Podcast · Viikon viisasteluklubi Viisastelu 23.9.2022 · 2022-09-23 · 57:15 · In Finnish

Mobilisation, envy day and forbidden words — Sami Miettinen on Weekly Wiseguys

Published as “Viisastelu | Venäjän liikekannallepano | Uudet kielletyt sanat: äiti ja isä | Yhden Totuuden Suomi”

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 23 September 2022, with Tere Sammallahti in the third seat. It was the week Russia declared partial mobilisation.

The Ukraine section is the part worth the time, because the panel does not converge. On whether Finland should open its border to Russians fleeing conscription, one argument is that freedom has to be won inside the country and letting out exactly the people who could force change guarantees no change; the counter is that surrendering in the field is not safe for an individual soldier, and that even a palace coup would most likely produce another dictator. Neither moves. On a negotiated settlement, Sami — who had run a negotiation exercise on this in the spring — sets Russia’s minimum at the Sevastopol base and sanctions relief, and his own at ceding Crimea while recovering Luhansk and Donetsk. The other speaker rejects the whole idea: not an inch.

The economics contributes the episode’s most effective single figure. Fortum’s Uniper loss of 5.6 billion euros is worth roughly 15 per cent of all direct share holdings of Finnish private individuals combined — a comparison that makes the sum legible in a way the headline number does not. Around it sits a set of checkable wealth facts: the average Finn is closer to the average Portuguese than to other Nordics, the richest one per cent owns about 13 per cent of Finnish wealth against over 40 per cent in the United States, and almost nobody in Finland lives on regular capital income — the top of the tax list changes each year because the money comes from selling a company at the end of a career.

The conceptual argument that carries furthest is about vocabulary: Finnish had separate words for biological sex and for gender identity, and the panel’s claim is that merging them is a change in language rather than in science. They then apply it, unusually, against their own rhetoric — conceding that removing sex from the personal identity code is a sensible reform on security grounds and should happen, while disputing the reason given for it.

Chapters

• 00:00 — Iran, the morality police and a double standard
• 02:29 — Finland’s own morality police, and expulsion from a parliamentary group
• 04:07 — Labels as weapons, and pressure campaigns
• 05:42 — Russia’s mobilisation and Turkey’s role
• 06:30 — Sanna Ukkola’s column: how men are talked about
• 08:12 — The environment boys are growing up in
• 09:02 — “Mother” and “father” on a list of words to avoid
• 10:46 — Orwell, newspeak, and sex versus gender identity
• 11:32 — Closing the border to Russians — if the political will exists
• 13:08 — Reactivity as the government’s signature
• 14:42 — The constitutional committee, the chancellor of justice and THL
• 16:17 — The targeting law: who supports it and what happens in committee
• 17:55 — Envy day, and an opt-out list that became a target list
• 20:23 — The facts about Finnish wealth
• 21:13 — Uniper’s 5.6-billion loss, to scale
• 22:45 — A national error of perspective about the rich
• 25:14 — The gender pay gap, the unexplained residual and productivity
• 29:26 — Harari, AI and words of comfort
• 30:16 — The scale of mobilisation and the coming winter
• 31:53 — The burden of proof in Ukraine coverage
• 32:51 — Tactical nuclear weapons and annexation votes
• 33:37 — Should the border open to draft evaders — the panel disagrees
• 37:05 — Minimum positions in a negotiated settlement
• 40:26 — Naivety, and a comparison with 1968
• 42:00 — The asymmetry of sanctions and nuclear power’s alternative history
• 44:25 — The “moral fantasy world” and why no alternative is voiced
• 45:58 — Ninth-degree links, and the lustration that never happened
• 46:43 — The legend of a Finnish sister party for Putin’s party
• 47:30 — Empathy is not justice
• 49:49 — The gender law, the personal identity code, and the reform worth making
• 52:12 — Self-identification, statistics and medical diagnosis
• 54:33 — An ESG questionnaire that asks for executives’ race

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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