Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
People have been elucidating the reason why Americans and Europeans, in general, keep supporting Ukraine in many individual posts; one of the main pillars of the global international order is countries not altering their borders unilaterally through invasion and annexation, and whatever other violations to this principle there have been, none have been as flagrant as what Russia is doing now.
However, beyond that, is there any wonder why I, as a Finn, would have a special reason for hoping Russia loses, and loses badly? It's not just an abstraction when one lives in a country next to Russia, which used to be a part of the Russian Empire, which was for a long time in Russia/SU's claimed sphere of influence, which went through another "border adjustment" by Russia in 1939/1940. The said border adjustment, incidentally, meant my father had to leave his home while two years old, an event he would still recount on the phone while drunk and crying to his adult children decades after it happened. The said border adjustment removing my native Eastern Finland of what would have been its natural biggest city and a potential hometown for me, Viipuri, and turning it into a peripheral Russian wreck of a town. And a hundred other similar reasons.
What is crucial for Finland's future is one thing: Russia finally learning that it is not a special country. It does not have a sovereign right to adjust its own borders on a whim. Not for the "protection of Russian minorities", not for "russkiy mir", not for its ephemeral "security", certainly not because - as one tends to hear from countless Russian patriots when discussing this - because Russia's bordering countries just are puny and useless and will be dominated by one country or another anyway, so might as well be Russia. And there really seems to be no other potential way for Russia to learn this lesson than getting drubbed in Ukraine, and drubbed badly.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
One of the things about the war I've been thinking about lately is how hard it has been to predict what's going to happen next. I'm not sure if there's anyone with a clear bill of being able to predict even the grand trends of the war for the entire duration. To have that you'd need to have:
- been able to confidently even predict the war is going to start, after several false predictions on dates (a lot of folks, me included, would be right out this stage)
- then go with the absolutely most bonkers pro-Ukrainian position until approximately autumn 2022 (insofar as I remember, it genuinely was only the most bonkers pro-Ukrainian types who were first able to predict that Russians would withdraw from Kiev and Ukraine wouldn't collapse right from the gate, then that Europe would do all the sanctions and support it has right now instead of chickening out immediately, then that the Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives would actually be successful even after Kherson offensive had become a regular joke among pro-Russia types)
- then move smoothly to a moderately pro-Russian narrative (ie not go with the predictions of renewed Russian offensives pushing to Odessa etc., but also be able to predict there would be no further major successes for Ukraine after Kharkiv and that Russia would still make gains in Donbass)
- and, of course, all the while not predict that there would be further countries invaded, WMDs used, Western intervention etc., all of which were widely and often confidently speculated on at multiple intervals
All things considered, while my guess would be some sort of a ceasefire during this winter with frontlines wherever they are, I fully also acknowledge this has all the chances of being wrong with something else happening, though who knows what.
Culture War in Finland: Onrolling Far-Right Scandal Moves on to Forums Poasting
The Finnish government has been up for three weeks and pretty much all of that has gone to abjudicating the various comments and stuff said by ministers belonging to right-wing nationalist The Finns Party. The last few days in Finnish politics have focused on party leader Riikka Purra, now the Finance Minister (and the second most powerful member of the govt, at least formally), and her online posts from 15 years ago.
These posts were made in the online guestbook of previous party leader Jussi Halla-aho, the guy who basically is responsible for kickstarting modern anti-immigrationism in Finland and for the anti-immigration hardline faction taking over the Finns Party. Halla-aho got famous for running a blog and gaining grassroots support through it, and an important part of it was his "guestbook", an old-style webpage guestbook which eventually started functioning as an informal forum (imagine a forum with only one ongoing thread). The guestbook, alongside some other forums, was used for bringing together the faction that would eventually grow strong enough to elect several people as MPs, and these people (and people in their general orbit) now make up the party's elite.
The entire guestbook is still online and searchable, the original guestbook at Halla-aho's website is gone (apparently due to hosting troubles), but there's a mirrored copy of it elsewhere. A number of web sleuths found out that one of the guestbook's posters was nicknamed "riikka". Now, Riikka is a pretty common name in Finland, so that wouldn't alone be enough to connect this to Purra, but sleuths also found out that:
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nickname "riikka" has stated that she comes from a left-wing home and that her parents had taken a pic of her as a child in front of Lenin's statue - Riikka Purra has told a similar story on TV
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nickname "riikka" stated that she went to same school as leftist MP Anna Kontula - Kontula and Purra have gone to same secondary school in Tampere
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nickname "riikka" sent the guestbook greetings from Barcelona on 25 August and 27 August 2008, dates on which Riikka Purra participated in an academic conference there
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nickname "riikka" talked about moving to small town of Kirkkonummi in 2008 and asked about the number of immigrants in a specific neighborhood. Apparently the number was low, since Riikka Purra has indeed lived in that neighborhood in that town since 2008
And many other similar congruities, ie. it's pretty obvious to anyone that this is the same person. Nickname "riikka" had also posted on the guestbook posts, where she:
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drops the Finnish n-word several times (it's a linguistic question whether that word is the equivalent of English n-word or the word "Negro", but these are angry enough one might say it's the former in this context), as well as talking about a Middle-Eastern man as a "Turkish monkey or whatever", as well as uses some more creative (common in the Finnish racism community) slurs, such as the ones translating to "mocha dicks", "somps" (Somali + chimp) etc.
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ironically calls herself and other forums members "raycist" and "Nezi" (net + Nazi), including asking others for beer by saying "Any Nezis in Helsinki today up for spitting on beggars and beating up n-word children?"
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states that "if I had a gun there would be bodies on this train" after hearing a black teenager say "I don't care about Finland" and going "BANG BANG!" with fingerguns at her on a train (this happened two days after a notorious school shooting)
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After browsing a Finnish Islamic forum describes herself as "so full of hatred and rage she is going to melt on her chair" and says that things like this start to seriously bother her life since "there's nothing else running through [her] head"; also gets angry after seeing a fat Somali family eating at McDonalds at the same time as her family
And other such fare. In other words, at least the most notorious poasts are a mix of edgy injokes and weird ranting. Unsurprisingly these discoveries don't play well in the media, local or foreign (the Finnish foreign minister, while at the NATO summit in Vilnius, actually apologized to Turkey (our new NATO ally, mind) for the "Turkish monkeys" thing.
Purra has copped to being "riikka", and while she originally commented this by saying "there's nothing to apologize or explain", she ended up apologizing and saying that of course the government or she don't tolerate racism and so on. Many of the party's supporters are disappointed and believe that she cucked, but of course if you're in actual government with other parties you kind of have to occasionally do what they demand you will do, if the alternative is your party getting kicked out of the government.
All of this probably serves to indicate what happens when - basically - an Internet forum ends up taking over a political party, and potential for similar things exists might exist in other countries, considering the centrality of Internet in modern communications. I'm pretty sure that Purra, 15 years ago, didn't think that her ranting online might have any importance whatsoever regarding domestic politics or, indeed, that she would even rise to her current heights, but maybe you already have a bunch of groypers in America making edgy jokes on Twitter or wherever who will have to eventually explain that stuff 15 years from now when running for Senate or some other high post.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Again, as I said, we're not talking about Soviet external claims. We're talking about Soviet internal numbers, ones that became available during the period of expectional openness that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. (Among other things, such numbers have been generally used to bring clarity to the extent of the Great Purge, the gulag system etc.) These numbers might, of course, contain mistakes, just like all demographic statistics, particularly in authoritarian countries. However, even in such cases, one would expect those numbers to rather exaggerate the effort of instances like NKVD to do whatever they've been tasked with doing, rather than diminishing them.
I've been interested in demographic numbers and questions for a long time, so it's natural to me to take this approach also to this issue. It speaks volumes to me if the crucial question of "well, what happened to the Jews then?" is treated by revisionists in such a cavalier manner.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2mo ago
Okay, this is obviously a very minor point, but a Calvinist church... with a monastery?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
"Woke madness has gone so far that they are now ahistorically portraying black people as criminals" is certainly a new twist.
Some of these criticisms are pretty odd. The Harkonnens absolutely were shown as perverse and brutal, a lot of that was just dumped on Feyd-Rautha here, and I liked what Villeneuve did with Feyd-Rautha very much. "Feyd-Rautha as a psychosexual Darth Maul" turned out lot better than the usual "Feyd-Rautha as a somewhat more competent Joffrey Baratheon" thing and Austin Butler was great with microexpressions. The worst thing about the casting of the Emperor Shaddam IV (not a particularly major character anyway) is that it's impossible to see Christopher Walken as something other than Christopher Walken, but other than that, casting him as intergalactic Joe Biden showcases that we're seeing a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down. I don't understand the point about Irulan.
I understand the Alia criticism - I had been quite averse to early rumors on how Alia would be handled but ended up being OK with it, I guess that the murder toddler would have been something that might have become ridiculous too easily - and share the Chani criticism, though that might have also worked better if Zendaya was a better actor outside of the love scenes, which she handled well.
Personally I thought that the part with Paul taking the worm juice could have been handled (a lot) better and Dave Bautista was kind of wasted in this movie.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
The sub appears to be connected to the "black women divestment" movement. I've seen references to this a couple of times, but the whole idea seems to generally be connected to the idea that black women should detach themselves from the general "black community" (ie. black men), start dating white guys and concentrate on self-improvement instead of social justice causes. ie. according to this Medium post that I found and that bashes the movement:
Divest/ Divest Black Women/Divested Black Women
This movement is derived from BWE, but with a more intentional focus on “divesting” oneself from the Black community, from social justice (#BurnTheCape), and from issues relating to Black male oppression. Self-improvement (feminization training, weight loss, professional development) is promoted as a means of achieving hypergamy. Compared to BWE/BWGTOW, there is more of a focus on colorism and the disparate treatment of monoracial dark-skinned Black women (DSBW). Less centralized, and more spread out across social media platforms, this movement appears to be the most current as well as the most popular iteration of the BWE ecosystem. As I will explain later, this movement is also notable for its idealization of traditional gender roles, and its pointed interest in the perceived failure of Black men (especially in Western countries) in comparison to other groups of men. Predominantly Black neighborhoods are derisively called “Blackistan”. “Blackistan” is a conceptual place where Black dysfunction and violent crime flourish.
I would expect such a movement to have offbeat views on a great variety of things, and wouldn't certainly use it as a barometer for progressive thought.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
Is there something inconsistent about being right-wing and supporting fighting Russia? You would simply be one link in potentially numerous generations of right-wing local nationalists who have supported the same.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Isn't "DAN", at this point, basically just a bot trained, through user feedback, to answer the questions in a way that a "typical DAN user", ie. 4chan/rw twitter schizoposter, would expect? That's why it spouts conspiracy theories - that's what a "typical DAN user" would expect. It's not that much more of a real chatbot than the original ChatGPT.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
It's a bit hard for me to see it that way, since, as said, insofar as I've been interested in the whole debate, it's been through the demographic question, dovetailing with my interest in various other demographic questions. The whole debate about door hole placement in Auschwitz or the specific details of victim testimonies has never held my interest, and I have little to say about it.
However, howevermuch one would want to say "reversal of the burden of proof", the question is still there, isn't it? It doesn't just go way by such a reference. While the Holocaust has been, of course, related to many criminal cases, in the sense of this forum debate we're not talking about a formal criminal case debated by a court - it's a historiographical debate, one with many different varying facets, one of which seemingly is one that revisionists wish to avoid (apart from saying "Look, Sanning!")
Furthermore, Sanning's book is not just about debunking standard claims about the Holocaust - he makes some quite far-reaching claims himself, including one about there being a genocidal murder of the Polish Jews, just one done by Soviets instead of the Nazis. This highly unusual claim comes with precious little proof of this happening, especially considering - as linked previously - that we can now peruse Soviet files on this era, and they do not show a transport/labor camp operation of the claimed sort. If one uses Sanning as reference, shouldn't there be at least a bit more effort to offer proof for his particular claims?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
And they have deprived a third of their population of the right to vote on the basis of ethnicity.
None of the Baltic countries has "deprived a third of their population of the right to vote on the basis of ethnicity", this assuredly referring to stateless post-Soviet citizens in Estonia and Latvia (not Lithuania, incidentally). Currently ca 9-10 % of Latvian and 7-8 % of Estonian population has the non-citizen status; this was not based on ethnicity but on the basis of becoming resident in these countries during Soviet occupation times (in other words, people descending from Estonian or Latvian Russian minorities that had existed there before the Soviet occupation gained citizenship among the others). Of course the noncitizen numbers were larger in the past decades, but many of them have been naturalized since.
Finnish MP Quiz: Initial results
(note: I've created a second equivalent quiz, you may click here to take it if you want to test yourself more without reading analysis)
The quiz has been taken 237 times (at the moment of writing). The best results has been 19/20 (this may have been just me testing the quiz, though). The worst result is 3/20. The average result is 10.8 - while this looks like only a little better than random change, it should be mentioned that evidently not all answered every question.
Going through the individual MP's, here's how they rank on the basis of how correctly they were guessed (in other words, the number shows how many people correctly guessed a left MP as leftist or a right MP as rightist):
LEFT MPs
97 % Pia Lohikoski (Left Alliance)
77 % Tiina Elo (Greens)
68 % Anneli Kiljunen (Social Democrats)
65 % Seppo Eskelinen (Social Democrats)
64 % Pirkka-Pekka Petelius (Greens)
50 % Kimmo Kiljunen (Social Democrats)
47 % Ville Skinnari (Social Democrats)
14 % Markus Mustajärvi (Left Alliance)
RIGHT MPs
73 % Vilhelm Junnila (The Finns)
71 % Janne Heikkinen (National Coalition)
68 % Mauri Peltokangas (The Finns)
64 % Ville Vähämäki (The Finns)
58 % Wille Rydman (National Coalition, currently independent pending review)
52 % Jouni Kotiaho (The Finns)
51 % Kai Mykkänen (National Coalition)
42 % Kaisa Juuso (The Finns)
41 % Hannakaisa Heikkinen (Centre)
32 % Ville Valkonen (National Coalition)
30 % Hanna Kosonen (Centre)
25 % Riikka Slunga-Poutsalo (The Finns)
QUICK THOUGHTS:
The fact that there is one MP who was correctly guessed by 97 % shows people have tried to answer the quiz seriously, for the most part. It's not surprising that Pia Lohikoski would be guessed correctly by the most, as there are several cultural signals (red hair, glasses, jewelry) that probably are more associated with left-wingness than right-wingness interculturally.
On the other hand, her party comrade Markus Mustajärvi was the most wrongly guessed person in the quiz; it probably should be mentioned that while both indeed belong to the leftmost party in the Finnish parliament, Mustajärvi is probably the most "red-tribe-equivalent" leftist politician in the country, representing the deepest reaches of Lapland, being very much a "trad leftist" type, opposing for instance gun control bills when they have occasionally been proposed, once causing a scandal by drunkenly addressing a far-right rally etc.
Generally speaking, I suspect many simply associated women with left wing and men with right wing. Finnish political dress codes for women are typically looser than in countries like US and "normie dresses" and such are pretty normal female politician-wear; the sort of a "power pantsuit" you'd associate with Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi etc. would be reserved to a very distinct class of right-wing female politicians.
The two female politicians from the Centre were guessed more incorrectly than correctly, and Centre, indeed, would probably be the party whose members would most likely resent me placing them in the "Right" category; this party, stereotypically representing rural interests, identifies as centrist (as the name says) and is in government with the three left-wing parties, but it also constantly fights with those parties in all manner of policy issues, recently almost bringing down the government, and at least at this point I would guess most Finns would place the party on the Right.
Some people said that 20 pols is too little and they want to test again if they are now better at a particular form of cultural pattern-matching, so I've created a second quiz with 20 more MPs. My subjective appraisal is that this might be a little bit easier?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
I don't care about Jan 6th but are you really saying it was treated the same of the protests the summer before?
No, because it was a literal attempt at overturning a democratic election result, ie. a coup attempt. No matter how farcical or amateurish, that's what it was. The people invading the Capitol obviously thought in some way that their actions would lead to Trump being declared the president, despite that, according to the law, this wasn't supposed to happen, and indeed didn't happen. That's a coup attempt by whatever definition of the words you are using; it is absolutely not surprising at all that a coup attempt would be treated more harshly than an "ordinary" riot.
Making a character a vegan or an animal rights activist has been a very typical TV way of conveying that they're an annoying, priggish fanatical progressive. I'm not a vegan or any sorts of an animal-rights type myself, but I've noted this for some time now. Lindsay in Arrested Development comes to mind. Or having veganism being used to convey being a killjoy in general; Angela in Office (US) was no progressive, but still had somewhat incongruous veganism tacked on her to accentuate her being a stuck-up bore.
Of course, you also get progressive characters who are alternatively written as noble and annoying; some of Lisa Simpson's more annoying moments involve her veganism, and I hold that Hermione Granger's SPEW (which, today, seems to mostly be interpreted as some sort of a dis of antiracist activism, and thus brought up as evidence of Rowling's racism) is intended to rather be a parody of animal rights activism ("what if the animals actually WANT to be oppressed, huh?")
I've seen people on this forum and elsewhere bring to attention that Hollywood and TV shows often portray fundamentalist Christians as fanatics and bigots, but the equivalent treatment of animal rights activists (see eg. Straw Vegetarian page on TVTropes) gets less attention. I would guess most would just go "Well, but the vegans actually ARE that annoying!", though that view is probably also mediated by seeing examples of annoying vegans and animal rights activists being mocked on various types of media.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Anyone who wasn't plugged into news media would probably struggle to articulate any way in which Brexit has actually materially affected their life. Marginally more waiting times at airports to go on holiday?
If it doesn't affect your life in any other way expect to make you wait more time at airports, it has affected your life in a negative way, no? Which then just leads back to the issue of your country making this change for absolutely no reason that no-one has been able to explain beyond "gave Boris a chance to play PM for a bit", with large promises of extra cash for NHS and various other benefits that didn't come. Which is my point; why should millennial Remainers vote for Tories if what they get for voting Tories is... that?
Freedom of movement is almost never used in practice, indeed 55% of brits never move very far away from where they're born;
But I was not talking about 55 % of Brits. I was talking about Millennial Remainers.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
surge in heart attacks
Heart attacks have indeed gone up in recent years, but there are at least two major potential factors besides the vaccine:
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COVID itself
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deferral of care due to the burdening of health system (which in itself might have many overlapping explanations, including COVID, secondary effects of COVID like the economic dip, undue fear of COVID, the related measures like lockdowns etc.)
These would seem particularly relevant considering that apparently the rise of excess heart disease began already in 2020, ie. before mass vaccinations began.
It's hard for me to take the vaccine/heart attack theorists completely seriously if they just wave these explanations away ("It can't be COVID because COVID was actually harmless!"), particularly considering that many of them did speak a lot about the problems of deferral of care such as heart attacks caused by lack of check-ups before the vaccines became the main topic of discussion and then immediately pivoted to blaming heart attacks on vaccines alone.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
"When they were shouting about killing grandma or plague rats, I had understood those utterances as words that containing meaning or argument."
I think that, fundamentally, most people just wanted Covid to go away and to return to normality as fast as possible. The governments, after feeling the initial high of the all-in-the-same-boat feeling of Spring 2020 and the relatively normal (in most parts of the West, if memory servers) summer 2020, got worried that they were in for a long slog after Covid "returned" in autumn/winter 2020/2021 and then got fixated on the idea that there is One Weird Trick they can do to make it go away. And there sure was a good candidate for One Weird Trick: the vaccines.
I think this really explains the rest. The Western governments really, truly weren't, as some conspiracy theorists claimed, trying to use the pandemic to re-engineer the society; more than anything, they just wanted the pandemic to go away and to return to "life as it was". At the same time, they felt they couldn't just do nothing, or many people might die and they'd get blamed for it (many people did die, but since they were at least trying to do something, that at least blunted the criticism.)
If one remembers initial promises about the vaccines, they were actually quite modest, in line to what we now know the vaccine does (ie. not that much). However, at some point the hype cycle got out of control and the governments and everyone else started believing that the One Weird Trick really was here, just vaccinate everyone and Covid is over and no large lockdowns are needed. (This was preceeded by a similar but smaller hype cycle around masks being the One Weird Trick, which was sufficient to make masking a thing that still continues among the hardcore Covidians).
The furious hatred against "grandma-killers" and "plague rats" was, then, really a feeling that it was those people, the anti-vaxxers and Covid-skeptics, who were responsible for the One Weird Trick not working. Politicians, media, ordinary citizens - what they felt was that the vaccines would really work as promised if everyone just was responsible and got the vaccine. And it was of course easier for public opinionmakers to blame a small, already-hated group (antivaxxers were a popular target for disdain even before Covid) than to admit that there really was no One Weird Trick.
Even after the initial vaccine hype cycle, there was another one over the Covid vaccine passports, but even here the tone was already different. The vaccine passports were presented as a way to run down measures for most of the population - only leaving the hated ones to suffer from the measures. Of course this was a doomed and idiotic attempt from the get-go, but it probably served for some to get them to the mindset where they could just start to let go of the measures and the fear. Perhaps this was the real purpose.
Thus, it also followed that once it became really clear the vaccine really wasn't what the hype cycle promised, everything just died down. It turned out that the way to make "Covid go away" was simply to run the measures down and stop worrying about Covid. At least here, this was aided greatly by Russia starting the Ukraine War and this, then, becoming the huge global thing to worry about. And once this happened people just mostly also actively started to forgot just how crazy the preceeding years were, precisely because they wanted to forget it all.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
The Soviet census data that seems to mostly inform your position on this topic existed during a time with the Soviet-reported death toll at Asuchwitz was 4 million, and over 1 million at Majdanek. Presumably you would have dismissed Revisionist criticisms of those claims because, after all, there's the census data, right?
For the third time, the reference here was not census data, but internal NKVD data in Soviet archives, opened for research after the fall of the Soviet Union, regarding the specific figures for Polish Jews moving to Soviet Union and the number of those Jews transferred to other areas. I am honestly not sure why there would be room for debate if this misrepresentation continues to be made again and again.
Revisionists engage the demographic debate,
This and previous engagements suggest that they "engage the demographic debate" by having one book, from 50 years ago, which is essentially thrown at the other party, with any further efforts to discuss the book's actual contents then dismissed and every effort made to return to the territory the revisionists prefer to debate.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Again, it wasn't done against one ethnic group. The group of stateless citizens included Ukrainians, Azeris etc. in addition to Russians.
Estonia and Latvia did this under rather special circumstances. In the Baltic countries, the historical view - with justification - is that the countries were illegally occupied in 1940-1991, with the legal state continuity instead being carried by the exile governments abroad. The fall of Soviet Union then meant the end of occupation; in this view, nobody was stripped of the Estonian/Latvian citizenship, since legally the newcomers had never even held it, as no citizenship application had been processed by a legitimate government in those countries.
Of course, this did lead to a fair mess regarding the status of the noncitizens and the fact that Lithuania solved this issue differently despite a similar history to other Baltic countries complicates things, but it's still important to remember what the legal justification for all of this is, insofar as Estonia and Latvia view the issue.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
My guess is that there's still going to be great amounts of older children's books available representing in the great majority heterosexual families of your country's majority ethnicity (or animals obviously intended to represent that ethnicity like Berenstain Bears in US etc.), no? At least when I go out in bookstores to check what they have, they usually have reprints of old classics front and center.
My guess is that a lot of modern children's books authors specifically think about the great majorities of existing children's books not showcasing groups other than heterosexual families of a country's majority ethnicity, and thus go above and beyond the call of duty to increase the general representativeness.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
I think the quality has been going down, but I wouldn't peg bots. This might very well just be a personal opinion, just this morning, I was thinking about how increasing amount of subthreads are about trans stuff, a subject that, in the end, doesn't hold a great deal of interest to me. Not only that but it seems to be about endlessly relitigating a few particular facets of this particular culture war. Probably not something that it would be easy to write a bot for, though.
Sigh. What needs to be understood about this issue that the border thing is not a new issue for Finland; it goes back to the summer, expect back then it was not about draft dodgers or regime opponents, simply about why the Finnish border was open for hordes of tourists, at least stereotypically your stolid "non-political" middle class, seeing it as their sovereign right to continue cross-border shopping or use Helsinki to go on an Italian flight despite all this war business and of course getting into very non-political fights with Ukrainian refugees in Finland while doing so.
The Finnish government indicated that it sees this as a problem and wants to end this tourism, but it can't do so, since there's a law issue, and Finnish governance is all about being sticklers about formal procedure and following laws and regulations to the letter. This thread by Finnish nationalist politician explains this tendency and its roots quite well, though I disagree with him on whether the border closure would have actually done anything to destabilize Russia ("When the Russian middle-class cannot go on holiday they'll overthrow Putin etc.").
This issue continued to build up, in large part because it has provided a good populist attack vector for Finland's right-wing opposition bent on accusing the Finnish center-left gov't of being weak on Russia and also in part because it has led to our little brother nation Estonians and other Baltics calling Finland an unreliable ally. This rose to a fever pitch just before Putin's mobilization announcement, making it all but impossible for border closure proponents even consider backing down and making it even harder for the Finnish government to maintain "b-but... the law..." position. Any arguments that now the border-crossers are going to be mobilization dodgers are just going to be met with newly-minted claims that since Putin and Shoigu implied that it's West that Russia is at war with, young Russian males crossing the border might just be destabilization agents and a danger to Finland.
Anyway, one more proper argument that I'd say might have weight is that if the intent is mobilizing 300 000 soldiers and the task has been delegated down to regions with quotas, any potential mobilization avoiders fleeing abroad might just mean that the positions they might have filled in the quota would just be filled by some poor schlubs who don't have the money to utilize this option.
I've talked about this before, but me and my wife have had two kids at a comparatively late age, ie. the younger one is 11 months and the older one is 3 years and we are around 40. If we could magically become ten years younger we might have another child, now there's no dice - not just because the age makes it unlikely, but because we just wouldn't have the stamina for three little ones.
While we don't have that much money (especially when compared to my assumptions about the general earnings of this forum), the time and energy issues are absolutely more crucial as to why we feel burdened, not only because we are getting older but also because the most natural "extra nurses" apart from day care - the grandparents - are old too, around 80 (and my father dead), and also live on the other side of the country.
Once one's a parent, one quickly realises that your friend circle just isn't that much help - the childless ones just don't seem reliable enough, and the ones with children tend to have their hands full with, well, their children, who are often equally as young as yours.
One less-discussed fertility thing might be the culture where it's almost a rite of passage, at least in educated circles, to not only move away from home but frequently to a whole different city from your parents. It's fun when you can go out drunk and party without fearing you'll run into your older relatives and they disapprove, but once you're a parent, the far-away grandparents thing starts getting acutely more real.
"Ukraine will have to take loads of third world refugees by EU/NATO" is one of the most ridiculous predictions of this conflict. How many third world refugees, exactly, are there in Romania/Bulgaria/Croatia - the closest equivalents as the newest EU countries? What even is the mechanism how this is supposed to happen? There are currently no ways how EU could force an EU member state to take in refugees from (presumably) other member states, and all efforts to create one have been scuppered.
Of course, if the EU wanted a "soft" mechanism to considerably discourage asylum-seeking in general, a way to do it would be stating "sure, you can come, but you would have to settle in war-torn Ukraine"...
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