Helvetin Pastori/Pastor of Hell

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...

Let's take a look at one of the biggest clusterfucks in Finnish political history: The sote-reform. Since a lot of my visitors here are foreigners, I'll have to do some explaining first. Sote, is an abbreviation used when talking about heath and social services.  It's currently being thrown around a lot because of an effort to reform these fields, in order to combat increasing costs, which puts a lot of pressure on the system. Probably the main reason for this is the aging population, a problem facing large parts of the western world. Because of this, in order to guarantee the same services in the future, plans were devised to curb some of the increasing costs, mainly by simplifying the administration. You see, currently these fields are being controlled on the municipal level. Since individual municipalities are allowed these things themselves, this means there are multiple different ways to handle this, which makes the current system hideously complicated. The main idea...