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Comment by d33 | Hacker News Reader

Personally I find peace prizes abominable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laur...

They just got way too political.

How is it abominable? And how do you propose advocation of peace to be divorced from politics? It is necessarily intertwined.

"Moral revulsion" seems reasonable to feel at Kissinger's win.

Obama's is meaningless, even if you believe he did contribute materially to international peace (he didn't) he hadn't done so yet, with less than a year in office.

Giving it to the EU is just farce, in the same sense as "corporations are people." The EU is the result of the process the prize is supposed to encourage. It should be going to the people responsible for that institution's functioning - but good luck convincing anyone that its leaders have done a particularly good job navigating post-sovereign-debt-crisis, the period the prize would usually be awarding.

(I agree the award is necessarily political. I think it's better to say many recent awards have been tactical - moves in an attempt to bring about better relations, mostly unsuccessfully, rather than recognizing those who do really encourage them.)

The efforts of the EU (and other things, of course) have helped the major powers in Europe avoid war for over half a century now, a rarity in European history. Why wouldn't that be worth recognising?

I mean hell, on this page we have people complaining that the prize "only goes to three people when thousands were involved", and here you're complaining that "a group of people are awarded instead of a few individual". Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

I support the EU, but it's not clear to me that they are the primary entity responsible for peace in Europe between 1945 and 1991. And I think they have acted especially parochial and conservative during 2007-2012, the period prior to getting the Nobel.

It's supposed to be political, that's the point.

I like both the EU and Obama, but don't think they deserve them.

I think that's part of the point though. Politics is the way by which you achieve peace. So the Peace prize is also a political tool. "We're giving you this prize and now you have to live up to it.".

Hopefully the drone programs under president Obama disabused them of that particularly odious and arrogant fallacy.

Because it can't be awarded posthumously I think it is impossible to divorce it from politics.

Because it's fundamentally about a political objective, I think it's nonsense to even talk about it being divorced from politics, even if it could be awarded posthumously.

It would be funny if the distinction between politics and history was explicitly whether the subjects' life was over. Id love to pedantically say to someone "osama bin laden is part of history now, not politics"

The peace prize has always been somewhat aspirational - the point is usually to shame the recipient into living up to the prize, not to recognize those who've actually most contributed to peace. The latter is pretty hard to do, because peace is the absence of war, and so "the people who most contributed to peace" are really the majority of citizens who mind their own business and don't seek to dominate others.

Peace prize is not treated seriously, not by audience not even by itself. It is political stunt nowadays.

It always has been political. This means that the prize can be controversial at times. That's just the nature.

Past controversial examples would be the 1935 award to Carl Von Ossietzky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Ossietzky), who angered the type of folks that do not like people who reveal state secrets. Or Cordell Hull's 1945 award (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordell_Hull), which was controversial because in 1939 he rejected a ship of 936 Jews seeking asylum from Germany. Or Linus Pauling's Peace Prize in 1962 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling), which was controversial among those who disagreed with his left wing pacifist views (to the point where he was labeled a suspected communist in the 1950s, as was fashionable at the time).

(We haven't even gotten to Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat yet...)

Yeah, the peace prize has become a joke. I have to disagree with the author about the science prizes, though - I think it's pretty reasonable to award people for moving the ball forward even if they didn't do it all themselves.

I would have given it to Kennedy and Khrushchev for avoiding nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I would've given it to Stanislav Petrov for avoiding nuclear war in 1983.

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