Snowden Nominated For Freedom of Thought Prize

First time accepted submitter DigitalKhaos23 writes "Snowden is a candidate for the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, named after Soviet scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, which honors people or organizations for their work in the defense of human rights and freedom of thought. The article adds: 'Edward Snowden risked his life to confirm what we had long suspected regarding mass online surveillance, a major scandal of our times. He revealed details of violations of EU data protection law and fundamental rights.'"

Comments

Monarchies are the worst forms

[boorack]

I don't know who created this bunk theory. Wanna see how monarchies work ? See Saudi Arabia. They sell almost as much oil as Russians do, or soviets did. Yet, soviets, with all their crappy, inefficient system, were able to finance huge social security, huge army and lots of other things with their oil money. Maybe not a good things to do, yet Saudis don't even do that. Their petrodolars are used to finance lavish lifestyles of their aristocracy (while rest of their society live in poverty), purchases of ultra-expensive military equipment, US bonds and so called "investments" - in other words, recycling earned petrodollars back into westen economies. Their feudalistic system is terribly inefficient, even compared to very inefficient soviet system, let alone to any other (relatively sane) economy in the world. You see, lack of progress in medieval Dark Ages are directly related to reign of absolute monarchies and feudalism. We've started getting out of medieval darkness mainly because in renesance, power of kings ceased to be absolute.

Re:Monarchies are the worst forms

[phantomfive]

I've never heard anyone who said that the Saudis were good kings. By all account, including yours, they are abusing their position.

If you want to understand the point, you need to look at the inefficiencies created by democracy (each side trying to create programs and shut the other one's down, the billions of dollars put into advertising campaigns for candidates, the wasted pork.....think how much better NASA could be if senators cared more about research than getting extra cash for their constituents).

It's still better than a monarchy for reasons stated above, but please at least try to understand the point before arguing against it..........