Podcast · Viikon viisasteluklubi Viisastelu 8.6.2023 · 2023-06-08 · 62:33 · In Finnish
What is a woman, who funds Pride, and what happens when the majority goes — Sami Miettinen on Weekly Wiseguys
Published as “Viisastelu: "Mikä on nainen?" | Fanidokkari velkaviisikosta HBO:lle | Tucker Carlson Twitteriin”
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 8 June 2023, alongside Tere Sammallahti and the writer and journalist Matti Virtanen. It was recorded the day HBO released its documentary about the five party leaders of Sanna Marin’s government, and the day Pekka Haavisto announced he was running for president.
The first long stretch is about Matt Walsh’s documentary What is a Woman and the definitional fight around it. The panel’s sharpest argument there is not about gender at all: a body of doctrine that rejects criticism on the grounds that the critic is an outsider is, by that fact, not science. Asked for their own definition they give a biological one and concede its incompleteness in the same breath, and they state their position precisely — the dispute they want is about minors and age limits, not about adults’ access to treatment. One of the episode’s running jokes is at Sami’s expense: he had predicted a couple of years earlier that “peak woke” was already behind us, and the panel compares the prediction to an end-of-the-world forecast that keeps getting moved.
The second is Tucker Carlson’s first Twitter episode, and it produces the best single move in the recording: the panel accepts his media-criticism argument about the Kakhovka dam — the US leadership said it did not know, the press said it did — and dismisses the man himself in the same breath as a columnist and propagandist, “Alex Jones with a university degree.” Accept the argument, reject the author.
The third is public funding for advocacy organisations, where the panel splits on a question of principle and leaves it unresolved: is a democratic decision enough to make the allocation legitimate, or are there right and wrong allocations regardless of mandate? They offer their own test — what if the same money went to an organisation with the opposite politics?
It closes on a hypothesis that travels further than the rest: the legitimacy of Finland’s state monopolies and of universally binding collective agreements is pinned to majority support, and none of them has a fallback for the day the majority goes.
Chapters
- 00:00 — The line-up and the “chosen five” joke
- 01:37 — Today’s agenda
- 02:28 — What is a Woman: what the documentary does
- 03:18 — Circular reasoning in front of the camera
- 04:08 — How science handles a hypothesis
- 04:58 — The parody answer, and a joke about how easy the definition is
- 05:51 — A question with no quick answer
- 06:37 — Rejecting outside criticism as a mark of unscientific thinking
- 07:25 — “A woman is a woman” — tautology as an answer
- 08:14 — The same question asked in another culture
- 09:01 — Puberty blockers and hormone treatment
- 09:57 — The authority everyone appeals to
- 10:49 — The decisive distinction: adult or minor
- 11:47 — An advocacy group cast as the expert
- 12:37 — “Peak woke” — a prediction that didn’t land
- 14:09 — A proposal: say plainly that this is a convention
- 15:00 — Who is allowed to appeal to lived experience
- 16:47 — Early-years guidance and how parents react
- 17:37 — When a curriculum loses its credibility
- 18:23 — The constitution and the limits of economic policy
- 19:09 — Property rights and the top marginal rate
- 20:45 — The panel’s own answer to the question
- 21:33 — Chromosomes, gametes, and the exceptions
- 22:24 — LGB splitting from T — a fault line in the movement
- 23:12 — The acronym that keeps growing
- 23:59 — €1.9 million in public money — the figure and its source
- 24:51 — Disagreement: is a democratic decision enough?
- 25:36 — Why fundraising works differently in Finland
- 26:27 — A semantic compromise about taxation
- 27:18 — Legal language and the sense of justice
- 28:57 — Public money is always somebody’s money
- 29:46 — A one-city organisation and its balance sheet
- 30:35 — The thought experiment: what if the money went the other way?
- 31:23 — A prediction: the movement breaks up from inside
- 32:10 — Conservative immigrant families and the school
- 32:56 — Transfers, and the metaphors used for them
- 33:42 — What €50,000 means in one person’s working years
- 34:29 — Tucker Carlson’s first Twitter episode
- 35:16 — Dams, pipelines and what nobody actually knows
- 36:02 — The panel’s verdict on Carlson himself
- 36:51 — Should propaganda be reported?
- 37:39 — Blacklisting and the three-strikes rule
- 38:36 — The left on Twitter and the left in parliament
- 39:25 — Labels, and why people get blocked
- 40:13 — How to approach a debate
- 41:06 — Why dissenting voices stay invisible
- 41:54 — Intelligence and what gets said in public
- 42:41 — The volume of disinformation and why Carlson works
- 43:30 — The same problem in the gender debate
- 45:15 — A press that goes looking for the expected voice
- 46:06 — The hypothesis: legitimacy is pinned to 50 per cent
- 46:53 — Political strikes and the polling
- 47:38 — The trade unions and the left parties
- 48:26 — Market share and the basis of a monopoly
- 49:21 — The survey nobody commissions
- 50:20 — Rotating the civil service — the proposal and its cost
- 51:08 — Scenario analysis, and how good it is
- 51:58 — An alcohol forecast that went the other way
- 52:52 — Official accountability and consequences
- 53:39 — The creation myth and “the best information available at the time”
- 54:24 — The survey that ought to be commissioned
- 55:18 — The presidential election: the panel’s bet
- 57:40 — The HBO documentary and the nicknames
- 58:29 — From green transition to clean transition
- 59:26 — A columnist’s review of the documentary
- 01:00:14 — A profile piece complaining about profile pieces
- 01:02:05 — Sign-off: changing the words instead of the policy
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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