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by eterevsky 622 days ago
To be fair, Nobel Prize has a history of expanding the traditional bounds of respective fields when awarding the prizes:

Bertrand Russel got the Nobel prize in literature

Daniel Kahneman got Nobel in economics

5 comments

Don't forget Barack Obama for absolutely no valid reason.
Hey he got the Peace Prize for conducting a war in the middle east!
The economics prize is not a Nobel prize.
"Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony."

- Wikipedia

That's all true, but it doesn't do anything to diminish my suspicion that there is a fair amount of coattail-riding behind it.
It's propaganda for liberalism. It's just that at a certain point that propaganda became so successful, that you sound like a lunatic if you call it propaganda. Unfortunately there was no reason to make propaganda for Mathematics so they never got their own Nobel prize.
Winston Churchill got a Nobel in literature, too.
Yes, but for his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and more broadly, for his lifetime as an author.

(Admittedly, even more broadly, the prize was the Nobel Committee wanting to acknowledge his leadership in WW2, but still.)

Bob Dylan on literature was another "hmm" one.

Not against nor in favor, it was just an unexpected awardee.

Bob Dylan is the Boomer poet laureate.
War criminials got Nobel prize in peace.
Which were you referring to?
Aung San Suu Kyi?

There's quite a few.

Yasser Arafat is one
Kissinger another.
Also Barack Obama. It's hard to be POTUS without commiting war crimes.
Do be fair to the Nobel committee, he commit his purported "war crimes" after getting the prize.
Probably Yasser Arafat