Helvetin Pastori/Pastor of Hell

As you can read from the title, it's once again time to talk about conscription. After the recent court case, where a conscientious objector was acquitted from charges caused by his total refusal to complete any form of service, it's clear that the current system is broken and needs fixing. Unfortunately, while not surprisingly, our minister of defense Jussi Niinistö sees conscription as something sacred and thus, is unable to admit that the system needs to be completely changed. Now, the court case I mentioned was all about discrimination. As you might remember, Jehovah's Witnesses have been exempt from service since 1987. The CO in question argued that the exemption given to Witnesses is discriminatory towards other CO's, who are sentenced to jail because of their refusal to serve and since discrimination of all kinds is banned by the Finnish constitution, this practice is in fact, unconstitutional. This has been argued before, but this is the first time a court t...

Well, it's been a while since I last posted anything. So, where have I been? Well, apart from school, I recently got a part time job, which has limited my already limited free time even more. I was also sick for a week, which is something that normally doesn't happen to me. So quite simply, I haven't had the time, the energy or the motivation to really focus on writing anything.   That being said, I'm back and as the title suggests, there have been some interesting developments in Finnish politics, which I've been planning to cover for a while. First, let's start with Paavo Väyrynen. You may remember that he was one of the candidates in the recent presidential election, and that in my posts about the election, I gave him some special attention (links at the end).  The reason is pretty much the outcome of the election. Since it was pretty clear from the beginning that president Sauli Niinistö would win re-election, the election lacked that sense of heightened e...