Podcast · Viikon viisasteluklubi Viisastelu 20.11.2023 · 2023-11-20 · 49:06 · In Finnish

The eastern border, treaties that no longer fit, and a chainsaw in Buenos Aires — Sami Miettinen on Weekly Wiseguys

Name: Viisastelu: Rajat kiinni | Kv-sopimukset turvallisuusuhka | Argentiinan anarkokapitalisti pressa
Uploaded: 2023-11-20T00:00:00+02:00
Channel: Viikon viisasteluklubi
Description: Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 20 November 2023, as Finland closed crossing points on its eastern border: the mechanics of a hybrid operation at the level of a single asylum claim, an argument about treaties written for a world that no longer exists, and Javier Milei's election in Argentina.

Published as “Viisastelu: Rajat kiinni | Kv-sopimukset turvallisuusuhka | Argentiinan anarkokapitalisti pressa”

Hosted by: Ivan Puopolo

▶ Watch on Viikon viisasteluklubi

Sami Miettinen joined Viikon viisastelu — Ivan Puopolo’s weekly political panel, known in English here as Weekly Wiseguys — on 20 November 2023, alongside Tere Sammallahti and Finns Party MP Onni Rostila. It was recorded on the Monday that crossing points on Finland’s south-eastern border were being closed and razor wire was going up, with nobody yet knowing how far the week would go.

The strongest stretch is the one where the panel works through the mechanics before taking a position: a person without documents is waved through the Russian checkpoint, states a need for protection at the Finnish one, and that alone starts a process the Finnish authority is obliged to run. Close the crossing and the person is stuck between two borders, because the exit stamp has already been given. Two observations follow that do not depend on anyone’s politics — a barrier you can walk around in the forest is not a barrier, and the law now being used for the first time to close the border was passed in the previous parliamentary term, by the politically opposite government. The panel also criticises the current government for being too slow, and credits the opposition for speaking with one voice.

The episode’s most durable argument is about treaties: a treaty nobody observes protects nobody, but it still binds whoever observes it alone. The reasoning is not that treaties are bad but that circumstances changed in three specific ways — the original purpose, the arrival of large statutory welfare entitlements, and the modern capacity to organise and move a large group. What they propose instead, assessing protection claims away from the border, is left without its hardest detail.

It closes in Argentina, where Javier Milei had been elected the day before. The panel likes the direction and openly dislikes the performance, and offers an explanation that travels: results like this are reactions, and their force measures how far policy has drifted from what voters actually experience. A prediction made in passing — that Geert Wilders’s party would do well in the Dutch election two days later — turned out right.

Chapters

00:00 — Today’s agenda
03:21 — A new segment and viewer suggestions
04:54 — A previous interview, and its musical footnote
05:42 — The border situation at the time of recording
06:35 — What happens if every crossing point closes
07:21 — The mechanics at the level of one person
08:10 — Whose responsibility the people at the border are
08:57 — A prediction about when opinion turns
09:47 — Where an asylum process begins
10:46 — The weakest-link argument
11:33 — The Polish precedent from 2021
12:26 — Mearsheimer and the realist school
13:14 — International law, or international aspiration?
14:06 — Treaties made in peacetime, applied in a crisis
14:55 — A treaty nobody observes
15:42 — Is this a NATO matter?
16:32 — Following the letter, and what it costs
17:24 — What the refugee convention was originally for
18:13 — A welfare state that did not exist in the 1950s
19:03 — Organising a diaspora with today’s tools
19:51 — Who arrives, and who objects to closing
20:45 — The risk assessment for a new NATO member
21:35 — Interdependence and Baltic Sea infrastructure
22:24 — The cold-eyed view Finland avoids
23:10 — States in anarchy — and the number of battalions
23:57 — The criticism: the response was too slow
24:42 — Fortifying in twelve hours
25:29 — A barrier you can walk around
26:20 — A law being used for the first time
27:07 — Credit to the opposition
27:54 — And what about the airports?
28:42 — What tools the situation offers
29:35 — Western self-loathing as a topic
30:21 — Platform moderation and a double standard
32:10 — A slogan banned in one place and allowed in another
33:21 — Whose ethnic hatred gets recognised
34:09 — A university demonstration and what was said
35:46 — Editorial selection and moral framing
36:35 — The context that goes unmentioned
39:21 — A poll that was not reported
39:49 — Municipal state transfers and capital income
40:43 — Argentina: the chainsaw and the election win
41:30 — Populism rising in waves
42:27 — The Dutch election ahead
43:14 — Milei as a reaction
44:02 — Culling ministries on video
44:50 — Argentina’s hundred years
45:36 — The Venezuelan story
46:29 — Ideology as religion
47:22 — Finlandisation and the trips nobody talked about
48:17 — Sign-off

The recording lives on Ivan Puopolo’s own channel and he owns it. This page is a record of the appearance and a pointer to the original, not a copy of it. The chapter marks above are derived from the recording itself; the episode carries no published chapter list of its own.

A fuller write-up is on Neuvottelija AI, in English and in Finnish.

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