as the speaker because he lists the other three by name — makes an argument that has nothing to do with the trans law and everything to do with the purity requirement:
“If a person isn’t a hundred per cent [in agreement], it gets turned into a collective problem. Sami and Onni and Ivan and I don’t agree about everything either. It would be impossible to make a programme like this if every small disagreement meant…”
The same guest makes a point about the law itself that usually goes unsaid in public debate: the bill was a package of a dozen or so separate provisions, and many of the Coalition MPs who voted against the whole had supported most of them. The panel treats this as checkable in the voting record, and nobody disputes it.
The structural argument: a rule that was never published
The most durable claim in the episode is not about Pride at all. It is an argument about predictability:
“Nobody said in advance what counts as transphobic. Even if you wanted to avoid it, you have no way to, because there is no rule.”
The argument is formal: a norm that is not published before it is breached, and whose content is fixed afterwards by whoever took offence, does not guide behaviour — it produces fear. It holds regardless of what one thinks of the substance, and the same argument can be made against any vague rulebook, including one the panel’s own side would favour. The panel does not make that generalisation, but it is where the argument naturally goes.
Partnership, brand, and who needs whom
The most practical stretch is commercial. The panel’s observation is that partnership fees are paid by listed companies, political parties and cities — Helsinki, Espoo and a Finnish listed company are named — and that the relationship is upside down: the payer is the one with the audience, the voters and the customers, yet behaves as if it owed something for the use of the brand. Their recommendation to the Coalition and to other partners is simple: do the things that improve equality on your own arguments and under your own name.
Attached to it is one clearly honest concession: the previous version of the trans law required proof of infertility, and removing that was, in the panel’s view, a real and significant reform. They are not claiming there was nothing to fix — they are claiming the essential fix has now been made.
Rhetoric best read as rhetoric
The episode compares partnership fees to protection money and the organisation’s conduct to a personality-disordered or abusive partner who writes the rules after the fact. The comparison is forceful and is meant to be, but it is not analysis: it replaces a claim with an image. The panel partly dismantles it themselves — a mafia has a means of coercion and this does not, so the premise of the whole analogy fails. Read it as what it is: a sharp figure of speech, not an observation about how the organisation operates.
Predictions about intent
Three claims in the episode are about what somebody intends to do. They are not verifiable and should be kept separate from the above:
- That the decision was a message to the Coalition on the eve of the coalition talks.
- That the next demand will concern hormone and surgical treatment for minors. The panel says it has found hints in the organisations’ own writing; no source is named, so the claim stands unchecked. The same speaker explicitly distinguishes this from the straw men of earlier years (“marrying dogs”), which he calls idiotic.
- Douglas Murray’s prediction of a backlash. The panel refers to The Madness of Crowds and puts it at “maybe ten years ago”; the book is from 2019, four years before the episode. The prediction itself — that the movement must keep going one step further until the general public turns — is offered as a prediction, not as an observation.
2. Being called a Nazi — and what the law should do about it
The most personal stretch of the episode is also its most constructive. Tere Sammallahti gives a first-hand account: he had repeatedly been called a Nazi on Twitter, had considered filing a criminal complaint for defamation, and had talked it over with the host.
He describes the harm concretely and without inflating it: the people doing it have never met him and have not watched his videos, and when challenged by his friends some of them backed down — but the claim keeps circulating, and people close to him take it hard.
Two political risks he marks himself
This is the methodologically cleanest passage in the episode, because the speaker lists the risks in his own course of action before giving his conclusion:
- “The free-speech defender runs to the police the moment it lands on his own side.” A complaint would sit badly with his own stated position on speech.
- If the complaint goes nowhere — the police conclude there is no reason to suspect an offence — that reads as evidence the claim was permissible and therefore somehow founded.
His conclusion: there is nothing politically to be won.
The proposal that stays with you
What he offers instead is a legislative proposal, and it is the most concrete thing in the episode:
Move defamation out of the criminal code and into the civil courts, as in the United States. The aggravated offence would stay in criminal law.
The reasoning is about resources rather than values: defamation complaints consume police investigative capacity, and those that go further consume prosecutors’ and courts’ capacity. Moving it would take pre-trial investigation and the prosecutor out of this category altogether; anyone who felt their reputation injured would sue and seek damages themselves.
The panel raises the counter-argument and answers it: what about those who cannot afford litigation? The answer has two parts — a market in legal-expenses insurance and a contingency model where a lawyer takes the case for a share. Both are empirical claims about what a market would do, and neither is demonstrated here. The expected side effect is stated plainly, and honestly: the threshold would rise, and fewer things would be legally offensive. That is the point of the proposal, not a by-product of it.
Reading hidden motives
A broader observation follows, and it cuts both ways: a claim about somebody’s concealed motive is structurally irrefutable. The panel compares it to being asked to prove there is no invisible pink elephant behind the moon. The examples run from dog-whistle readings to the suggestion that one of the guests has spent ten years building an ideological position purely as a mask. The panel also notes that this kind of reading tends to be done in one direction only in the press — their observation, not a measured result.
The practical conclusion here is apolitical and would serve anyone: an insult wildly out of proportion says more about the person making it than about its target, and the most effective answer is not to react.
3. Public money: adult education, free services, and the queue
The middle stretch starts from a television interview in which a representative of the adult education centres defended their funding by pointing to the number of courses on offer. The panel turns the argument round: if the service is that valuable, why does the taxpayer have to pay for it?
The figures are from memory — funding for adult and folk high schools is put at something like €180 million, with the public broadcaster’s funding and legal aid offered as comparisons. Nothing is sourced; read them as orders of magnitude.
The substantive argument has three parts and is clearly put:
- There is no measurable benefit. Asked what the benefit was, defenders answered with enjoyment and relief from loneliness — not a measured outcome.
- Alternative provision exists. Finding a hobby group has never been easier, and the private sector produces comparable services.
- Targeting would be cheaper. If the aim is to support hobbies for people on low incomes, a voucher does that directly.
Sami Miettinen makes the general mechanism claim, and is interrupted mid-way through it — the best single moment in the episode:
“If a private provider runs a yoga course for a hundred euros and you can get the same for nothing, no alternative market even forms.”
“Let me correct you there, Sami — these do cost something.”
“It makes no difference. Whether the price is zero or heavily subsidised, the same mechanism operates.”
The correction is fair, it is accepted, and the argument is restated more precisely. The subsidy claim is standard economics and it also runs the other way — a subsidy can be justified precisely because a market price would exclude part of the population. The panel does not take up that side.
The same speaker makes the observation that is easiest to carry away from the episode: anything free attracts a queue, and the length of the queue tells you nothing about the size of the need. The illustration is a thought experiment about free grocery bags, and the more empirical case is the old health-centre fee, whose abolition doctors had resisted because even a small charge filtered out visits with nothing to treat. The latter is a recollected anecdote from student days, not a source.
A disagreement left open
Onni Rostila argues that growing the public sector is partly a conscious strategy: new posts and new commissioners create a constituency dependent on public money. Another speaker says outright that he disagrees:
“Onni and I have argued about this before, but I’m not at all sure it’s that conscious — I think it’s what their heart tells them.”
The disagreement is left unresolved, and that is the right outcome: one claims strategy, the other sincerity, and the episode settles neither.
One number in the same stretch is unchecked: the claim that a particular organisation receives some €600,000–800,000 a year in state grants. It is given live without a source, and it is marked here as unverified.
4. The coalition talks as negotiation theory
The last stretch is the only part of the episode that makes a prediction that can later be scored right or wrong. It is given by name.
The host hands over explicitly — “Sami, give us the analysis” — and Sami Miettinen, who says he has also been interviewed on the subject by Helsingin Sanomat, reasons as follows:
- The Coalition will concede, because it has no credible plan B. The alternative would be a deal with the Social Democrats, whose fiscal programme, he argues, would rest on tax rises.
- The Swedish People’s Party is the actual kingmaker. It has to weigh two things it considers good against each other: market-friendly economic policy and its own immigration line.
- The Finns Party’s position is stronger than in 2015, because there are now two large parties at the table instead of three.
- A public ultimatum is a sign of weakness. If a negotiator has to seek leverage from the press, it says the others have the upper hand at the table. The opposite reading is offered immediately afterwards: the timing may be deliberate, because dealing with the hard item early removes pressure from the final hours.
The panel does not agree. One guest says plainly: “I can’t categorically sign up to all the premises of that analysis.” The disagreement is marked here because it is the most honest moment in the episode — three like-minded people who do not agree about the outcome.
The general negotiation observation travels further than the case does: the naive way to negotiate is to settle items one at a time; the workable way is to keep everything open and trade in packages. A minimum-wage figure against a change to unemployment benefit is an example, not a position. And the hardest situation is the one where the dispute stops being about the substance and becomes about prestige — the panel compares it to a domestic row in which neither side will give ground.
The panel also marks what it does not know: the talks are not leaking, the political correspondents’ reporting shows they have nothing, and the panel says it is guessing too.
Claims presented as claims
The parts of the episode that are unverified and should be read as the speakers’ positions:
- That the Pride decision was a deliberate message into the coalition talks.
- That the next demand concerns treatment for minors.
- That growing the public sector is a conscious exercise in constituency-building (the panel disagrees with itself about this).
- The size of one organisation’s annual state grant.
- That a legal-expenses insurance market would emerge if defamation moved to the civil courts.
- The date of Finland’s marriage equality law is given in passing and gets partly muddled: parliament approved the citizens’-initiative bill in 2014, and it took effect in 2017, during Juha Sipilä’s government.
What survives the episode
Three things that hold up even for a reader who disagrees with the panel:
- A norm that has not been published does not guide behaviour. If the breach is defined afterwards by who took offence, the rule is an instrument rather than a rule.
- Moving defamation to the civil courts is a concrete, argued proposal whose costs can be estimated — and it is put forward by the one person present who would have benefited from the criminal route, who explains why he is not taking it.
- Negotiations settle in packages, not item by item — and a public ultimatum is usually a sign that there is no leverage at the table.
How the episode runs
- 00:00 — The line-up: “the fourth estate” group chat
- 01:45 — Ice hockey and a loss in Tampere
- 02:38 — The items on today’s agenda
- 03:24 — Set theory, and two sets that cannot overlap
- 04:10 — Identity politics and the demand to pick a side
- 05:03 — Why the partnership ended: how MPs voted, and “transphobic speech”
- 05:51 — The trans law as a package — what was actually voted on
- 06:37 — Sammallahti: collective purity is a strange way to treat the world
- 07:25 — A message to the Coalition ahead of the coalition talks
- 08:32 — Exclusion, and the way back into the fold
- 09:23 — Partnership fees as protection money — the analogy and its limits
- 10:09 — The political grid, and where the Coalition gets pushed
- 11:02 — The alternative: do the same things without the flag
- 11:47 — Equality on its own arguments
- 12:33 — TERF, orthodoxy, and the market for sin
- 13:21 — Why defining sin is power
- 14:11 — Anti-racism as the original sin of the age
- 15:01 — Drawing the moral line as a strength of the left
- 15:46 — Collectivism, and why it feels alienating
- 16:34 — The rule that was never published
- 17:25 — Rostila: a growing public sector grows its own constituency
- 18:16 — The disagreement: conscious strategy, or sincere belief?
- 19:09 — The modern sale of indulgences
- 19:56 — Who needs whom: the brand or the partner
- 20:42 — An analogy best read as rhetoric
- 22:21 — What the trans law already achieved — and what is left
- 23:16 — The logic of power: the demands have to keep coming
- 24:09 — Consumer boycotts and the corporate calculation
- 24:57 — Douglas Murray’s prediction of a backlash
- 25:48 — What comes next — and what is a straw man
- 26:35 — The ask: it has to be possible to discuss this sensibly
- 27:22 — Sammallahti on his own case
- 28:07 — Why it is not just words
- 28:54 — Two political risks in filing a complaint
- 29:40 — The proposal: move defamation to the civil courts
- 30:28 — What about those who cannot afford to litigate?
- 31:15 — The aggravated offence would stay in criminal law
- 32:04 — Where the Nazi accusation comes from
- 32:54 — What an over-the-top insult says about the person making it
- 33:41 — Dog whistles, and reading hidden motives
- 34:30 — Why the claim cannot be disproved
- 35:19 — Guessing at hidden motives in one direction only
- 36:06 — Labelling as a pre-emptive move
- 36:53 — Adult education centres: an interview that turned on its own argument
- 37:43 — €180 million, and the question of measurable benefit
- 38:30 — The counter: private provision and a voucher
- 40:07 — Who actually uses the service
- 40:56 — Free of charge is not free
- 41:44 — Why no spending ceiling ever gets set
- 42:31 — Miettinen: a subsidy destroys the market
- 43:17 — A correction mid-argument
- 44:11 — Anything free attracts a queue
- 45:03 — Health centre fees and co-payments
- 45:56 — Public funding as a gift, not an entitlement
- 47:36 — Coalition talks: the Swedish People’s Party as kingmaker
- 48:24 — The blue-red alternative and its economic policy
- 49:10 — Miettinen’s analysis: the Coalition will concede
- 49:58 — Humanitarian and work-based immigration as separate questions
- 50:44 — Why Purra raised it now
- 51:32 — Disagreement about the premises
- 52:22 — A public ultimatum as negotiating strategy
- 53:12 — Talks that do not leak, and reporters guessing
- 54:04 — A comparison with the 2015 negotiations
- 55:58 — Two large parties instead of three
- 56:50 — When a negotiation turns into a contest of prestige
- 57:41 — The naive way and the smart way to negotiate
- 59:21 — Sign-off: the answer comes at six