Brazil has left the Geneva Consesus.
Is that the same friendly Finland who kicked their arses that time?
Damn, I knew that the political situation in Haiti was bad, but not this bad:
Jacinda Ardern has, apparently, run out of gas.
Just saw that. Wtf? Nooo!
It’s a bit of a shock. She seemed to be doing so well, I really didn’t expect anything like this.
Tired of the nonsense, it seems… She was not as well liked at home as internationally.
Maybe we can talk Ms. Ardern into coming to 
to be our next Governor General… 
Sounds like she’s hoping for a better, safer life.
TIL, she was raised in the Mormon church…
Which makes a weird kind of sense that she’d be interested in the Labour party from the time she was a teenager. Mormons tend to be highly community focused, which aligns well with Labour-style politics. I don’t know how the mainstream Mormon community managed to get captured by a political party that does not align well with their strong historical focus on community (ie Mitt Romney).
I have no idea if she still practices her religion of childhood today?
Apparently, she left the church in her twenties.
"Ardern has said that she left the Utah-based church in her 20s over the faith’s stance on LGBTQ issues. She told The New Zealand Herald in 2017 that she used to live in an apartment with three gay friends while she still was attending Sunday services “every so often.”
“I just remember thinking ‘this is really inconsistent — I’m either doing a disservice to the church or my friends,’” she recalled. “Because how could I subscribe to a religion that just didn’t account for them?”"
Cool! Thanks for doing the work I’m too lazy to do!
I am unsurprised by her principled stance here! What wonderful human!
ETA:
That is the sort of principled stance I expect from human beings who want responsibility, power and respect. Because they realize what makes them worthy of those things.
Agreed. I’m also wondering what can be done to counter the polarization and hate that is growing out of control. Due to partisan politics and corporate influence in the US, we now have branches of government and the military full of folks who want power without any responsibility. They don’t care about respect (for institutions or others). They just want loyalty from their allies and obedience from everyone else.
Folks like that poison every environment in which they thrive. They twist functional systems to suit their own ends. It’s the toxicity and dysfunction they encourage that chews up and spits out principled people, like Ardern, who work for the common good. We need better tools to fight back against those who promote hatred and undermine everyone’s safety and security. 
TikTok election fears
Helsingin Sanomat reported on concerns surrounding the social media platform TikTok and the upcoming parliamentary elections in April.
The China-based social media platform has already caused a fuss in the US over alleged threats to democracy, privacy and national security.
HS noted that in the run-up to the elections, there has been very little discussion about TikTok in Finland, despite its popularity. There are nearly 1.2 million people in Finland who use the service, according to social media marketing firm Troot.
“Politicians throughout the ages have used new media platforms and their mechanisms. I would be surprised if they don’t try to use them in the current elections,” Matti Nelimarkka, a researcher at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, told HS. He has studied algorithms and political power in the digital environment.
HS pointed out that when searching TikTok with the keywords ‘Finnish politics’, the most popular videos are those dominated by the opposition Finns Party. The nationalist party which Prime Minister Sanna Marin (SDP) recently characterised as “openly racist”, was the second-most popular among likely voters in a recent Yle poll.
It is unclear how TikTok’s algorithm actually works, but it is known that a user with just a few followers can make a post that potentially garners millions of views.
That kind of “viral” exposure of a video could cause people seeing the content to think that the video’s creator is some kind of an authority on politics or other subjects, according to the paper.
HS then raised the moral question of the platform, that even if someone merely watches a video, they can unwittingly help to raise its profile, even if they disagreed with its content.
Almost 100 children died in 2022 in the Yanomami reservation.
