Satire · first published 2022-10-22
The woke test, one sentence in English, and the price of energy | Weekly Wiseguys, 22 October 2022
Sami Miettinen and Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 22 October 2022. The episode opens with the panel taking a newspaper's "woke test" live on air and conceding two things to the other side while doing it — that the experience of being a visible minority is real, and that labour markets are not perfect. The middle section takes apart a single English sentence and how it became a headline. The last third is the strongest: the panel argues against compensating households for electricity prices, a policy that would be easy to support, and grounds the argument in the energy balance.
The woke test, one sentence in English, and the price of energy | Weekly Wiseguys, 22 October 2022
Summary: Sami Miettinen and Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo’s Weekly Wiseguys, 22 October 2022. The episode opens with the panel taking a newspaper’s “woke test” live on air and conceding two things to the other side while doing it — that the experience of being a visible minority is real, and that labour markets are not perfect. The middle section takes apart a single English sentence and how it became a headline. The last third is the strongest: the panel argues against compensating households for electricity prices, a policy that would be easy to support, and grounds the argument in the energy balance.
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 and Tere Sammallahti.
A woke test taken live on air
Helsingin Sanomat had published a test based on a psychology researcher’s questionnaire, scoring respondents in “woke points”. The panel works through it out loud, claim by claim.
What is interesting is not their answers but the observation about the instrument, which arrives with the first item. The test defines wokeness as social justice, and points accrue the more one agrees with the statements. The first statement is “humans have two biological sexes.” From which the panel’s observation follows: a maximum score requires the respondent to deny a claim everyone on the panel regards as a fact.
This is criticism of an instrument rather than of a politics, and it is precisely put: if a measure is built so that virtue correlates with denying a fact, the measure is measuring something other than what it promises to measure.
The second problem they raise is question chaining: if you answer the first item “strongly agree”, the next statement — “trans women are women” — has already been settled by the previous answer. Election compasses are cited as a comparison, where the same structure recurs.
The panel also disagrees with itself here. One answers the first item “somewhat agree” and grounds it in chromosomal variation; the other rejects this and says the determining factor is the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, so the binary holds. Neither disputes that variation exists nor treats it as a defect — “it obviously doesn’t mean you are defective or should be pushed aside.”
Two concessions
The test produces the episode’s two moments of conceding ground. They matter more to this write-up than the places where the panel holds firm.
First: the limits of the market argument. To the claim that income differences are caused by oppression, the panel gives the classic answer: in a free market a prejudiced employer becomes an expensive employer, because he passes over competent workers whom a competitor then hires more cheaply — and loses to that competitor.
Then an objection arrives from inside the group, and it is accepted: labour markets are not perfect. Tax and benefit traps, support structures and cognitive biases are real, and if biases are called “structures”, the claim is at least partly true. The criticism that remains is narrower and more precise: the problem is not that an explanation exists but that only one explanation is permitted.
One of the guests offers a concrete example from his own recruiting: applicants with Russian backgrounds go unhired for lack of Finnish, because there are not enough English-language projects. It is an explanation that is not discrimination — and he offers it as an explanation, not as a denial that discrimination exists.
Second concession: the experience of visible minority status is real. To the statement “a white person cannot know how a black person feels”, the panel first answers at the general level — nobody can know how anyone else feels — but then one speaker describes living in a part of London as a young man where he was the only white person, and says plainly: “that was the first time in my life I experienced being a completely different colour from everyone around me. And there is something to that.”
Another sharpens where the concession ends: the difference comes from how others behave. When people are minding their own business, being different registers as nothing; when there is staring or shouting, it registers. That is a more precise formulation than the original statement, and it is built on top of the concession rather than in place of it.
One sentence in English, and the headline made from it
The best-documented piece of media analysis in the episode concerns a single sentence.
An economist had given a talk in English and said, after referring to the prime minister’s tweet about monetary policy: “even politicians have gone crazy, but the economy hasn’t.” This became a news headline reporting that he had hinted the prime minister had gone mad.
The panel’s argument is linguistic and checkable: gone crazy is an everyday English expression about the unreasonableness of conduct, not a medical claim. The headline moved it into the territory of diagnosis.
The more general observation is methodological and the sharpest in the episode: the coverage did not read the sentence, it hunted for the intent. Once interpretation targets what a speaker presumably meant, the desired result is always findable.
The same mechanism is recognised in an earlier row in which an opposition leader described a television debate using the word shrieking. The panel’s point is that the debate moved entirely away from what was being argued — 80 billion in spending and a deficit of around 10 billion — to who was offended by which word. They also note the word choice was “a free pass straight into the hands of the other side”: the criticism was foreseeable.
Monetary policy: where the panel splits and where it agrees
The prime minister’s tweet questioning rate rises as an inflation tool gets two different treatments in the episode, and the difference between them is its most valuable passage.
The criticism: a politician is trying to steer the central bank, and the underlying framework (MMT) is in the panel’s view wrong. Turkish rate policy is used as the comparison — which is a sharpening, and marked as one.
The concession comes immediately after, from Miettinen, who mentions that Antti Ronkainen had also been a guest on his own channel: “of course one has to be able to discuss this kind of scenario — which is the better option, plague or cholera.” His distinction is procedural rather than substantive: a researcher speculating and a prime minister tweeting are not the same act, because the second has consequences for the economic policy a country actually runs.
On the structure of the euro area the panel puts an argument and its objection back to back:
- Argument. The root of the problem is the absence in practice of a no-bailout rule: if the central bank ultimately rescues member states, an individual state’s incentive to hold the line weakens, and it is enough that some are reckless.
- Objection. Being lender of last resort is part of a central bank’s job. Remove it and the state’s borrowing costs rise — so a rule abolishing rescue would be partly self-harming.
Neither is declared the winner. The conclusion is put honestly: the options are “more painful and less painful”, and a currency of one’s own is no protection against bad policy.
Energy: an argument against their own interest
The strongest passage is the one in which the panel opposes a measure that would be politically easy to support.
The starting figure is attributed to an industry representative: energy imported from Russia had accounted for around 40 per cent of EU supply and had fallen to about nine — some 31 percentage points of cheap energy removed from the market.
From this follows the panel’s claim: compensating households for the price of electricity does not solve the shortage but deepens it. Subsidise demand and consumption does not fall, so the price stays high or outages follow. They say out loud that this is unfair on people with electric heating and long distances — and hold to the conclusion anyway.
Set alongside it is an observation about adaptation, and it is checkable: within six months firms had replaced about half the gas they used with propane and efficiency, and households had cut their electricity use. State spending, by contrast, had grown. The panel’s conclusion is that private actors adapt faster in a crisis than public ones.
The technical section is unusually concrete: if gas supply to central Europe is cut in a cold snap, power generation suffers; under EU emergency arrangements member states are prioritised, and Finland is not near the front; and because grid frequency must be held constant, the only lever once generation runs out is to cut demand, meaning rolling outages. From this the panel draws a prediction worth reading as a prediction: European energy solidarity will hold up badly against people freezing because of another country’s decisions.
The practical conclusion is undramatic: the fastest available lever is reducing peak demand, and small measures aggregate at national scale.
A housing company’s equality clause
A small but good example that crystallises the same idea at domestic scale.
Puopolo describes trying to install a heat pump in his flat and running into a clause found in many housing companies’ rules, whose logic runs: because not every shareholder has a balcony, permitting the pump would place shareholders in unequal positions — so it is permitted to nobody.
The panel’s conclusion generalises: the question is whether the right answer is shared misery or private initiative, and they apply it to a housing company and a government alike. Another speaker notes that in some collective decisions — shared facility hours, say — the collective is right. So the distinction is drawn rather than skipped.
A presidential question the panel disagrees about
The closing section deals with a poll in which the director of a foreign-policy institute had come out on top. The figures quoted are Aaltola 44, Rehn 43, Haavisto 42, with Korkman at 16 and Ollila at 7 further back. They are recalled from a newspaper poll from memory.
Against. Visibility is not competence. A president is briefed into the office, but foreign contacts, diplomatic experience and negotiating skill cannot be briefed in — they come from years of work. Two candidates with long foreign-policy careers are offered as the comparison.
For. Miettinen says he attended the book launch and rates the analysis in it. His example is concrete: when the prime minister told an international news agency that NATO membership was unlikely during her term, the author had worked through in real time whether she had exceeded her authority by committing, on a timeline, a matter belonging to the president. Miettinen treats that as a demonstration of exactly the competence the office requires.
Neither moves to the other’s position. The one arguing against concedes that he does not know what negotiating capability the candidate has — which is an honest way to end a disagreement.
As an aside the panel criticises parties for recruiting celebrities at the expense of party activists. One speaker immediately notes that the person saying this is himself a party activist seeking a seat — so the criticism runs in his own favour.
Claims presented as claims
- The polling figures. Quoted from a newspaper from memory.
- Russian energy at 40 → 9 per cent. Quoted from an industry representative’s remarks.
- The claim that firms halved their gas use within six months. No source.
- The gap between British and Finnish tax levels and the 27-billion figure derived from it. The speaker’s own calculation.
- Interpretations of what the prime minister does or does not understand about market economics. An inference about another person’s thinking, and jokingly marked as one in the episode.
What survives
The instrument critique. The observation that a test can be built so that the highest score requires denying a fact generalises, and is independent of the subject matter.
Two concessions. That the programme concedes the imperfection of labour markets and the reality of minority experience in the middle of taking its own test makes the rest more readable.
The energy argument. Opposing compensation is a position that costs politically and is grounded in a balance sheet rather than in ideology. It is the most serious passage in the episode.
How the episode runs
- 00:00 — The woke test: what the instrument actually measures
- 01:46 — Claim 1: humans have two biological sexes
- 03:20 — Mutations, variation, and what follows from them
- 04:07 — Claim 2: trans women are women
- 05:43 — Safe spaces, and two recollections from events
- 07:16 — Reading lists, and the police as an institution
- 08:03 — Income gaps: the market argument against discrimination
- 09:50 — The limits of that argument: language, incentives, imperfect markets
- 11:29 — Claim: a white person cannot know how it feels
- 12:45 — A concession: the experience of visible minority status is real
- 15:33 — Orpo, “shrieking”, and what the debate was turned away from
- 17:53 — One English sentence, and the headline made from it
- 20:19 — Hunting for intent instead of reading the words
- 21:14 — A prime minister’s tweet, the ECB and MMT
- 21:59 — The missing no-bailout rule — and the objection to it
- 22:56 — A concession: the question is real, but a tweet is not research
- 23:49 — Stimulus in every phase of the cycle
- 24:36 — Why only one side is asked for a list of cuts
- 25:24 — Prime Minister’s Questions, and what Finland lacks
- 26:55 — Is the press allowed to polarise
- 29:35 — Britain’s tax level, and what the mini-budget actually failed on
- 30:26 — The private sector adapts, the state does not
- 31:12 — Russian energy from 40 per cent to nine
- 32:47 — A housing company’s equality clause, and shared misery
- 34:21 — Why compensating electricity prices makes the problem worse
- 36:43 — Emergency priorities, the Baltic Connector, and hertz
- 39:18 — Cutting consumption as the only fast lever
- 41:05 — Mika Aaltola for president — the polling
- 43:25 — What a president should be required to have
- 46:31 — Parties and celebrity candidates
- 49:49 — Closing