How To Ridicule Opposition
The sudden increase of Finnish yoga instructors
Some while back, I was listening to a Swedish speaking podcast produced by the Finnish Public Service media, called The News Pod. The podcast promotes itself as investigative journalism by experts, so it’s supposed to be a heavyweight source of information for your average Finn, looking for truth and objectivity.
This is not the first time I’ve been keen on commenting about Scandinavian Public Service, as they work hard to tell everyone how to correctly interpret reality. Public Service is the state run media, and its mission is to educate the population and keep it informed in a secular, democratic spirit.
Invisible elephants
This particular podcast was dealing with the coordinated protests against coronavirus lockdowns on March 20th 2021, which took place in many cities around the globe. The podcast’s intention was to educate the public on how they should properly react to this occurrence.
Personally, I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a non-biased media. This is true when I’m writing something myself and it’s also true for everyone else. Whenever someone decides to write or broadcast something, there’s an agenda to it. Whether the agenda is the author’s, or whether the author is paid to promote someone else’s agenda; it varies, of course. But it’s still there. Well vetted journalists know where to draw the line, and Scandinavian Public Service is famous for this type of dishonest journalism. The elephant in the room might be there for some of them, but if you have a habit of mentioning it, you wouldn’t be in that spot in the first place.
The remarkable podcast
The News Pod was made to teach people that protesting against the government’s lockdowns was bad, without having to touch on the actual arguments. Now, whether you agree or disagree with that statement, a question still needs to be asked: When you ridicule opposition by hitting them under the belt, does it really benefit anyone? Doesn’t it just further deepen the divide?
The arguments in the podcast were really irrational, and any thinking individual would have picked up on it. One of the speakers in the Helsinki event was in this podcast claimed to be a yoga instructor. I haven’t been able to verify this, but regardless, it shouldn’t be a deciding factor as to whether a protest was justified or not. Are yoga instructors less intelligent than other people? Should people have less regard for the protesters opinions, if one out of several speakers happened to be into yoga? Politicians also come from all kinds of backgrounds, and some of them have very little education or work experience, besides a political career.
The podcast further went on to say that it was apparent that a big chunk of people critical of the government lockdowns, were also yoga instructors. If they weren’t yoga instructors, they were wellness coaches or people who were so far off in their thinking, that they would consider other cancer treatments than chemotherapy! Moreover, it claimed that the protesters were not normal people with an opinion; they were claimed to be either very extreme left wing or very extreme right wing individuals. Many of them were definitely anti-Semites, Nazis, and people against immigration.
The podcast then went on to assure everyone that opposition was still very small and insignificant, and mainly occurred because there’s so many Nazi anti-chemo, anti-vax, and anti-Semites in Sweden impacting defenseless Finns in their thinking. Worried Finns could exhale and not think too much about it. Normal people still don’t question the government, and normal people would not be attending a protest like this one. Thank you Finnish Radio, for the clarification.
The lie detector series
From the fall of 2019, just prior to the coronavirus occurrence, this same Finnish media channel started a series called The Lie Detector. It’s supposed to be a series of articles about facts and fiction online and in social media. They have some truly remarkable pieces about how to deal with people who ask questions, hesitate, worry or cause trouble.
The level of the arguments sound similar to the above mentioned podcast — ridicule the opposition without providing any evidence and without actually responding to people’s concerns. I don’t know if the coronavirus lockdowns have resulted in a sudden increase of yoga instructors in the Finnish capital, but regardless, Finnish public Service is continuing to avoid any real debate. Why not actually have a dialogue with people who listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Geert Vanden Bossche? Why not debate the actual arguments? To continue ignoring concerns regular people obviously have, and call them anti-Semite out of the blue, to quickly put the lid on the protest, is just to further tear society apart.
It’s a dishonest method which does not belong in the state-run media of an alleged free democracy.
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