Roger Boyes interview

My visitor logs indicate that there's still a market for Roger Boyes bashing, so let's take another tilt at it.

Helsingin Sanomat interviewed The Times's man in Berlin a few days ago and now they've put a translation of the article up on the web. Boyes, as we all remember, wrote an asinine analysis of the Jokela school shootings and was subsequently flamed crisp. HS euphemistically describes his article as "streamlined text from a man who seems to be drawn to a psychological approach." In other words, it was a load of cobblers.

What did Boyes take away from his experience?

"I do not believe that I am communicating with an entire nation. It was more like an enclosed community of some kind. There was something hysterical in the answers."

Hysterical, you say?

"They did not want to tell their opinions, they wanted to kill me."

Hysterical.

The great man noticed that some of his critics were Brits living in Finland. With characteristically keen insight and colossal condescension, he remarked,

"A typical Stockholm syndrome. A man is the hostage of his Finnish wife and identifies with her thinking."

An alternative explanation is that a man has lived in Finland and thus understands just how poor Boyes's analysis was. He knows, for example, that social lives are not put on hold in the winter; and that a kid living in a sleepy suburb might be lonely, but not due to physical distances separating lakeside farmsteads.

"People do not accept that any evil might come from within the community. It is always imported, in this case, caused by America, the Internet, or globalisation."

Of course, a central argument put forth in Boyes's article was that kids in Finland spent too much time on the Internet, chatting away with friends when they should be making human contact. (Internet friends, as we all know, don't count as humans.)

"But still, this took place specifically in Finland. The environment that allowed this to happen is Finnish."

So analyze the environment, then. Come up with some distinguishing features that separate the events in Jokela from numerous incidents in which armed non-Finns have gone amok. Make some bloody sense for a change.

Or, if that's too much bother, you might just come up with another wacky theory. Here's Boyes holding forth on why he was criticized so heavily:

According to Boyes, there are societies on the outskirts of Europe, where trust in the local media is low.

These include countries such as Romania and Hungary.

People in these countries seek information from foreign media - reliable brands such as The Times, Boyes says. At the same time these people are nevertheless plagued by an inferiority complex.

"They feel that they are treated with disdain in the foreign media, and therefore, react in an emotional manner."

Oddly enough, trust in the media is unusually high in Finland. Can't this guy get anything right?

"OK, OK, the comparison is shaky. ..."

This almost convinced me that the comparison was strong.

Very telling in the view of Roger Boyes were the comments of the teachers concerning Pekka-Eric Auvinen: he was an average pupil.

"That was all that they had to say. They did not say that he was isolated, or that he had strange thoughts."

According to Iltalehti (fi), a Jokela teacher described Auvinen as a militant radical who was interested in both the extreme left and the extreme right. He also said Auvinen was a better than average student. The police said (fi) that at least some of the teachers were aware that Auvinen had been bullied.

I don't blame Boyes for not knowing any of this. He doesn't speak Finnish or follow the Finnish media. But given that he knows nothing about the topic, might he show just a tiny bit of humility when coming up with his theories? Maybe he could - oh, I don't know - check his facts before spouting off. Perhaps he could do a web search or two. If he has some time on his hands, he could even interview a Finnish person.

(Here's how I imagine it would go:

BOYES: "Are there many farmsteads in Jokela?"
A FINN: "Nope."
BOYES: "What role do you suppose Ukko played in this?"
A FINN: "Zilch."
BOYES: "Thank you very much, Finnish person. Without your invaluable help, I might have made a complete prat of myself.")

PS: Markkinointi & Mainonta magazine had an amusing interview (fi) with Boyes. If you can't read Finnish, rest assured that the pattern of Boyes making some claim ("Finnish newspapers operate within a narrow consensus") without knowing what he's talking about ("So you've read Finnish newspapers?" "Well, no, ...") was repeated.

Kimi Kimi Kimi the super pilot!

This was the best ending to a F1 season I can remember. The last three GPs were wonderfully entertaining - tense, dramatic, and packed with reversals of fortune. And there was even a happy ending. (It's a shame that the live TV coverage was on a pay channel that few get to watch.)

While I'm at it, fair play to Fernando Alonso fans for seeing the bright side in their favorite's third place:

Fans of Fernando Alonso danced in the fountains of his hometown last night to celebrate Lewis Hamilton's failure to win the Formula One drivers' championship in Brazil.

"Hamilton did not win, that's the main thing," said one Alonso supporter before plunging into the fountain of the main square in Oviedo.

Guffaw.

Somewhere there's an advertising executive cratching his chin: "What can they have against Hamilton? He's so handsome and well-spoken and young and talented. Savior of F1! Bigger than Tiger Woods! Everyone loves Our Lewis. And just look at the grace with which he wears that TAG Heuer watch!"

Banging on about a referendum

As far as I can tell, there's no logic to this post in the Economist's EU blog. We are told:

To date, the best guess of British officials and politicians watching the referendum row is that Mr Brown will eventually get away without a national vote, for the reason that the Conservatives under Mr Cameron can only hammer away at the topic for so long but will then have to drop it. This is because Mr Cameron is determined to avoid the fate that dogged so many Tory leaders in recent years, of being defined by Europe. Banging on about a referendum, crudely, may chime with the specific views of British voters, if you invite them to think about the new EU treaty. But most British voters, much more importantly, do not want to think about the new EU treaty, or the EU at all. Their irritation with Europe is such that any party that talks about it, even to attack it, ends up incurring their wrath. That is what happened to the Conservatives under John Major, when any number of loons and bores on Europe became the public face of the party.

So if Labour doesn't consent to a referendum, they risk... the Conservatives screwing up their election campaign. Huh? Either campaigning for a referendum is an effective election strategy, in which case the threat of Cameron doing so would put pressure on Brown, or it's a losing proposition, in which case Brown should wish that Cameron take it.

Herring-smokers write books too

Yesterday's Grauniad carried a highly refined example of the "foreign writer travels to Finland and does touristy things" genre. It has it all: lots of lakes, saunas, the Kalevala, huskies, smoked herrings, a classical music festival, and the nightless night. But here's something you may not have known:

The Finish people are keen to impress on visitors their cultural heritage. Much of this revolves around the epic poem, the Kalevala, first published by a Finnish academic in 1835. The poem was put together from the ancient oral histories of the Finnish and the Karelian people from the west of Finland and across the border in Russia.

It was the first book to be written in Finnish, and is seen by many Finns as the cornerstone of both their language and their culture.

Sounds plausible to me.

Opinion congruence on EU

I came across an interesting article titled "Cautious Voters - Supportive Parties: Opinion Congruence between Voters and Parties on the EU Dimension" (2006) by Mikko Mattila and Tapio Raunio. That parties in most EU countries are generally more pro-EU than voters shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but it's still useful to have a study to cite on the phenomenon. The authors conclude:

In line with previous research, we first showed that parties are closer to their voters on the left/right dimension than on the EU dimension. Then we confirmed that parties are more supportive of European integration than are their voters. We expected party system characteristics (number of parties, ideological range) to have an effect on opinion congruence, but this was clearly refuted by our analysis. The responsiveness analysis at the party level produced several findings: government parties were less responsive than opposition parties; party size was related to responsiveness, with opinion congruence higher in smaller parties; and responsiveness was lower among centrist parties. Our study also confirms that European parties, at least in the old member states, fail to offer enough competing alternatives to voters over European integration.

The article also contains a rather interesting by-country breakdown of the distances between parties and voters on the EU dimension and the left-right dimension, as measured in an international study after the previous European Parliament election. Finnish parties did a comparatively poor job of representing public opinion on EU; they were the fourth furthest from the voting public. British parties were the furthest from their supporters on this count, not including Northern Irish parties which were the closest. In two countries, Poland and the Czech Republic, parties were generally less pro-EU than the public. Finnish parties came fourth in being more pro-EU than their voters - with British parties winning again.

On the left/right dimension, where parties were generally closer to voters, Finnish parties were slightly better than average, tied at ninth place with Irish, Estonian, and Cypriot parties. Northern Irish and Dutch parties did the best, Portuguese the worst.

Base of democracy

While I'm on the subject of Blair and Brown, I'll quote Thanos Kalamidas at Ovi Magazine:

Since when does somebody become prime minister not because he/she was elected by the public, the base of the democracy, but they were chosen by the retiring prime minister? [...]

Gordon Brown is the new British Prime Minister. A prime minister never elected for this position from the public, a prime minister who will use all the government and party mechanism to promote himself in advance of his opponents inside the party, the man who will finish the destruction of the Labour party and whatever else Tony Blair has left behind.

Since when does somebody become prime minister not because she was elected by the public? Let's ask John Major, James Callaghan, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Macmillan, Anthony Eden... oh, and Matti Vanhanen. What say you, gentlemen?

"The question betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how a parliamentarian system works. A prime minister's legitimacy is not based on winning an election, but on enjoying the confidence of the parliament. That's why it's called parliamentarism."

Thanks, guys!

Look back in anger

I was struck by BBC World's decision to cover a change of prime minister by showing footage of politicians walking in slow-motion, with the occasional cut to politicians waving to crowds, all the while Britpop plays in the background. The oh-so-nostalgic Blair retrospective got Oasis's "Don't Look Back in Anger" whereas the Brown career recap was played for laughs and had to make do with Franz Ferdinand's annoying "Do You Want To". I'm used to various sporting events inspiring broadcasters to put together music videos featuring the flashiest action and most important moments, but I guess the practice is seeping into politics.

I wonder, when Vanhanen's time in office ends, will we get footage of him blinking in slow-motion set to Nightwish's "Sleeping Sun"? God, I hope so. Of course this music-videofication will inevitably spread from (sort of) historic moments to far less momentous news events. In the future, whenever for example the Chancellor of Justice changes, your television channels will report the news by showing some footage of the old chancellor striding along a corridor while an emotionally uplifting tune plays. You may protest now, but in your heart you know you wanted to see Paavo Nikula strolling, slowed down and set to Rihanna's "Umbrella".

Free to drink vodka

Stupid argument of the day:

The leader of the British Conservative MEPs, Timothy Kirkhope, also welcomed the vote, saying "people are free today to drink the vodka they want - the British vodka drinker is saved from protectionists in Poland and Finland".

The vote was over labeling, specifically whether you can use the name "vodka" for spirits that aren't made from the traditional vodka ingredients - which you now can, as long as you admit it on the label. No matter the result, Britishers would have remained entirely free to guzzle their fruity quasi-vodkas - which I've never tasted and which may be indistinguishable from real vodka for all I know.

I don't have much else to say on the Vodka Wars (so go read Aapo's take), except to note that it resulted in the most publicity Finnish MEPs have received in a long time, possibly ever. Leading the charge were Alexander Stubb (National Coalition Party/EPP) and Lasse Lehtinen (Social Democratic Party/PES), at least one of whom tended to be quoted in every story written on the topic.

Low-carbon energy strategies

The British government is considering replacing at least some of their aging nuclear plants with new ones. Since Finland is the only EU country in which a nuclear plant is under construction at the moment, the Finnish experience is being used as an argument by both sides of the British nuclear debate. From a Finnish perspective, some of argumentation is a bit curious. For example, John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, wrote in the Guardian:

[T]he move appears to be undermining alternative low-carbon energy strategies. After falling in 2001 and 2002, Finland's carbon emissions are now rising. Measures, promised in a 2001 climate report, such as energy taxation, have not been implemented. According to Finland's former environment minister Satu Hassi MEP, once the decision was made to build the new reactor, the country lost interest in alternative energy sources.

I'm not sure where Sauven gets his data on carbon emissions. According to Statistics Finland, carbon dioxide emissions increased in 2000-2003, but dropped in 2003-2005 to end roughly at the 2000 level. The decision to build a new nuclear plant was made in January 2002 and the building permit was issued in February 2005.

Satu Hassi (Green League) resigned as minister over the decision to build that new reactor, so it isn't surprising that she is still fundamentally opposed to it. I have to say, for a country that has lost interest in alternative energy sources, our politicians spent a lot of time going on about the topic during the election campaign.

One party rule rules

A fun aspect of the recent British regional elections was observing people accustomed to plurality elections come to grips with proportional representation. Seeing commonplace, accepted features of our political system like coalition governments and post-election negotiations to form a government program assailed as strange and counterproductive showed just how different political cultures can be. Simon Jenkins, a columnist for the Guardian, produced a heated example of the genre.

It turns out that sometimes parties don't even announce what sort of a coalition they'd like to form after the election, thus removing "the outcome of an election from the hustings to the private deal of corridors, cabals and careerism." The poor electorate is kept in the dark as party leaders go as far as to offer cabinet posts to potential coalition partners. What's even worse, because pluralities of the vote well short of 50 percent don't routinely amount to majorities in the legislature, proportional representation almost always leads to power sharing among parties. This in turn leads to a "diluted, unstable, and unaccountable" executive. It's clearly a terrible way to rule a country. I wonder how we've managed to sustain it for 100 years.

For once I'd like pieces assailing proportional representation to survey how the various election methods known by that name perform in practice. Given that proportional representation is more common than first-past-the-post, there isn't a shortage of data to study, but the only examples that are used with any regularity are Israel, post-war Italy, and Weimar Germany. Those three don't exactly amount to a representative sample.

Incidentally, first-past-the-post was considered in Finland when it came time to pick an election system. It was proposed by the Finnish Party. They wanted 160 single seat districts with a set majority of the seats being located in the countryside, where they were the most popular party at the time. The proportional system was picked in part because it was thought to better guarantee representation for minorities, i.e. give seats to the Swedish Party. This was somewhat illogical, I think, as single member constituencies tend to help regionally based parties.

The results of first-past-the-frozen-post would have been interesting. The Social Democratic Party would have persisted as the left-wing alternative and the Swedish (People's) Party would rule the Swedish-speaking areas, I would say. The pressure on the Fennoman parties to merge into one, which was considerable even under proportional representation, would increase further. But what would have happened to the Communists electoral prospects? (My guess: they would have tried to take over the SDP with unpredictable results.) Would the Fennoman parties have merged? (Yep.) If so, would they have split again? (Yep.) Would the new dividing line have been rural/urban, liberal/conservative, or right-wing/centrist? (A bit of each.)

Zhdanov on the Zinoviev letter

Recently I read Jukka Nevakivi's very entertaining book Ždanov Suomessa ("Zhdanov in Finland") about Andrei Zhdanov's time as the head of the Allied Control Commission in Finland. Nevakivi describes a discussion on January 23rd, 1945, in which Zhdanov instructed Finnish Communists in the art of election propaganda. One of the examples he used was the Zinoviev letter. The interesting thing is that according to Zhdanov, the letter was of Soviet origin, but intended by them to hurt Labour. Nevakivi quotes Zhdanov thusly (my translation): "Before the election we published the forged 'Zinoviev letter' and because of this forgery, Labourites lost a part of their votes to the Conservatives..."

I haven't seen this theory in British sources. The general opinion seems to be the one from the linked article: that a few British intelligence agency officers were behind the letter's release, but that its forger is unknown. In theory Zhdanov's claim remains a possibility. On the other hand, in late 1924, when the letter was published in the Daily Mail, Zhdanov was a local official in Nizhni-Novgorod, so presumably whatever he knew about the topic he heard second hand, after the fact. The claim that the Soviets published the letter is questionable, as we know that it got to the British press from British intelligence, but it can be interpreted loosely, I suppose.