Some may find the list of people who can nominate someone for the Nobel peace prize interesting. From their website:
Members of national assemblies and governments of states; Members of international courts; University rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes; Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; Board members of organizations that have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; Active and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; Former advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Committee
Most of those are fairly small groups; but "Members of national assemblies and governments of states" is a pretty big chunk of people, and "professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology" is a simply enormous group of people.
As a result, nominations are very meaningless; any third rate history or sociology prof at some podunk community college can nominate someone if they have a mind to, and all sorts of people get nominated, often as a lark or to prove a point. I believe Bush was nominated repeatedly, for example. (Well...nominations are secret, but I know of people who have the ability to nominate, and claimed to have done so, and I don't see why they'd bother to lie, so...)
So yes, Snowden was nominated (well, unless these politicians are lying). Honestly, he was probably nominated dozens of times. This isn't news. Also, a couple of left-wing Norwegian politicians like Snowden. Also not news. :) The only real news here is if he wins...
Hitler was TIME magazine man of year, and for a decent while in America Fascism was mildly popular (circa 1930's). Its strange looking back on a that time (Post Holocaust and WW2). American Newspapers applauded the works of fascists claiming, "They got the trains to run on time."
Being Man of the Year isn't necessarily an honor. From Wikipedia:
Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual
issue of the United States newsmagazine Time that features
and profiles a person, group, idea or object that "for
better or for worse...has done the most to influence the
events of the year."
"Though we spent hours debating the pros and cons of naming Osama bin Laden, it ultimately became easy to dismiss him," said managing editor Jim Kelly. "He is not a larger-than-life figure with broad historical sweep ... he is smaller than life, a garden-variety terrorist whose evil plan succeeded beyond his highest hopes."
OBL's impact wasn't that big in year one. It was huge over the next decade though. How many million man years have we spent in airport security lines because of him?
> for a decent while in America Fascism was mildly popular
Where now politics standing in staunch opposition to liberals, communists and socialists with an emphasis on a ultra nationalism and military power, is thankfully a thing of the distant past.
Oh.
;-)
(I am joking, I'm aware that there are significant differences, particularly regarding the role of the state).
According to site you're citing, the nomination was actually an attempt at satire by a Swedish MP:
"Apparently though, Brandt never intended the nomination to be taken seriously. Brandt was to all intents and purposes a dedicated antifascist, and had intended this nomination more as a satiric criticism of the current political debate in Sweden."
No need for complex explanations when a simple one is given.
Kinda, but I think it was really obvious that he'd be nominated. There's hundreds of nominations every year; Manning has been nominated repeatedly times, Assange has been nominated. Now Snowden's in the news; what were the odds some politician somewhere wouldn't take the opportunity to get some easy headlines by nominating Snowden? I can't imagine him not getting a few nominations. :)
> "professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology" is a simply enormous group of people.
It used to be that professor status was very regulated. In Sweden prior to 1993, a professor title was granted by the government, and in practice one could only become a professor if such role was currently unfilled.
Was the Noble price nomination rules created before 1993?
It's a bit unclear in English nowadays, because in Scandinavian-written academic English, 'professor' sometimes refers only to the formal title Professor, which corresponds to what Americans sometimes call "Full Professor", but in other usages it includes a broader set of faculty. For example the three academic titles in Danish are Professor, Lektor, and Adjunkt, but in recent years their official English translations are Full Professor, Associate Professor, and Assistant Professor, which better reflects how the roles have evolved in practice. So are the latter two included under the term "professors" when a Danish institution writes something in English? Sometimes yes, sometimes no...
While I'm fond of any form of flipping the NSA-backing US administration the bird, the Nobel Peace prize has not enough reputation to matter in this context.
Al Gore got it for raising awareness of climate change. Obama got that for not being Bush. Even if Snowden gets it, it doesn't really matter.
Yasser Arafat & Yitzhak Rabin were awarded it, its not clear if they intended to create a peace, but they did not. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded it. Henry Kissinger meanwhile embarked on a major bombing campaign and Le Duc Tho declined the honour.
They've made premature or outright bad calls before.
I don't think that the Peace Prize is only meant for people who have made tangible changes in the amount of violence in the world. It's also a carrot that you can dangle in front of people to reward them for taking risks in the interest of reducing violence.
Rabin and Arafat (and Peres) tried, with the Oslo accords, to move toward a settlement of a long-standing, violent dispute. They didn't completely succeed. And indeed, you could argue (as many do) that the Oslo accords were a mistake. But they were willing to take risks in order to perhaps make things more peaceful for their people, and that's the sort of thing that the Nobel Committee wanted to reward.
Of course, now that I've described things in this way, maybe Snowden is an appropriate recipient...
That sounds like the kindergarten definition of "Prize" - which is given to incentivize the person to do something as opposed to after he has actually achieved something of worth.
..assuming they were acting in good faith, which they have always accused eachother of doing. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were certainly not acting in good faith. In any case, the official criteria is:
"done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.*
IMO it should be like the other Nobel Prizes, awarded later when the things have settled. The Science prizes were changed to include a lag allowing for discoveries to face scientific rigor for a while. I think they should adopt the same policy. Wait until a war ends before handing out a prize to those who end it.
People on both sides of the Israel vs Palestine discourse tend to accuse the other side of acting in bad faith. And the various "Peace Processes" have generally been a result of pressure from outside the region.
I think plenty Israelis want the Palestinians gone from Palestine and I think plenty Palestinians want Isreal erased from the map. When that is the goal of both parties, no I don't see them wanting peace.
Of course, we're making a huge generalization here, plenty of people on both sides don't have this as their goal and certainly want peace, which can only be achieved through coexistence. But when coexistence is not your goal, when the ideal terms for both parties is the dissolution of the other, then no; there can really be no peace.
Edit: btw I'm not really talking about the specifics of Yasser Arafat & Yitzhak Rabin listed by the OP, just your statement, which implied something more general then just those two.
Of course they do, but clearly the Oslo Accords (for which Arafat and Rabin won their Nobel) were a product of US intervention. Concessions to the enemy are rarely a vote winner.
Or being the guy who 'legitimized' the drone war and killing of American citizens without a trial. Institutionalizing the president's power to decide who dies under the "disposition matrix" (kill list).
Note: Not saying Anwar al-Awlaki was a good guy, or blameless, or anything of the sort. But it is still killing an American citizen from afar without so much as a thought of a trial.
I'm with you, right up to the point of "an American citizen". As I see it, the right to a speedy jury trial, etc., don't come from being a citizen. These things came from the natural rights philosophy that Madison and others viewed the world through when creating our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Hence, the right to a trial comes simply from the fact of being a person. No citizenship or residency required.
(I grant that reconciling this with acts of war makes it much more murky)
They should have waited 3-4 years to see if he would actually accomplish something beyond getting elected. I'm not saying he didn't accomplish anything, but traditionally a great honor is bestowed for achievements past, not potential achievements.
That's pretty ridiculous. You are really misrepresenting what happened. Sure, you can say it was little more than for a promissory note of peace, which is what people were saying at the time but this is just too much.
> Everyone has already forgotten Pfc. Manning rotting away for 35 years.
Please represent the facts accurately. Manning is eligible for release in 7-8 years. I'm willing to make a long bet (http://longbets.org) for $300.00 that Manning does not serve 35 years, or "rot away for 35 years" as you put it. Are you up for it?
I hate that this nitpicking has become the standard response whenever someone is facing a prison sentence. It utterly belittles the hardship that people like Pfc. Manning actually face, even if it is for 7-8 years in the end.
Additionally, the parole or probation that she faces even after release are still punishment. It's not as though the troubles are suddenly over.
Treating the issue in this way makes it sound like the judge announced the 35 year sentence, slammed a gavel, then looked over to Manning with a wink and a whimsical smile. That's not what happened. 35 years was the sentence, and that is what you should expect to hear in relation to the case, even if it can be reduced with work on the part of the defendant.
Eligible for parole means nothing too. They won't ever let manning out early because they must 'set an example' to deter future whistleblowers, and don't want manning on the talkshow circuit talking about war crimes
What they get out in, is just as relevant as what they were sentenced to. Otherwise, why do we get so mad when a murderer is sentenced to 20 years and out in 2?
I agree that it is a fairly large difference in number, but I still think that trumpeting on about it distracts from the primary discussion.
At best, this is all speculation. 7-8 years is the time before Chelsea Manning becomes eligible for parole. Whether or not she is actually released will depend on a number of factors, including the political climate at the time. We'll only really find out around 2021.
Finally, and this is something I touched on in my first comment, even 7 years in a federal prison is nothing to sneeze at. A non-trivial amount of time spent on federal probation after release isn't exactly going to be a cakewalk, either. And this is all on top of the time already spent in the military justice system, including almost a year of solitary confinement. Basically, I'm just asking that we don't downplay what must be an awful experience simply because our justice system has wiggle room.
After the aggressiveness of the current administration, you think there is a chance the next administration might come along and say "nope, they need to serve the full 35 years".
The sentence is 35 years. They could legally be forced to serve the full 35 for any reason. As far as I am concerned that is the weight being hung around their neck, not the imaginary eight.
And eight years in prison is an insanely long time, don't forget the terrible health care and dangers from other inmates. You can lose all your teeth and die from infections very easily if someone decides to just let you rot.
First I have heard about that. I had to look it up on wikipedia. I have a resentment of gendered pronouns but I don't think there is any realistic hope for change.
I'd bet on released at first parole hearing as long as Manning is willing to be "quiet" and just goes on to enjoy life. Which would probably be a desirable outcome, given age. It's pretty easy to make an argument for leniency based on age, irresponsibility-when-committed, and complete life changes (I mean, sex change, the Snowden revelations, by then no troops in Iraq/Afghanistan (hopefully!), stepping down from perpetual war (if for no other reason than economics), and at least one change of President.
I'd take the bet if you'd be willing to take the position that he'll be released in 7 years. Betting hat he'll be paroled somewhere between 7 and 35 years is silly.
I'm not sure if either of them deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, but I believe Manning's sentence is reasonable. I'd like to shake his hand, buy him a beer, thank him personally, but it's a decision he made that has severe consequences for a reason. And while I don't like Snowden at all, I think his actions are much more justifiable from an ethical point of view. It's not like terrorists were unaware the NSA was spying before they had proof—the only people being blindfolded were citizens. Manning's actions were more complex and the ramifications were less straightforwardly positive.
So by your standard, Martin Luther King Jr. should be getting out of prison just about now?
Manning was a whistlerblower, just like Snowden, with less power and ability for flight to defend themselves.
There was no personal gain ever intended or achieved, yet great personal loss even in the best outcome. They saw something very wrong happening and had little to no way to say "hey there are some incredibly powerful forces in this country doing some very evil things".
The problem is we only treat whistleblowers like traitors legally and Manning's "trial" was a complete scam, zero media coverage allowed on purpose by the government so they could be railroaded.
I don't purport to be an expert on either of these cases, but my impression as a casual observer was that Mannings leak was just a massive dump of classified documents without any attempt to be selective about which information needed to come to light.
Any sizable dump of classified documents is likely to have some damning pieces in there but that doesn't necessarily justify blindly leaking massive amounts of documents. I think Manning would have gotten a more favorable response by more people if he had been just a bit selective in what he leaked.
Again, I don't have deep knowledge on either of these cases compared to some around here so I'll concede that maybe I'm wrong on some of my facts...?
It's not even clear Manning is a whistleblower—what the hell did he blow a whistle on? It's not like any widespread scandal, corruption, or conspiracy was revealed.
Yeah, I was under the impression that he leaked information on the slaughter of civilians in the Middle East by soldiers/mercenaries. My familiarity is clearly cursory.
"I'd like to shake his [sic] hand, buy him [sic] a beer, thank him [sic] personally", "but I believe Manning's sentence [of 35 years in prison] is reasonable".
My jaw dropped to the floor. Assuming that you want to thank her for doing that thing that landed her in prison, there is nothing you can say that can reconcile those two statements for me.
You miss the point. Pfc. Manning now identifies as Chelsea Manning. She is transgendered, and since her military career is toast she has come out of the closet on the subject.
I'm going to be generous and assume that duaneb poster was not closely following the story and is unaware of the above.
Transpersons are always the subject of massive flamewars online, so some folks get really strong kneejerk reactions to misgendering.
I think efbee was responding to "I think what they did was right but also they deserve a 35 year sentence" as the two irreconcilable statements. Misgendering is an important point as well, but it's not what makes the statements contradictory.
I was not aware of Manning's being transgendered, and I don't mean any disrespect—consider it an editorial he given my assumption of gender from sex (I can't edit).
I doubt it was malicious. I read about it right when she made her choice public, and I still forget regularly. I'm just not used to people changing gender, so my mental constructs treat it as kind of a read-only value...
So you're saying you like Manning personally, but not for her 'criminal' actions? What about her makes you want to 'shake [her] hand' and 'buy [her] a beer' then?
There are thousands of people in government and the military who broke the law and defended their actions because they believed them to be morally justifiable. Surely those people should have a similar sentence to Manning?
A lot of the civil unrest that happened in the world in the years following the State Department cable releases is suspected to have been loosely caused by revelations in the cables themselves that often had candid descriptions of corruption and other misdeeds by governments.
This is clearly something that we as a society are going to have to wrestle with.
It seems reasonable to me that this person, having XY chromosomes and all the hardware that go with them, may be correctly referred to using masculine pronouns.
There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the individual in how they'd like to be addressed. But there's definitely a point at which that drifts off into absurdity. Just because I can claim descent from Henry VIII doesn't mean that I can reasonably expect people to address me as "lord".
So I'm interested in respecting people, but think we need to let this percolate through society first, and determine where to draw reasonable lines, before you accuse someone of disrespect for failing to honor someone's alternate world view.
There's a time and a place to be pedantic, and this really isn't it.
Transgendered people go through a heap of terrible, terrible crap and the least we can all do is give them the dignity of using their identified pronoun. If anybody has earned that respect, it's ms. Manning.
I mean really, how the heck does it hurt anybody to say "She" instead of "He" after you've been informed that's not how she identifies? Does it really matter that much? Obviously the extreme SJW flamewar reaction you usually see on misgendering is excessive, but after being politely informed that's not how she identifies, how are you harmed by going along with it?
Will the ghost of Plato arise and smite you down for failing to properly class something?
It seems totally unreasonable to me to intentionally misgender anyone against their wishes even after such intention was communicated. What possible purposes such action can serve?
I think it's more comparable to calling someone by their old name even after someone went through a trouble of changing one's official name because they hated the name given by their parents. You'd agree that's a bad manner.
> It seems reasonable to me that this person, having XY chromosomes and all the hardware that go with them, may be correctly referred to using masculine pronouns.
Gender != your chromosomes and gender != your "hardware" or any other body part for that matter. Gender is about social identity and structure.
> There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the individual in how they'd like to be addressed. But there's definitely a point at which that drifts off into absurdity. Just because I can claim descent from Henry VIII doesn't mean that I can reasonably expect people to address me as "lord".
Laying claim to a royal lineage is not the same as having a gender. Also, lord is a title and we are talking about pronouns, things used when talking about anyone.
> So I'm interested in respecting people, but think we need to let this percolate through society first, and determine where to draw reasonable lines, before you accuse someone of disrespect for failing to honor someone's alternate world view.
We already know where to draw reasonable lines: Manning has already publicly stated her gender. You have disrespected this person by misgendering them. Manning's world view is not an "alternate" world view and you are being incredibly transphobic.
It seems pretty simple to me. If you ask me to describe my best friend, I might say he's smart, studied this or that in school, speaks such-and-such languages, likes such-and-such music, and so on. His height and weight would be pretty far down the list of things I find important.
Similarly, we think of our mind as being our "self" in a much more fundamental way than our toes.
If a person is female in their mind but has a male body, it seems very clear that we should consider the former to be their "real" gender. Why should the body matter more or be more fundamental?
In polite society we respect the ways that others wish to be addressed, as long as the request isn't unreasonable (I want you to call me 'Doctor wavefunction' yet I lack the credentials).
It is not absurd to refer to someone by the gender they prefer.
This posts reeks of cisgender privilege [0]. Gender is a social construct, not a biological inevitability, and it is disrespectful to refer to someone as a gender that they have explicitly stated they do not identify with.
I'll let you fill in the comparisons to widespread sexism, racism, and homophobia for yourself. Go back to the leaders of the American civil rights movement and tell them to let things "percolate through society" so they can know "where to draw reasonable lines".
I have no problem if someone wants to identity with a different gender but it can get confusing for others as some people don't limit their pronoun choices to "he" or "she" to identify themselves.
How about this for an idea... Pvt. Manning? Easy and no disrespect.
Shooting people? Yeah. I didn't know the helicopter crew felt so bad about it though. I thought they had better psychological support, but they sounded traumatized.
Obama's prize was more of a credit for good deeds in the future. Jagland himself (Nobel committee chairman) partly confirmed that. Sadly, it didn't work out. Rather backfired.
Fortunately its not about who deserves it more than whom, (theoretically) its about who deserves it the most (although, imho, that's hardly ever the case).
At the time he got it he and Putin deserved it. Had he not gotten it then, he would def. not deserve it now after all the horrible decisions he's made since.
Let's have a look at how the Norwegian Nobel Committee works, that is, the people in charge of selecting the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. Currently, the committee is made up of five members, who have to represent the political parties of the Norwegian Parliament. Here is the list of these members :
Jagland has been a member of the Nobel Committee since 2009. The same year, he was elected Secretary General of the Council of Europe. Note that Norway is part of the Council of Europe, but not of the European Union. Jagland is in favor of the EU, although Norwegian people have voted against joining the EU two times.
All of the other members are politicians from national parties. According to Wikipedia, Mrs Kullmann Five is also member of the Board of Directors of Statoil, an oil company which is the largest company in Norway. Mrs Reiss-Andersen is a lawyer, and she has written two novels. Mr Stalsett is the Protestant bishop in Oslo.
As we can see, the committee is not a group of international law experts, famous scientists or peace activists. The truth is, it seems the five members of the committee do not have the right profile to be responsible for one of the most important international awards in the world.
In fact, an additional person helps the committee to make decisions. Geir Lundestad is the director of the Nobel Institute and has been the "secretary" of the Norwegian Nobel Committee since 1990. He was a researcher in charge of international relations at Harvard for three years, and a researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center, which is the eleventh biggest think tank in the world (according to the Go-To think tank ranking) with famous members like Hillary Clinton and Arne Duncan. Then, in 1990, Geir Lundestad came back to Norway and became the new secretary of the Nobel Committee, and went on for 23 years.
The bottom line is that Geir Lundestad is the real decision-maker. This guy calls the shots, and he will of course not choose Edward Snowden as the next Nobel Peace Prize.
First of all, a huge number of people are nominated each year for the Nobel Peace Prize. So the fact that Snowden was nominated doesn't really surprise me; I'm guessing that many activists from around the world are nominated.
The list of who can nominate is somewhat restricted -- but given that any member of any parliament, or any social-science professor at any university, can nominate someone, that doesn't strike me as a very high barrier to entry.
The bigger question, in my mind, is whether Snowden contributed to world peace. Yes, he clearly unveiled all sorts of schemes that the NSA had. It's a good thing for democracy that he did such things; it's clear that the US government was doing things that it claimed not to be doing, and that US and foreign citizens alike were rather upset to hear.
So yes, I'm personally glad to hear that these things were unveiled.
However, did this really contribute to world peace? Is the world a less violent place as a result? You could make the argument that it actually is more dangerous in the world, because the US is less able to spy on people. I'm not sure if that's the case, but it's not a totally crazy argument.
Well, I guess since even Barack Obama, a president who spreads hatred by not abolishing torture, not ending wars, supporting assassinations, etc. won the Nobel Peace Prize a lot of things are counted.
Since the US obviously fights many secret wars and considers everyone but UK; Canada and Australia their enemy unveiling the fact that there are secret wars fought way more intensely than we knew before it is the only possible first step to end it.
It at least makes more sense to me than destroying a part of (mostly broken or expired) nuclear weapons. I don't think that the presence or absence of nuclear weapon will ever be a reason for war, maybe a pretense, but that's all.
I actually think that Obama's generally an OK president. (Not that I agree with many of his policies, including those having to do with Guantanamo and drones, mind you.)
But I still think it was kind of weird for him to get the Nobel Peace Prize. At the very least, it strikes me as way premature.
Wow. The ability of people to only see what they want to see is amazing.
So Obama deserved a Nobel Peace prize for running a successful electoral campaign, but Edward Snowden doesn't deserve one for making one of the largest exposés of compromises of individual freedom in the history of the world.
Well theoretically all this global spying and bombing targets from remote controlled airplanes piloted half a world away should be making a safer more peaceful world right?
The Norwegian Nobel Committee is composed of five members appointed by the Storting (Norwegian Parliament). The Committee's composition reflects the relative strengths of the political parties in the Storting, and is assisted by specially appointed expert advisers.
Well it certainly would say something about the value of the NPP if one winner was forced into refugee status in one of the worst human rights violating countries because he couldnt get a fair trial from another NPP winner.
Hear, hear. I would love to see him get the Nobel. I think history will look kindly at Mr. Snowden, while the NSA's activities will be vilified -- assuming we are allowed to learn about those activities and those of us speaking out (or just texting each other about it) aren't fired, denied tenure, or otherwise removed from public view in the Brave New World of total surveillance.
I think the comment was intending to highlight the fact that multiple international organisations are trying to arrest Snowden and his appearance at the awards would put him in jeopardy, not that travel logistics might be an issue.
I was disappointed he didn't win in 2013. If I remember my reading of the rules correctly the members of the Nobel Committee could still have nominated at the point when it was clear what he was revealing and how. Seems like the obvious choice by far for last year.
As a relatively minor side benefit, Snowden winning the Peace Prize would be an elegant rebuke to the rulers in the Sixth Eye of Five Eyes - Nobel's birth country of Sweden. I'd like to see that.
There are many people that would be eminently eligible to share a Nobel Peace Prize with this sort of motivation though. Only two slots left for the sharing... Bill Binney and Tom Drake? John Kiriakou? Who are the other strong contenders?
How interesting. If he wins, he will be obtaining the same award as Obama. That just seems so ironic. You win the same award as the guy who has lied about what the NSA is doing, and what he is willing to do about it.
Here, Here! In the end, more knowledge will lead to more peace. It sounds hokey, but clandestine infinite historical data storage can only end in disaster.
I assume it must have been before it lost the status when they gave it to a guy who had yet to do anything, other than give some captivating speeches... so... several minutes sometime?
Members of national assemblies and governments of states; Members of international courts; University rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes; Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; Board members of organizations that have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; Active and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; Former advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Committee
Most of those are fairly small groups; but "Members of national assemblies and governments of states" is a pretty big chunk of people, and "professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology" is a simply enormous group of people.
As a result, nominations are very meaningless; any third rate history or sociology prof at some podunk community college can nominate someone if they have a mind to, and all sorts of people get nominated, often as a lark or to prove a point. I believe Bush was nominated repeatedly, for example. (Well...nominations are secret, but I know of people who have the ability to nominate, and claimed to have done so, and I don't see why they'd bother to lie, so...)
So yes, Snowden was nominated (well, unless these politicians are lying). Honestly, he was probably nominated dozens of times. This isn't news. Also, a couple of left-wing Norwegian politicians like Snowden. Also not news. :) The only real news here is if he wins...