The photographs were taken on January 4th.
Thomas Wilhelmsson, Chancellor of the University of Helsinki, wrote on Twitter: ”US and UK researchers, welcome to Finland! Finnish people still believe in science and real facts”.
Welcome to Finland – WTF for short – sounds rather good.
I can’t believe what is happening in the US, which has become a dictatorship with an easily lead narcissist as the frontispiece for unscrupulous fraudsters and all kinds of evilness. Science – including humanities, liberal arts, etc. – is no longer open or to be relied on because of political control, and access to information is being drastically curtailed.
The blindness to facts (and preferring “alternative facts” and putting forward the big lie) will lead to suffering and dying people. All this will be blamed on “the other”, as it is impossible for a narcissist to acknowledge that he is to blame. And thus there is need to hide the real facts, such things as global warming, unemployment statistics, public health, etc. Otherwise people would see the emperor having no clothes (and tiny hands).
What will happen unless plenty of people #resist?
Here are some scenarios: Collapse of the educational system. Shipwreck of research institutions. Large-scale economic misery and unemployment, except for some of the wealthiest robber barons and baronesses. Extreme weather destroying property and killing people. Bankruptcy of health care, and manifestation of diseases that had almost been vanquished.
What can be done? The Women's March which was organized on January 21, 2017, showed the way. One needs to #resist, and it helps to have plenty of humour on the way.
And coming back to WTF. We do have problems here in Finland as well, including some populistic politicians who are doing hateful and unlawful things and fermenting trouble. Still, I trust in the sanity of the Finnish people.
(Posting title is from the poem Husky Boys' Dickies by Jill McDonough.)
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