All of this about wearing masks and people not wanting to wear masks and arguing on TV about it is kind of unnerving, looking at it from post - 2020.
And nobody in the comments seems to have noticed anything at all about Minna's blaming the Rash on immigrants, and specifically on illegal immigrants at that. At least, unless she removed those posts.
-- another thing I notice in the comments on some pages is an awful lot of click-on-this assorted spam. It occurs to me that I didn't notice the dates on it, though, and it tends to be later in the comments: maybe it was added after Minna quit paying much attention to the pages?
-- did anybody get a picture of Magnus the cat, that you didn't have to have voted at the time in order to see?
Yeah, having lived what we have, it reads differently! I remember how in early 2020 there were many Disqus comments on how the Covid-19 will be the end of the world. Several people took a long break or stopped reading around then because they found it too upsetting. Lucky us Covid wasn’t quite that bad!
As for the illegal immigrants… the world has changed since 2013! The oft-ridiculed “wokeism” seems to work, and it’s not ok anymore to just drop stuff like that and not called out. Based on what I can recall of how public discussion was in Finland around then, I’m willing to read it as negligence rather than malevolence.
I mean that I assume (note, I’m only guessing!) that the thought process could have been that the pathogen appeared somewhere far away and exotic, so… let’s say Africa. And then it spread in a way that prevented the origin to be learned. So, hey, immigrants! Rather than “let’s make a tale of how those people destroy Europe”. It’s not ok, it’s blatantly racist, but I think it could be casual rather than intentional racism. Which, arguably, is the more dangerous kind, as it permeates everything and influences everyone’s thinking. As is demonstrated by the fact she and the commenters at the time didn’t pay active attention to it.
I support this reading by the way none of the talkshow people attack immigrants over it. It would have been natural avenue for stressing the issue, which she didn’t use, so I HOPE (I very much hope!) that the racism was in failing to see it’s not alright rather than in trying to push anti-immigration agenda. Immigration became much more of an issue in public discussion in Finland (ad elsewhere in Europe) in 2015, so this precedes that.
