Patient safety bill in Parliament

The parliamentary constitutional law committee has ruled that the patient safety bill (a.k.a. forced labor bill) wasn't constitutional in nature and could thus pass with the support of a simple majority of MPs. This was a necessary step for passing the bill, since the opposition parties are sending every signal of intending to vote against it.

YLE1 showed several hours worth of footage from the Parliament earlier today, where our representatives busied themselves in debate. I managed to catch a part of the proceedings and was quickly reassured that all sides are still inherently incapable of dealing with opposing arguments in a honest manner.

For the opposition, this showed in the way MPs refused to understand the safety concerns behind the bill. For the government side, everyone tap-danced around the question of extra state funding for municipalities, a key opposition demand. No one seemed interested in defending government's fiscal priorities, which in part explains why the government has been losing the debate in the media. Winning an argument becomes rather difficult when you're not prepared to justify your position.

Gun law proposals

Inevitably the subject of Finnish gun laws has been brought up in the aftermath of the Jokela school shootings. This morning Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen weighed in:

Vanhanen said that the possibility that hand guns should be kept at sports clubs and target ranges, and not allowed to be taken into the home should be considered.

Other proposals I've seen include a requirement to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and an obligatory waiting time of a month or two before getting one's first gun permit.

Since the discussion is clearly motivated by Jokela, it's worth considering what sort of restrictions on gun ownership would have prevented this tragedy. For example, the proposed EU directive which would limit gun ownership by those under 18 years old - and which Finland used to oppose - wouldn't have prevented the Jokela shooter, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, from buying a handgun, since he was over 18.

Whether Auvinen could have passed a psychiatric evaluation is something I don't know; obviously if he was honest about his views and feelings, he couldn't have done so, but he might have had enough self-control to hide his problems. It seems to me that he got his gun specifically to carry out his murders, so he would have had a reason to misrepresent his inner life to a psychiatrist.

Having written all that, naturally law changes that couldn't have stopped Auvinen might still serve to save lives.

Comparative study of Finnish and Swedish cultures

A study (fi) by Thorleif Pettersson and Sakari Nurmela, titled "Eri tapoja kohdata suuri elefantti - Suomalaisen ja ruotsalaisen kulttuurin vertaileva tutkimus" ("Different Ways of Meeting a Big Elephant - A Comparative Study of Finnish and Swedish Cultures") got some press (fi) a while back. I would have posted something on the topic sooner, but at first I couldn't find a link to the study, and then the Jokela shootings interfered.

Using World Values Survey data as evidence, the study concludes that Finns are more conservative than Swedes. Then again, so are pretty much everyone else; the numbers point to Swedish exceptionalism. For example, Swedes' attitudes toward democracy are the most positive of any country in the survey by some distance, whereas Finland is close to several other liberal democracies. The study concludes that the liberal Swedes are guided to a greater extent by principles, whereas the conservative Finns are more pragmatic.

In addition to the World Values Survey figures, the researchers carried out a survey of their own that concentrated on bilateral issues between the two countries, such as what do Finns and Swedes know of and feel about each other. In the trivia part of the questionnaire, respondents were given three options in each question. We find, for example, that five percent of Finns thought The Who was Swedish, whereas only three percent of Swedes thought it was Finnish. Nevertheless Finns were judged to have slightly better knowledge of Sweden than Swedes of Finland.

The headline grabber of the study was the finding that Swedes were friendlier toward Finns than vice versa. 81 percent of Swedes agreed strongly or in part with the statement, "I would like to have a Finn as a close friend." When Finns were asked about having a Swedish friend, the figure dropped to 32 percent. The authors present the possibility that Finnish and Swedish respondents understood the statement differently. I would also consider the possibility that Swedes can be a bit annoying, what with their democracy and hockey team that wins tournaments and famous rock band The Who.

Roger of Tuusula

Times hack Roger Boyes - a name to which the only correct response is "No thanks" - defends his killer analysis of the Jokela school shootings. The article is filled with standard dodges people employ when they don't want to address the substance of the criticism headed their way. The actual issue isn't the flaws in Roger's hackery, oh no. The brave truth-seeker that he is, he's just questioning why these terrible events happened. His article was a part of a debate that's worth having - "don't you think?" - and thus when readers tear his ill-judged and ignorant theorizing to shreds, it illustrates how they're not interested in the answers.

Now sporting a Tuusula byline, Boyes has suddenly forgotten all about remote farmsteads and the lakes that surround them. Instead he holds forth on the soul-crushing qualities of sleepy suburbs:

Paradise on Earth, you say, but I wager not if you are a) the offspring of divorced parents; b) unemployed; c) a teenager stuck in a small dormitory suburb without much cash; or d) a polar bear.

Apart from d) those categories apply to Tuusula. Which is where I am writing from.

Aside from the rampant revisionism, he still can't quite get his facts right:

But you're right: Finland ranks as one of the happiest countries in Europe. It also has one of the highest suicide rates, the third highest divorce rate in Europe (beaten by Sweden again!) and 56 per cent gun ownership. So that adds up to a pretty complex society, no?

The suicide statistics are outdated and wrong (see yesterday's post). The gun ownership statistics are ludicrously wrong. According to one estimate, which is quite a bit higher than the official figures, there are 56 guns per 100 people in Finland. This, strangely enough, doesn't mean that 56 percent of Finns own a gun, because Finnish gun laws are so very lax that many people have several guns. (You might think that 56 percent gun ownership wouldn't sound plausible to anyone, but to be fair, Boyes wasn't the only one to make this mistake.)

The logical flaws in Boyes's approach, separate from all the factual inaccuracies, are also worth considering.

First, none of his theories seem to take into account that he's writing about an international phenomenon. He looks for cultural aspects that are specifically Finnish and then constructs general theories on why school shootings occur, even though there's no reason to assume that the parts of Finnish culture that are distinct from e.g. British culture (or American culture or Japanese culture) had anything to do with it. Boyes, however, considers the link to Finnish culture to be axiomatic.

Second, considering his eagerness to find some Finland-specific reason for Jokela, it's odd that he studiedly ignores the underlying facts of the incident. He writes about people being isolated because of physical distances, even though the killer's loneliness obviously had nothing to do with travel times. In his response, quoted above, he talks about divorce rates, even though the killer's parents weren't divorced, and unemployment, even though the killer was a high school student.

Roger Boyes knows Finland

The Times' Roger Boyes describes the hellish existence us Finns face in "Similarities to other massacres - but this was a very Finnish affair":

Finland is a land of wide open spaces, between 16-17 people per square kilometre. Lakes often separate neighbouring farmsteads. At this time of year it is sunk in almost permanent half-light and Finnish families count the days to their winter holidays when they can flee to the bright sunlight of south-east Asian resorts.

This is a very insightful point. I'm sure the fact that Pekka-Eric Auvinen grew up on a farmstead separated by lakes from the rest of civilization has a lot to do with his shooting spree. Not being familiar with the Jokela area, though, I can't help but to wonder how they managed to fit the farmstead, not to mention the lakes, in a built-up area with a population of about 5'000 people.

Clinical depression is high, the suicide rate too. But above all the Nordic winter isolates the young in the small towns: they arrive at school in the dark and leave it in the dark, travelling long distances to their homes. Friendship in the traditional sense is often a summer luxury.

Ah yes, the unwaveringly high suicide rate. The dark winters are to blame, no doubt, what with the way the lack of sunlight prevents young people from leaving their houses. If people didn't insist on living on farmsteads located on remote islands, maybe their houses would be lined by lit streets which they could traverse even after sundown.

And so friendship becomes virtual. The social networking sites are switched on the moment the Finnish teenager returns home. YouTube substitutes for television, which is regarded as dreary and middle-aged.

If only Finnish teenagers would watch more television so they could experience real friendship.

About 75 per cent of all Finns use the internet. And Finland, the cradle of Nokia, has some of the cheapest mobile phone rates in Europe. Kids as young as 6 take mobiles to school; a child's first text message is a matter of parental pride.

Quite often it's framed on the wall. This illustrates how the parents are to blame: if moms and dads didn't encourage children's mobile phone use, maybe the kids would have more time for social interaction.

None of this is unusual for modern Europe, but in Finland the high-tech world has become a normal, rather than an exceptional, substitute for the world of human contact. A youth isolated at school sinks even deeper into isolation when he has left the school gates: a recipe for trouble. Even more so in a country where guns are so readily available; Finland has the third-largest per capita ownership of handguns in the world.

This is the closest this remarkably condescending hack comes to making a sound point. I'd like to see his source for that statistic, though, as there's a possibility he's mixing handgun ownership with gun ownership in general. I know Finland ranked third in the latter category in a recent survey.

Update: Responding to the same article, Aapo keeps it short and sweet.

The killer as a self-publicist

Re Pekka-Eric Auvinen's shooting spree at Jokela high school, Greg Sandoval of CNET News writes:

Predictably, some media outlets are already producing stories that imply Google's YouTube is a scary place where hateful polemics can be broadcast, unmolested by more thoughtful minds.

That's terribly unfair. What people should remember is that YouTube did not glorify the teenage gunman who went on the killing spree in Finland early Tuesday morning. Nor did the world's largest and most influential video-sharing site help him spread his angry message. Nonetheless, in the wake of yet another senseless shooting on a school campus, people will be looking for scapegoats.

I sympathize with the sentiment, but Sandoval goes a step too far. Of course YouTube helped Auvinen, a.k.a. "Sturmgeist89", to spread his message. It offered a place where he could post his videos and an existing audience that could easily find his messages. If we take away the controversy and consider a situation in which a teenager posted videos on YouTube of himself, say, reading his romantic poetry, would not everyone agree that the website helps him to spread his art?

Another question is whether a website that helps people to have their say in a public place are a bad thing. Even if we ignore the full range of uses to which such sites can be put and only consider this specific case, I would argue that spreading Sturmgeist89's videos far and wide would have been a positive thing; it could have potentially alerted others to the fact that he was a disturbed individual who shouldn't have been in the possession of a gun.

One could argue that he might have found converts for his cause. However, his messages to the world were amateurish and full of logical errors. Had he not killed all those people, I would have been inclined to dismiss him as prankster. Here's a teenager from Fin-reindeer-molesting-land spreading the truth about de-evolution in broken English and calling himself the "natural selector". And then he goes to his boring high school, whips out his gun, and starts shooting people while yelling, "Revolution!" In Tuusula! The whole scenario is absurd - except for the bodies.

It's also a fact that the media have helped to spread the message to a much greater extent than YouTube ever did. Every media outlet I follow has mentioned the web videos and most have given enough details about them to allow any experienced Internet user to find them. If attention-seeking is the motive, then prevention can only come about by regulating the media, because their reporting reaches so many more people than some nobody's videos on YouTube. Does anyone want to advocate for this?

Jokela school shooting

Eight people dead. It's all over the news, so you don't need me for the basics.

If you want to read the shooter's attempt to justify himself, his writings are available for download here (available in both stilted Finnish and bad English). The documents aren't very illuminating, in that the guy's actions aren't at all logically connected to his violent theories. E.g. he praises himself for his free will and deep understanding of how society works - a superior being in a sea of mediocrity - and then shoots himself in the head.

The shooter, apparently named Pekka-Eric Auvinen, had shooting as a hobby and owned a licensed handgun. He read Nietzsche. He watched violent movies. Whatever your grand unified theory of school shootings is, there's enough material here to support it. I guess that can wait, though.

Forced labor

Helsingin Sanomat reports (fi) that the government has been working on a law to lessen the effects of nurses' industrial action:

The aim of the bill under preparation is to secure urgent treatment necessary to keep patients alive. Excluded from the action would be activities such as emergency room treatment, intensive care units, and treatment of premature babies and support services such as laboratories and x-ray examinations.

The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health calculates that the bill would exclude no more than ten per cent of the 12,700 nurses who have signed up for the mass resignation campaign.

The law needs to be brought before the Parliament by Friday at the latest for it to come into force in time.

I wondered if something like this might happen, as the same reasoning that has led to the currently existing limits on industrial action also applies in this case. I didn't think the government would react so quickly, though. I'd have guessed the matter would be debated in the aftermath of the resignations, should deaths ensue.

Tehy, for its part, has been adamant that the resignations are a form of industrial action. It's probably necessary to lessen the risks normally associated with resigning from your job, but it also makes it plain that the resignations are a way to get around the preexisting restrictions on health care workers' right to strike.

More presidential polls

Re the presidential polls published in Apila, they've now come out with the numbers for the Centre Party (fi). As expected, Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen leads with 34% percent of support. He's followed by former Prime Minister Esko Aho and Jorma Ollila of Nokia fame, both at eigth percent, and then former (and future) Environment Minister Paula Lehtomäki and EU Commissar Olli Rehn at six percent. Anneli Jäätteenmäki MEP and Foreign Trade Minister Paavo Väyrynen are at four percent.

Interestingly, they also released some figures of where the candidates' support is coming from. Among Centrist, Vanhanen scored at 59 percent, Aho at 12 percent, Ollila at eight percent, Lehtomäki at seven percent, Rehn at three percent, Väyrynen at two percent, and Jäätteenmäki at one percent. I wouldn't have predicted that Väyrynen and Jäätteenmäki are less popular among Centrists than respondents as a whole. Conversely, Vanhanen and Aho are more popular among their own. Outside of Centrists, Aho is most popular among Christian Democrats and National Coalition Party supporters; Lehtomäki among Left Alliance and Green League supporters; Ollila among Social Democratic Party supporters and Greens; Väyrynen among True Finns supporters; Rehn among Coalitionists, Greens, and Social Democrats; and Jäätteenmäki among True Finns.

The Tampere daily Aamulehti published a poll (fi) on Social Democratic party council members' views. 38 out of 60 members responded and the winner was Governor of Bank of Finland Erkki Liikanen with 16% of first preference votes followed by former Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen at 11% - although Aamulehti asked the respondents to name three people and then gave points, which increased Liikanen's lead. Apparently the party council hasn't warmed up to Erkki Tuomioja MP. The respondents also backed party chair Eero Heinäluoma for another term; only five of them wished him to move aside next summer.

Kind of bad news from Finland

The Bad News from Finland blog (and others like it) has a mission:

News coverage from Israel in much of the media is frequently a parody of honest journalism as defined by the 'Code of Ethics' guidelines of the profession. In order to expose the frequent distortion of news by a number of Finnish journalists, “Bad News from Finland” has been created. It focuses on negative news items from Finland. Yet it is much more honest than what these correspondents report. This blog only provides true facts and states clearly that it states negative facts only. It shows that by using real news stories without context, one can make any country look bad.

It doesn't really work, though, when the stories are things like Finland being sixth on a global competitiveness list on the theory that at least it's worse than being number one. That doesn't make the country look bad, no matter how much context you leave out.

Further, the kind of stuff the blog has so far focused on tends to go unreported in international media in the case of Israel, also. Israel came in 17th in the global competitiveness index and dropped three places. As far as I can tell, those facts weren't mentioned by the unnamed correspondents the blog seeks to parody.

In general, to show that you can act in a biased manner doesn't prove that someone else is biased. The blog would make a much better case for its central claim if it actually named the journalists it thinks are biased and analyzed their work. As it currently operates, it's not reaching its stated goal of exposing media distortion.

Kanerva on a trip

Foreign Minister Ilkka Kanerva, that master of metaphor, said (fi) he expects the government's next foreign policy report will be "like an appropriate travel brochure". According to the bard of Lokalahti,

They describe the travel destination and tell what sort of people usually go there. Additionally they give the price and information on the travel route. And when it's a question of a group trip, the brochures should be available to all. Few of us make decisions on our trips without having sufficient basic facts and evaluating them, so this must also apply to our NATO relationship.

[...] Finland's NATO membership discussion seems to have passed the Combed Ware period; the Iron Age looms, but there's still some way to go to the information society.

What I want to know is, does NATO membership have air conditioning?

The speech is even better in the original Finnish. Kanerva has a wonderful way of mixing old-fashioned, idiosyncratic terms into politicians' usual technocratic language. Such nuances are difficult to translate, alas.

Latest polls on party primaries

...for the Finnish 2012 presidential election, that is. The Centre Party's web magazine, Apila (fi), has been publishing polls on who the most popular presidential candidates are in the major parties.

For the National Coalition Party (fi), the list goes Speaker of Parliament Sauli Niinistö at 55 percent, Foreign Minister Ilkka Kanerva at four percent, and a slew of people who have no shot in hell at three percent. There's no surprise here; it's generally understood that the Coalition candidacy is Niinistö's if he wants it.

For the Social Democratic Party, the rankings are Erkki Tuomioja MP at 20 percent, former Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen at 17 percent, former Left Alliance chair Suvi-Anne Siimes at 11 percent, and Governor of Bank of Finland Erkki Liikanen at eight percent. It should be noted that the respondents were not limited to party supporters. I'd imagine that Tuomioja has a larger lead among Social Democrats than the general public.

It would be interesting to see how a Tuomioja presidential run would pan out. He agrees with President Tarja Halonen about pretty much everything and Halonen enjoys broad popularity. Nevertheless, I suspect Tuomioja isn't nearly as acceptable to center-right voters as Halonen. Lipponen has said he won't run, which leaves the floor open for someone from the Third Way wing of the party to challenge Tuomioja.

Party chairs Eero Heinäluoma and Finance Minister Jyrki Katainen are at four and three percent, respectively. At least Katainen can say he's essentially tied for second.

Now all we need is a third poll to account for the Centre itself. I mean, Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen will be in the lead, of course, but who's second?