I also have my issues with the cited “study.”

I’m not saying Americans aren’t dumb, but I take this kind of data with a sack of salt. How was the study phrased? What does the company stand to gain by expressing the results of the study in this way? Why not tell us exactly how the study was performed and what questions were on it?

There’s a big difference between “Hey, what are Lay’s chips made of?” and “Do you know what exact ingredients are in your bag of chips?”

My gut tells me this is all fairly performative framing so they can just cozy up to a political administration for favor and head-pets while also trying a new marketing campaign that should be universally acceptable to consumers, one that reframes their products as “healthy” in some way.

China does not want to own nor invade our chaotic political and social hellhole, nor do they want to destroy us.

They want us knocked down a few pegs so that they have economic advantages and so that the US doesn’t have as much international leverage.

That’s the extent of how super-powers view each other in a massively interconnected world. There is probably only a fraction of the population who really understand how incredibly huge and complicated our supply chains are, and how fragile it is, and what the consequences are of disrupting this beating pulse that keeps the world fed.

The danger is from rogue nations who are desperately trying to cling to or achieve “super power” status so they have that leverage themselves or maintain it even as it’s slipping away. Such as Russia right now, a nation so mismanaged that they genuinely saw gambling with a forever war as their best alternative for growth. The USA is going to be like that in about a generation or two as we continue to let oligarchy gut us.

Some little girl a few grades below him did that once and that’s probably why we’re here looking at him now.

He’s trying SO very hard to be the next Trumpian “fist pounding dictator” who will lead Trump’s base after his inevitable and likely relatively imminent passing.

It’s wild how nobody seems to get what hooks Trump’s political base, his fervent mob of ride-or-die, armed loyalists with the combined brainpower of an entire kindergarten.

It’s not Miller that’s for sure. He had zero power before he was able to impress Trump, and his pathetic whining and stereotypical “stringy nerd” aesthetics are going to push him back to obscurity the moment Trump breaths his last. He also talks too much, he tries too hard to sound like a criminal mastermind, when Trump’s base is calling for a huge Orc to spit in their faces and choke them out while telling them everything is gonna be great and they’re very good boys.

I found a user-repost of an old article in newsnowfinland.fi, no idea the reputability of the site or its politics but I tend to believe it based on the fact that the “proposal” never really went anywhere nor had any momentum in Europe. I tend to be very cynical about these stories because I’ve had enough CEO’s who said similar sentiments and never made any effort to actually do the thing, because largely, liberal democracy haaaaates the idea of giving people any actual hints of socialism and social care, and tend to just serve the softer arm of capital.

How Finland’s fake four-day week became a ‘fact’ in Europe’s media

We take a look at how media outlets in the UK - and in Europe, Asia, Australia and USA - were all caught out by a Finland story that was just too good to be true. Because it wasn’t.

Have you heard the news? Prime Minister Sanna Marin (SDP) is doing something radical.

“Finland’s new prime minister, 34-year-old Sanna Marin, has announced plans to introduce a four-day week” says the Guardian, underneath the statement that Marin has “promised” a short working week.

“Finland’s new prime minister calls for four-day working week” says the Independent.

Britain’s commercial television channel ITV writes that “Finland PM calls for four-day working week and six-hour days.”

“Four-day working week and six-hour shifts to be introduced in Finland” trumpets Metro.

Meanwhile in the Daily Mail, with millions of readers every day, the headline is “Finland to introduce a four-day working week and SIX-HOUR days under plans drawn up by 34-year-old prime minister Sanna Marin.”

The story is not just confined to UK media outlets either: over the course of 12 hours on Monday it’s been repeated in a Belgian media website; and been the topic of a call-in during an Irish radio programme. It’s been published in Australia, India and the USA as well.

And it’s not true.

Not only are these proposals not included in the Finnish government’s policy programme, multiple government sources told News Now Finland on Monday evening that it’s not even on the horizon. SDP politicians and party activists gather at 120th anniversary event Turku, 19th August 2019 / Credit: Jukka-Pekka Flander, SDP

Charting the origins of the story

So how did this fake news story begin, and how did the misinformation spread so quickly?

Back in August 2019 some senior Social Democrat politicians and party activists gathered in Turku on Finland’s southwest coast, for an event to mark the organisation’s 120th anniversary.

The weather was warm, the drinks were flowing, and the Turku Workers’ Association brass band – resplendent in their scarlet blazers – played traditional tunes while the guests sang along.

After then-PM Antti Rinne had made a speech, it was time for a panel discussion.

The participants included Sanna Marin – at the time Minister of Transport; Tytti Tuppurainen, Minister for European Affairs; Ville Skinnari, Minister of Development and Trade; and Antti Rönnholm, the SDP’s Party Secretary.

They sat under a canopy on a small raised stage, with a potted ficus and some SDP banners for decoration.

A moderator posed questions and kept everything moving along, but the whole event that day was about a celebration of the party’s history rather than formulating policy – which had anyway already been enshrined in Rinne’s government programme just two months before.

At one point during the discussion Sanna Marin floated the idea that Finland’s productivity could benefit from either a four-day working week, or a six-hour working day (she never suggested both).

Marin also tweeted about it at the time, noting plainly that it was an SDP party goal to reduce working hours – but to be clear, again, this was never official government policy.

The comment got some modest media attention in Finland but the news cycle soon moved on. Composite picture showing some of the misinformation about PM Sanna Marin

Tracking the spread of the fake news story

Four months after the Turku event, on 16th December 2019, Austrian news outlet Kontrast picked up the story.

Journalist Patricia Huber quoted Marin as saying that day: “A 4-day week and a 6-hour work day. Why shouldn’t that be our next step? Are eight hours really the last truth? I think people deserve to spend more time with their family, loved ones, hobbies and other aspects of their lives – like culture. That could be the next step in our working life.”

It’s the key quote to follow here, and it matches almost exactly to what Finnish media quoted Marin as saying at the time. So in that sense it’s accurate.

The next time the story crops up is 2nd January 2020, when Brussels-based newspaper New Europe published an article by journalist Zoi Didili whose headline was “Finnish PM Marin calls for 4-day-week and 6-hours working day in the country.”

It gives the impression that this is an initiative announced after Marin became PM with the opening paragraph “Sanna Marin, Finland’s new Prime Minister since early December has called for the introduction of a flexible working schedule in the country that would foresee a 4-day-week and 6-hours working day.”

It gets several things wrong in that one sentence, and while it does reference the SDP’s Turku event, it doesn’t actually quote Marin saying there should be a four-day week, or six-hour days, and frames the whole context as if it’s a new initiative since Marin became PM.

It’s this article which seems to have sparked other stories especially in the British press, who quote Marin’s comments about people deserving to spend more time with their families, but offer no context or timeline for the original information. File image of computer, cyber / Credit: iStock

How should the government respond to fake news?

This is not the most damaging piece of fake news, but the way it’s been picked up, adapted, and crucially not fact-checked by so many otherwise credible media outlets is worrying in an era where people are quick to spread information without verifying its veracity.

“If the misinformation is harmful then you should really attempt to address it as soon as possible. But always consider that the misinformation is likely to travel faster than the truth, so you are looking more at damage limitation rather than anything more effective” says Fergus Bell, CEO of Fathm, a consultancy for the news industry with a specific focus on countering misinformation in media.

“It is useful to have a communications team that know how to spot stories that might be surfacing – this is going to be the quickest way to put out a correction as quickly as possible” he advises.

It’s sound advice, and may have been hindered in Finland by Monday’s public holiday with civil servants and politicians trying to enjoy a day off. But Bell says that countering misinformation might anyway have a limited impact.

“Because of the way misinformation can spread a rebuttal might only fan the flames of the misinformation and give it life. Drawing additional attention to it isn’t going to make it go away any faster.

I mean, if we all collectively, as a species decided we wanted a post-scarcity society where everyone is guaranteed whatever they need to live including food, shelter and healthcare, we could do it with relative ease. We have the infrastructure and technology to reduce work for everyone by a drastic degree, and many people would be freed up to study, develop science and make the system even more efficient.

But we’re not even at the point of a 4-day workweek being acceptable broadly, we’re not that unified species, we’re FAR from it. Baby steps my friend. Baby steps.

I love how it’s always former politicians and officials who come out to advocate for better things in the world.

Like, you had power when you were in office, you could have at least made the effort to broach this with the people so the next elected official with power can keep the cause alive so we eventually get better outcomes. The endorsement of people without political capital has barely a shred of power in the real world chessboard of political give-and-take.

Edit: Did some research, found what I expected, that it never even made it to government and was just “some shit she said” at an event and made a tweet about.

I have a close family member who visited North Korea back when they were still mostly closed-off to tourism from America, he managed to get in on a special tour.

The tour consisted of things like giving tours of “normal North Korean grocery stores” and shopping malls.

He came back and was enthralled. He said “Wow, our media got it all wrong, they have everything! They have food and produce and phones, they’re not being held back, they even had kids playing in the hotel lobby where I stayed!”

I said to him “Are you dumb?” and he got mad.

Turns out, he was in fact, very dumb. He fell hard down the alt-right pipeline and then the conspiracy hole where he never came back from. I haven’t talked to him in a long time because he straight up lost his mind. This is not a rare occurrence, most of America’s conservative movement has been powered by this breed of people, they are also the entirety of Trump’s political capital, a fiercely loyal voting group that supports anything their leader says, and they are violent and armed. You can’t buy that kind of power.

he said the president has full and unmitigated authority

Again. He said it again.

The man has said all of this before, he just had some mental “event” happen this time that got too much light to shine on the nonsense he babbles, so now liberal America is suddenly looking at this weird little freak. I mean, I guess it’s good, but I feel like I’m taking crazy-pills here, when I heard Miller saying YEARS AGO that the president has “total authority” and the “power to do whatever he wants.”

They will make up a variation that sounds imposing, like “High Chancellor of the White House” or “Master of America.”

We had a genre of television show in the US called “Professional Wrestling” which underwent a number of name-changes and variations over the years like “World Wrestling Federation.” and other titles and was all mostly controlled by one media company.

It was not a real professional sport of any kind, but it always pretended it was real. It featured scripted characters who became more and more sensational and outlandish fighting in pre-determined, choreographed “fights.”

It was just a form of story-telling escapism and fantasy for people who didn’t read books. Because it always maintained it was “real” despite all evidence to the contrary, some segment of people got so wrapped up in the stories about heroes and villains that they fiercely defended the idea that it was real, despite featuring characters who did magic and the like, and not only resisted attempts to tell them it’s fake, they got mad at people trying to tell them it’s fake, because they felt like someone was trying to take away their fun. This was basically Lord of The Rings as an ongoing story for illiterate teenagers.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is a Professional Wrestling character. She is an antagonist whom people who don’t read love to hate or hate to love. Despite being an obvious “antagonist character” enough people wanted to believe in her that they got her elected to office. This is because broadly, people everywhere want narratives and storylines more than they want material outcomes.

Most conservative politics has gone this direction. It can be argued that the Democrat party here, the “opposition party” is in on this act to a degree, or maybe entirely in on it.

It should also be noted that Donald Trump was deeply involved in Wrestling media and learned how kayfabe works many years ago.

He hasn’t said anything new or surprising though, he’s said all this before multiple times, they don’t have shame or even worry about consequence for the things they say, if they did we wouldn’t have this mess. That’s what I’m saying, it’s wild how naive everyone is.

What the fuck do people think “scorched earth” even means.

You don’t declare “scorched earth” unless you already have overwhelming victory and have left no opposition or chances of further opposition.

It comes from the act of burning your enemies’ towns and fields to the ground, a barbaric, murderous tactic in war to weaken your enemy’s infrastructure and demoralize its people. There’s usually a lot of rape of women and children in there too, but for some reason we don’t include that in the speeches.

Comey was never a friend to progressivism and has been playing politics for a long time. I’m not particularly interested in this while there are real injustices and life-threatening budget cuts happening daily.

They got exactly what they fucking bargained for, they made off like bandits with vast sums of wealth for capitalizing on the stupidity of millions of Americans who bought into the Trump “we need a king” grift.

The only thing that changed is now that the guy has had plenty of chances to deliver his promises to make america “great” again, and didn’t, the people have gotten bored with the narrative, and so the grifters who follow popular sentiment are moving on. That’s all, there’s no regret, there’s no “leopards eating faces” there’s NOTHING FOR US TO BE FUCKING SMUG ABOUT. We are still in real danger of losing rights, benefits and democracy broadly, but now the administration has a greater chance of getting away with it, because the media hosts like Rogan are tuning everyone away from the mess he rode in on.

I despise this “satisfaction porn” that both sides indulge in within spaces like this. It’s not a good thing that the only people who had access to Trump’s circus are now moving onto cover new things because people are bored with it. It just means now they can do worse things without anyone watching.

What? they’re making millions and will continue to do so.

Grifting on Trump’s popularity with a dumber population got them huge sums of wealth, and now that the dumb population is getting bored with the Trump/king narrative they are moving to new attention-grabbing grifts.

This isn’t regret, this isn’t leopards eating anyone’s faces. Can we PLEASE stop acting like we got any kind of justice or satisfaction here, it’s worse than the pandering that the right does with each other in their dumb spaces, because at least they’re dumb and don’t know better. We should know better.

Conservatism is broadly, almost entirely, a form of kink play.

Almost every social issue they support or prop up can be dismantled down to weird sex games and/or taboos. Most of the shit they hate is also tied to sexual hangups they have and are repulsed by themselves for being curious about - IE: look up pornhub keywords alongside right-wing vernacular and other leading issues. It’s not a coincidence that “cuckolding” porn became immensely popular the same time that they started using the word “cuck” as an insult against people they don’t like. You can see it in many other issues going back as far as gay rights and the current obsession with trans people.

We kill kings.

Are you in France? The last king killed by his own subjects was French king King Louis XVI. After that it was probably Tsar Nicholas II of Russia if you count him as a king. America sought independence from monarchy and never took the war to Britain.

I get what you’re saying, but I think the whole “mindless, indiscriminate killing of people against us” narrative fits far better with people who fasten political flags to the beds of their pickup trucks and collect guns so they can shoot democrats alongside Jesus come Armageddon day.

It’s not that I think there shouldn’t be capital punishment for heinous actions, but with both political sides calling each other “nazis” and the right saying the left is violent while ramping up violence, we have to be better about rhetoric and the chance for ambiguity. Lets get better.

This is nothing new, Miller has said himself the president has absolute power. We’re just all transfixed now because Miller fell down a Khole or his amphetamines started to wear off in the middle of an interview.

If it takes this kind of spectacle to make people aware of how bad this administration is, we’re so fucked.

I don’t understand what you’re going on about, I am talking about politics as it’s happening, and didn’t even frame it in a left/right way, I am talking about the administration and media’s framing of bailouts for “farmers.”

Are you a bot?

No, but middle-class liberal america are still the country’s actual breadbasket, and the ones who are most easily influenced with simplistic imagery and narratives, so that’s who these stories are designed to appeal to. It would really, really twist official narratives if America broadly realized that some industries get socialism and others don’t.