THR journalists being made responsible for the evolution of respective national languages

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Week 27

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Andy McCoy is known for his creative mix of different languages. He speaks his own pidgin.

Date: Jun 29th, 2020
Motion: THS journalists being made responsible for the evolution of respective national languages
Role: MP (opp.)

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I am sometimes put off by the way the Finnish language, my native one, is mangled and mauled by its native speakers. I have some pet peeves that do not seem to go away. This is nothing new; even Hyacinth Bucket MUST have had some reservations about the way her younger sisters or some other personality used the sacrosanct language of Albion. In the following, I’m going into some detail about this matter.

At some point, Finnish art critics, be it critics of pictorial art, theatre, literature, pop music, classical music, movies or adult films, began to write in this way: if some piece of art had been experienced/seen by so-and-so-many people, the piece had COLLECTED, GATHERED OR GLEANED so-and-so-many (paying) art aficionados, consumers or visitors. I was aghast. First of all, works of art are inanimate, so they cannot possibly actively do any of that, as it’s the will of their creators that have that pulling power. My first reaction was to blame the interfererence of the English language. I was sure that English was to blame, as pernicious developments in language sometimes stem from the global dominance of English on them.

Finnish is a language in which a syntactically dominant feature is that when something or someone has something (we are talking about the genitive), it is formed in inflecting the owner, adding the verb BE and ending with what is being owned. It is, technically, rendered as the owner+LLA or +LLÄ + be-verb in the singular irrespective of what follows + the owned, meaning “X has Y”. This is a very basic feature of the language and it is used in many related but looser contexts than direct proprietary ownership, i.e. “Carol has fever”, for instance. But, because it is orthographically hard to add the agglutinative ‘LLA’/’LLÄ’ to works of art of a foreign origin, such as A Clockwork Orange, art critics began to use a made-up form to circumvent the problem: ‘art X HAS COLLECTED Y people’. Critics did this because they did not want to follow the correct grammar, as they felt it was too onerous to follow, even though good ways may be learnt from grammar books. It turned out that English was not the culprit. Domestic indifference was.

I believe that the first ones to practise this kind of bad diction were rock critics in the few publications that are still left, as they always feel like (and are) the underdogs. That would have been fair enough. But, then the bad ways began to spread to other critics of art, who had nothing to do with rock music. Etc. etc. These days, even the National Broadcasting Corporation, YLE, has journalist critics who write in this “pidgin” way, because they do not know any better. If I needed to come up with an analogy, I would say that this would exemplify “how NME English becomes, by a sleight of hand, BBC English”.

Usually, when we’re talking about borrowed language, we are talking about mere words, but like I demonstrated, there may be also “structure loans” or developments that look like them, even if they are entirely of domestic making. Another example is when we say that “someone answers for or is responsible for the directing of this and that opera/photos/production/work of art”, when we mean that someone has created it or made that art, or, in other cases, when someone directs or leads some activity. Somehow a juridical responsibility (i.e. as in “they’ll answer for this!”) is substituted for the sheer joy of acting like the wild child that an artist or entrepreneur often is deep down. It makes no sense. Maybe it’s a sign of a solicitor society gone far too far. Being constructive does not lead to litigation. Being destructive leads. This phenomenon is ubiquitous in Finnish, all kinds of people are always answering for this and that, beyond the juridical aspect, but I have seen the same thing expressed in English, too. It is quite upsetting, when people bend their language in this way.

The rest of this speech goes to borrowed words. One example of a random, working loan is the word for the remote control. It is officially “kaukosäädin”, but it is often shortened to “kake”, “kaukkari” or “kauko”, whose English equivalents could be “remo”, “remoter” or “the remote”. The thing is that… any word of popular significance should be domesticated straight away into a receiving language. As soon as a novel word, secular or specialised, was detected on the radar, it should be taken under the loupe and slapped with an adequate ersatz word. The lazy way is to add an +i to it, which is the stopgap way of domesticating ANY noun, proper or common, into Finnish. The vowel is added as Finnish words need to end in one, and i is a middle one, a neutral one.

If there was, say, a Ministry of Localisation (Min-Loc) that would take care of this, it would not be overreaching. What people could do, on the other hand, is to come up with all the nicknames and pet names, abbreviations for novel words. That way coming up with new words would be patronising and independent at the same time. What is not needed is structural loans and tampering with grammar & usage. We don’t need that from other languages, as we have our own sense of purity. What we need is domesticated foreign words, usually nouns, in our language, but for all that keeping other influence at an arm’s length.

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Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t): Tämä on ehkä kokonaisuutena vähän tylsä, mutta tarkoituksenmukaisena puolena on, että edustajanpuheelle luonteenmukaisesti fokus on yksityiskohdissa. On aiempien tehtävä puhua laveammin ja leväperäisemmin, jotta oikeus tapahtuisi. Aiemmat voivat ottaa puheeksi esimerkiksi toimittajien taipumuksen olla sopuleita (kopioida toistensa virheitä) tai lehdissä olevien kirjoitus- ja muiden virheiden määrä nykyisin. Tämä ei silti tarkoita, etteikö hallituksellekin jäisi hyviä pointteja ajettavaksi.

THR the bookwormy past we come from

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Week 26

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When one spends one’s leisure reading, it’s like taking money out of the bank account.

Date: Jun 22nd, 2020
Motion: THR the bookwormy past we come from
Role: PM (gov.)

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Finnish author Jörn Donner was known for his slogan in the 80’s, “reading always pays off”, which was used in the commercials of the nationally then 2nd biggest bookstore chain, with Donner sitting in a chair like a latter-day FDR and uttering these avuncular words. Mr. Donner was chosen for this role partly because he had always been an avid reader, with a book collection that was always the hardest part to move whenever he moved between quarters, consisting of boxloads of books.

Mr. Donner is no longer with us, having passed away during the winter this year, and surprisingly the most topical book about him now is one written by his estranged love-child son in Sweden, Otto, whose book Vildhavre, meaning a weed variant of oat in reference to the verb phrase “sow one’s wild oats” and how some children are legitimate and entitled, whereas some are considered mere nuisances, tells the book- and celebrity-hungry public about the social awkwardness and baggage that comes with being the illegitimate son of a bookworm father.

I haven’t read a single one of the books that Mr. Donner wrote himself, but I could consider reading the illegitimate son’s memoir, as it is available in two languages at least so far, and it would nicely jog my proficiency in the other one. I’m all for precision-reading and singling out some special books to read intensively — rather than spending weeks, months, years and decades reading just about anything extensively. In the following, I’m presenting my arguments why reading books is NOT the best thing that one can do with one’s pants on.

Books Need to Fulfil More Requirements Than Just One
If we grab a book, the experience cannot be just skin-deep. Reading information-poor text for hours and pages on end is futile and tiresome, if not a health hazard. The books we read would preferably have a very rich informative content that we can use in our adult lives or alternatively a very rich fictive or philosophical content that we can equally usefully use in our adult (or imaginative) lives (if we are in a creative profession). In addition, the book might be read in a foreign language to jog our language instincts, since we get preciously little language exercise once we graduate from any of the schools we ever went to. Because every picture tells more than a thousand words, we would also benefit from reading autobiographies or biographies that typically have a middle section consisting of black-and-white or colour photographs snapped along the way.

Once Adulthood Has Set in, We Can Theoretically Let Go of Books
One of the great reasons why children and teenagers (aged 3 – 21) read books is that they WANT to KNOW what it is like to be an adult. Because real adults never tell them what it really is like to be an adult with an adult’s freedoms and responsibilities, they try to gather that wisdom from books on their own and on the sly. That’s why we see these precocious bespectacled youth biking to and from libraries with their satchels filled with borrowed books that they are returning within a week or two. They are desperate to know adult life from all possible angles, and who the better ones to teach them than adult authors in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, their productions bulging with juicy details about sordid lives and telling anecdotes about dreams, fears and triumphs, not to speak of uncannily accurate descriptions of exteriors, interiors and personalities. For all that, once we begin to have that a posteriori knowledge of our own, dirty and down to a tee, the importance of books begins to ebb, and once we start correcting politicians’ deliveries and speeches in parliament, we know that we are adults and we don’t need no introduction to that anymore. Conversely, if we see people who read voraciously when they are already mature, we can postulate that they do not feel like adults yet.

Second Reading Is Necessary for the Content to Sink In
Reading books is useless in the sense that most of them are read in childhood and teenage as outlined above, and their contents are forgotten in adulthood, as the distance to that first reading experience is fading fast and the brain is already filling up with gigabytes of new data on this and that. Any book that we have read would seriously benefit from a 2nd take, and that take should occur in adulthood. When we read a book for the second time, we notice the author’s adult style, funny references to contemporary culture or events, his or her habitual word usage, period aura and things we generally speaking omitted the first time around. It is also this second time that makes the book’s true content stick with us, as we can no longer forget something that we have read twice. The bad thing is that very few of us have the privilege and possibility to read books twice, with several years between the two instances. Time on our hands is not simply enough to allow for this to happen. So, in the best of cases we read a random book once in our lives.

I have presented you with reasons why reading is NOT that fulfilling, fun or rewarding on closer inspection. Reading is not as useful as you might think, while writing is not as difficult as you might think. These days, anyone seems to be capable of writing crime fiction, formerly called detective stories, but that capacity obviously doesn’t spring from experience in self-taught crime or police work — but, rather, hours spent reading crime fiction. Many of those usually academic authors had an entirely different layman’s day job before they ultimately became full-time authors. Reading enough makes for a graduate school in writing as well, for the better and for the worse. There is definitely a lot about books that makes reading them not such a no-brainer that librarians or the intelligentsia would have you believe at first.

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Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t): Ensimmäisen puhujan pitää ottaa lava haltuun, ja näin se lava otetaan. Perspektiivin täytyy olla riittävän laaja ja selkeä, joten ei ole fiksua alkaa saivartelemaan esimerkiksi e-kirjojen ja tavallisten kirjojen lukemisen välisestä erosta tai keskittyä internetin vaikutuksiin luku- ja kirjoitustaidoissa ja -tavoissa. Aihe ei tästä tyhjene, sillä parille ja edustajalle jää tämän jälkeen mahdollisuus tarttua esimerkiksi huonoon kustannustoimittamiseen tai siihen, miten korkeatasoisia sivilisaatioita on osattu pitää pystyssä ilman luku- ja kirjoitustaitoakin.

THW care about the costs covid-19 poses to the economy

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Week 25

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This is the second one in a series of two speeches on the Corona Crisis.

 

Date: Jun 15th, 2020
Motion: THW not care about the costs covid-19 poses to the economy
Role: MP (opp.)

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Money burns when corona turns, the world upside down.

Some people raised about a month or so ago the germane question, “how much may a human life cost in a medical situation” or “who decides on who gets to live or not, when there is merely One ventilator around?” etc. etc. These are philosophical, fundamental questions that we are sometimes terrorised with in real life and often in debate societies. However, there is the absolutist ring to the question, with our backs against the wall, so to speak, mostly because we are not used to thinking about these questions in a relativist manner amid our daily routines.

We have to crunch numbers to get an answer, rather than turn to theology or philosophy. It has been claimed that the Finnish corporate sector, the one that pays taxes in order to pay for the welfare state, needs now somewhere between €2bn and €20bn to get back on its feet to turn a profit and thereafter to pay taxes. That is taken as loans from abroad, as usual. In Sweden, which has had the least restrictions in Nordic countries, the death toll hovers around 4 500 people. About 3 in 4 of that number have died in homes for senior citizens and the elderly. In Finland, 326 people, less than a tenth of that, have died. For all that, we should not forget that there is also a general mortality that is not nil, in the meantime, and its partially attributable to disease that are not unlike covid-19.

Finland Could Have Gone the Way of Sweden
We may assume that had Finland had her restrictions on the same level as Sweden, the Finnish death toll would have been half of Sweden’s, in other words, circa 2 250 people. This is because Finland is an oblong land like Sweden is, its population is roughly half of Sweden’s and the same climate governs life on these latitudes, so we can rest quite assured that the disease would have spread here and there in a similar manner.

It can now be counted how much each saved life cost us. We have to deduct the number of those who already died, 326 from 2 250. That leaves us with 1 924. That is the “difference” of Finnish “excellence”, being “best in a class of its own”. If the losses to the economy have been from 2bn to 20bn, each saved, otherwise died life has cost us between €1 039 501 (minimum) and €10 395 010 (maximum). That is an enormous figure.

There Are Other Life-Threatening Disease As Well
The question goes how much we do pay in prevention of other costly casualties in the grip of disease. How much do we pay for the lifetime maintenance of a diabetes-1 patient? How much do we pay for the lifetime maintenance of an HIV patient lest (s)he turn into an AIDS patient? How much do we pay in the case of body burns or car crash rehabilitation costs? How much do we pay for the remaining lifetime of an Alzheimer’s sufferer? If there is a ceiling of sorts to these costs, it could also be the ceiling for how much a potential covid-19 preventable death could cost us.

Another way to calculate the relativist “right” cost is to look at how much covid-19 patients have cost society when they have received the FULL treatment in the grip of the disease. That would accumulate from an ambulance ride to the hospital to the positive blood test to care to intensive care to a ventilator to antiviral drugs to a slow recuperation, including three meals a day and visits from specialist epidemiologists. The prevention of a new case should not cost more (to the national economy) than the treatment of an old case has cost (to the taxpayers).

There Needs to Be a Ceiling
To save the economy from future shocks caused by wandering bacteria and viruses, society should calculate how much it is willing to spend on saving lives. If the ceiling is set at, say, €50 000, it would mean that restrictions to people’s consumership and inland mobility should be much less severe than what they were a while ago. Companies lose less money if we come to the conclusion that a saved human life is not incalculable or immeasurable. We don’t have to take that measure from Jesus but from the cost that other, potentially or patently fatal disease impose upon us.

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Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t): Koska olen puoleni ‘toisella puoliajalla’ puhuja, minua edeltävien puhujien pitää olla samalla asialla mutta eri tavalla. Toiveissani yksi omistani puhuisi siitä, miten koronavirus faktisesti tekee vain “rikkaista rikkaampia ja köyhistä köyhempiä”, vaikka vastapuoli saattaisi uneksua päinvastaisesta, ja toinen puhuisi siitä, miten kokonaiset toimeliaisuuden alat, jotka ovat eniten väenpaljouksista riippuvaisia, pyyhkiytyisivät hetkeksi kartalta tai joutuisivat massiivisten omistusten uudelleenjärjestelyjen kohteeksi. Viittaukset ekologiaan sen sijaan ovat turhia, koska maailman ilmaa ja meriä saastuttavuus on vain laskenut virusepidemian aikana, vaikka jätevuoret ehkä ovatkin kasvaneet.

THB the real culprits of Covid-19 have not been found yet

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Week 24

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This is the first one in a series of two speeches on the Corona Crisis.

 

Date: Jun 9th, 2020
Motion: THB the real culprits of Covid-19 have not been found yet
Role: Minister (gov.)

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China was ground zero for the global pandemic rather than Antarctica, which did not even suffer from it at all. The names of the continents are accidentally in Finnish, but that should not make them “illegible”.

A good question after the corona crisis is why China is not the target of accusations or criticism. Self-flagellation and the punitive treatment of unpopular (rightwing) leaders (Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro) has been on the agenda throughout the crisis, but in truth China is largely to blame for what “just happened”.

It doesn’t seem to be enough that China is leading the global race in capitalism and world economy; it is also gravely damaging other economies with what happened, unwittingly or wittingly, with a vested interest or not. Maybe this is the kind of “influence” that Chinese want, an implicit kind of influence and a soft kind of undermining that gives the Chinese more of what they most wanted a while ago: money.

This is the anatomy of the Chinese “perfect trident”.

A Vernacular Mixture of the New and the Old
In China, old superstitions are mixed up with the fabric of today’s modern society and its newer doctrines, empiricism and ideologies. That is why a Chinese can buy wild animals (such as pangolins, snakes or tortoises) or parts thereof at a street market and cook them up in one’s apartment, whether it’s for culinarism, the scholastic aptitude of the children or virility, while he or she is also living in a computerised world of digital appliances and a general no-nonsense attitude about everything. Chinese have embraced (post)modernity but they have not given up on what they had before that (antiquity, the Dark Ages), and that in itself is a bit of a problem in today’s hygienic, purified, sanitised world.

Culture of Secrecy and Oppression of the People
The Communist Party of China learnt its MO during the oppressive Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao (1966 – 1976) and before and beyond. It tries to retain secret a lot of what should by no means anymore kept mum about in a globalised world. Health scares are one such thing.
In the past, when nations were segregated by currencies, customs, tariffs and limited tourism, their internal affairs could often be concealed, something which was also heightened by the division of the earth into the 1st, 2nd and 3rd world (Capitalist countries / Communist countries / un[der]developed countries). Communist regimes did not want the whole world to know what they did wrong, such as in the Chernobyl catastrophe, and capitalist countries would rather we had not known about such embarrassments as the Three Mile Island accident or the Fukushima leak. Today, Health & Wealth are a kind of global currency, needed and wanted everywhere, cherished and promoted at all corners, and therefore any health concern that originates in any country that is member of the United Nations, what with its WHO preoccupied with occurrences like pandemics, should be made public, talked about and remedied as soon as possible.

Paradoxical Liberty to Trot the World
Notwithstanding the communist parties’ long-abiding control over their populations, Chinese have been allowed to leave their country to explore the world, something that was not allowed for the citizens of the former Soviet Union or the Eastern bloc. And travel they have. Throngs of Chinese tourists are not uncommon anywhere. They often move in big gatherings, visit local super markets for rice and refreshments and often leave a bigger lump sum to local economies than tourists of other ethnicities. Usually they manage their business in a combination of broken English and sign language, which in itself is usually just fine for practical concerns.

In a nutshell, the crisis of Covid-19 came about when a certain nationality was “allowed” (in quots) to develop biological weapons of mass destruction with their own idiosyncratic lifestyle, which borrows in an illogical fashion both from the past and the present and the future, after which the studiedly old-school brass of their nation enforced a silence and censorship over what had happened in the name of international “reputation”, whereafter the whole buck of the mishap could be passed abroad and recycled, from among the nation’s own citizenry, the best agents of all secret agents.

There is a telling silence concerning the true nature of what happened. Yes, I know why. China is a demographical behemoth, an economical powerhouse and a military superpower, the like of which has not been seen in recent memory. But, China is also one of the 190+ nations that constitute the UN and it should be held accountable for what it is and what it does. No country is an island and China is not even an island. Taiwan is.

Thank you.

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Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t): Joillakin väittelyfoorumeilla on tuskailtu sitä, ettei koronaviruksesta “voi pitää” väittelyä, koska väittely koskisi vain sitä, pitääkö meillä olla erittäin paljon rajoituksia vai melko paljon rajoituksia, mikä kävi myös selväksi mielipidekirjoituksista lehtien yleisön osastoilla noin maaliskuun loppupuolen ja huhtikuun alkupuolen välillä. Tämä on tietysti harhaa ja pötyä. Väittelyn voi saada aikaiseksi, kun pitää huolen siitä, että molemmilla puolilla on riittävästi ilmaa hengitettäväksi, ja valitsee yllättävämmän näkökulman.
Tässä puheessa on se erikoisuus, että II tiimi samalla puolella voi lähteä täysin eri suuntaan myöhemmin. Heidän vastuullaan on on olla puukottamatta I tiimiä, koska I tiimi ei voi tietää, mitä he aikovat sanoa.
Vaihtoehtoisesti puheen voisi myös pitää vastustajan tontilta käsin, jolloin se ikään kuin juontuisi aloitteen käännetystä sanamuodosta “epidemian todelliset syylliset tiedetään jo”. Avain käsittelyyn on tulkinnassa. Aika harva puhe kelpaa esitettäväksi kummaltakin puolelta, vaan tämä on sellainen.