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Edward Snowden Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize
SmartAboutThings writes "Edward Snowden has a chance of getting the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, as two Norwegian members of the Parliament have nominated him — Baard Vegard Solhjell (a former environment minister) and Snorre Valen. So, the fact that members of the Norwegian Parliament have proposed him for the Nobel Peace Prize could improve his chance of winning. After all, if Obama got this prize, why wouldn't Snowden get it?"
I thought the Peace Prizes to Gore and Obama to be the most asinine thing that the committee has ever done.
To implicitly compare those two politicians to the likes of King or Gandhi just disgusts me.
What next, giving one to Jethro Tull?!
to take away Obama's and give him that one. They should do it while playing the candidate Obama vs President Obama videos in the background.
Obama got it because tbey wanted to slap George Bush in the face. He should have declined because that is beneath the presidency to participate in such an exercise.
Although this case may also be seen as a slap at the president, at least Snowden wpuld arguably deserve it, if you approve of him.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If he wins, then we'll have one Peace Prize winner being honored for resisting the authoritarianism of another Peace Price winner.
Obama won the Peace Prize for being a president who wasn't Bush. Nobel prizes are an asinine political statement by a committee that's become reactionary anti-American and anti-China.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
"out of a universe of about 7 billion"
So it's not just the Miss Universe pageant that is rigged to only choose Earthlings...
Maybe the committee has decided that they would like to have some credibility.
The Nobel Peace Prize has LONG been without credibility; it's always been a tool to push some sort of agenda.
2012 - The European Union? You mean the group that shouted how we should stop Ghadafi from defeating the rebels in Libya, dragged the US into a response and then backed off leaving the US the sole owner of a military intervention they didn't want? Especially after forming deals with Ghadafi that had lessened his grip and got him to give up nuclear programs and chemical weapons? Yeah, that turned out well.
2009 - Barack Obama - all based on promises and rhetoric and no action... sure.
2007 - Al Gore for promoting environmental awareness? That's kind of the wrong category.
1994 - Yasser Arafat? He's done a lot to promote peace in the world.
1973 - Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for the Paris Peace Accords - I'm sure the South Vietnamese really appreciated Le Duc Tho's peaceful process when he invaded and annexed their country.
And where is Mahatma Ghandi? Where is Pope John Paul II? The Nobel Peace Price ceased being about "Peace" long ago and has simply been a tool to highlight the political agenda of a few Norwegian scientists.
You are confused, there is no notion of the USA's gathering intelligence to avoid terrorist attacks or wars.
The federal government were watching the attackers of 9/11 to see what they would do. well, we saw what they did.
The federal government used "intelligence" to justity a pointless invasion of Iraq (as aside note we supported Saddam and gave him money and dual use technnology to build the WMD he used to gas Iranians and Kurds)
The CIA is using "intelligence" to protect their narcotics cash crops in Afghanistan, bombing competitors and protecting chosen drug lords.
The federal government currently has FBI and DHS finding low IQ morons, losers with no ability to do anything, courting them for weeks while filling their heads with violent thoughts and ideas and then providing them with fake bombs. And then swooping in for arrests and headlines and congratulations all around for yet another blow in the "war on terror".
This is the type of "intelligence" you are claiming is necessary? fuck you and all other shills for the US's corporate fascist government.
Mod idea up. Snowden may have opened a gigantic, planet-sized can of worms, but it was a festering, nasty-ass can of worms that needed opening. The one spark of non-cynicism that remains alive within me cheers on people like Snowden, and gives me hope that the human race can be saved from a descent into global fascism.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
It's pretty sad when you can get a Nobel Prize for not doing / being things. I wonder if someone could get a Nobel Prize in physics for converting the mechanical energy harvested from Alfred Nobel oscillating in his grave into the ultimate in renewable energy...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
No, I actually don't. I think exposing an all-seeing police state has great implications for the rights of that state's citizens, but has very little bearing on life vs. death.
Let me make the connections for you. Government surveillance and data collection does two things (among many others), depending on whether it's publicly known or not.
If the government is running public surveillance and effectively acting like a police state (think the TSA), it convinces many people of a supposed necessity for "security" against some "unseen enemy." It's very easy to turn that fear against some random foreign nation, even when the connection in tenuous -- e.g., the Iraq war. The continuous feeling of "unease" that many Americans have by being continuously bombarded with messages like "You need to take your shoes and belt off and d the 'special pose' for the nudey scanners, or you could DIE even on a plane from terrorists" is that there are enemies out there, and the government needs to protect you, probably including military actions. (And imagine if "weapons of mass destruction" might be involved! See Iraq above ramp up to try to create a conflict with Iran in recent U.S. politics.) Public surveillance and police state actions create a state of paranoia in the populace that can often lead them to support armed conflicts... because they're just that freaked out and scared.
Now, what about secret surveillance that is kept from the public? Well, it does similar things, except the paranoia now is left to fester inside the government and agencies that compile the data. There will always be apparent "threats" to every nation, always people shooting their mouths off about something or other, always people talking to shady people (but not actually intending to be terrorists).
But increased surveillance ensures that lots of people in the government are frankly OBSESSED with huge amounts of weird stuff going by their desks every day. A report here, a briefing there, and suddenly you're convinced that many people are plotting terrorist activities right now -- and they're out to get you.
I don't know this for certain, but I have to guess that this obsession with looking for ANY signs of potentially bad actions probably also contributed to the Bush White House arguing for an invasion of Iraq (again, see above). The more "data" that comes in, the more likely that people are to see random patterns in it, effectively finding what they want to see.
And when those people are in charge of major governments or lots of weapons, that kind of paranoid quest combing through random data is a serious threat to world peace.
I think there are better candidates.
So do I. But someone who exposed the paranoid actions of crazy governments intent on finding "unseen enemies" to attack HAS potentially contributed something significant toward future peace.
I think you don't really understand the point of those rights. They aren't rights simply for being rights. They are rights because they are a necessary component of a healthy civilization. An "all seeing police state" perpetuates violence - the kind that a state visits on its citizens - it is just one or two steps removed from the actual violence that it creates.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.