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2014 Nobel Peace Prize Awarded To Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzay
An anonymous reader writes: This year's Nobel Peace Prize has been given to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzay for fighting to protect the rights of children and further their education. Yousafzay, at the age of 17, is the youngest recipient of the Peace Prize. Born and raised in Pakistan, she actively campaigned for girls' rights to education. In 2012, the Taliban shot her in the head, but she survived and continued her struggle. Satyarthi, a 60-year-old from India, has led many peaceful protests to fight against child slavery and illiteracy. "Satyarthi estimates that 60 million children in India, or 6 percent of the population, are forced into work. This, he believes, has nothing to do with parental poverty, illiteracy or ignorance. Above all, children are enslaved because employers benefit by getting their labour for free or for a pittance." This year's Nobel Peace Prize awards are also notable for bringing together an Indian and a Pakistani while their respective governments sustain a military conflict along a stretch of border between their countries.
But these are both great people who went through hell to great things. They could've awarded the peace prize to Hitler himself, and I'd still be thinking these awards are incredibly appropriate.
I wish I could've achieved as much as Malala when I was 17, and I can still aspire to achieve what Kailash did by the same I'm 60.
Fuck anti-education assholes, and fuck slavery.
Malala Yousafzay campaigns for womens and girls rights, and in the UK she gets sent to a private, segregated all girls school... I always found that slightly ironic.
There's some kind of myth that is sought to be promulgated by certain people that the Nobel committee is politically independent. That is completely wrong. The entire commitee is put together by votes in the parliament, and former and high profile politicians are heavily involved. So consider basically the committee's choices the result of the preferences of political appointees.
The current head of the commitee, Thorbjørn Jagland, is a former head politician of the Labour party. He was the one who gave the prize to Barack Obama. Of course, the commitee does have five people in it - but they are all political appointees, and the president has a double vote.
He has been severely and repeatedly criticised over many years, from high profile people, for completely ignoring Alfred Nobel's will. For example, here: http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/nobels-fredspris/nobel-forfatter-jagland-burde-gaatt-av-for-lenge-siden/a/10062076/ - headline "Jagland should have resigned a long time ago", criticism from the author of the book "Nobel's Will". Article about the author here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrik_Heffermehl .
Nobel's will states that the prize should go to whomever works to reduce standing armies and arrange peace conferences - it should go to efforts to reduce conventional wars.
The new conservative government has indicated that they are going to remove Jagland. Jagland has presented a conspiracy theory that this is because they are trying to please China. But that's probably not going to float, so the streak of madness and Labour party preference is going to end soon.
Neither has contributed much to the "fraternity of nations" and the "abolition or reduction of standing armies." Neither did Al Gore, who also won the prize. Truth of the matter is that the Nobel committee stopped handing out Peace prizes long ago and now hands out Ideologies We Like awards. The recipients may be very deserving of some sort of award, but few lately meet the original criteria of fostering peace and reducing war, Kissinger and Obama being the starkest proof of that. It's sad really: with all the wars that are raging now, you'd think promoting peace would be important to someone.
Where's Obama's second Peace Prize?
"In 2012, the Taliban shot her in the head, but she survived and continued her struggle."
That ladies and gentlemen is what we call a zombie. Can a zombie win the nobel prize? Apparently so. I for one welcome our new teenage zombie overlords.
an educated population is one of the best defenses against mindless wars. That's why it's so important to the corrupt governments that want to wage those wars to have control of the education systems in their societies.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The people of Pakistan and the people of India have been hostile toward each other much longer than that. Of course, they weren't "people of Pakistan and India" before the end of British rule of what is now India and Pakistan.
About the only period they weren't hostile was during the Raj, when the British tried to prevent that sort of thing.
Note that during the post-British period, when they were split into two countries, the Hindus living in what is now Pakistan were attacked by their Muslim neighbors and driven out of the country.
Likewise, during the same period, the Muslims living in what is now India were attacked by their Hindu neighbors. This reached the point that trainloads of Muslims fleeing to Pakistan were stopped by the Indian Army and machinegunned before being allowed to continue into Pakistan.
Bury the hatchet in each other's head, yes.
The way you mean it, no.
And do you really know so little of human psychology?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
lol, you have no idea what you're talking about and you can't even be bothered to check out wikipedia before you attack a teenage girl?
Let me make it easy for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
She attended school, despite threats from various, very scary groups that any girl caught doing so would be attacked.
There was basically a civil war while she was in school and girls were banned from attending, but she went anyways.
She worked for the BBC all this time, describing what it was like. Enlightening people in the west to the plight of girls in this area of the world.
Then the Taliban ordered her dead. A gunman drove up, ordered her to identify herself or he'd shoot them all. She did and was shot. She nearly died.
She survived the attack and continued to attend school.
This brought world wide attention to the plight of women in Pakistan.
She recovered, continued to attend school, got exiled, etc...
She's met with damn near every world leader.
Asked and received funding to support the education of women.
Got money from the UN
Wrote books, articles, blogs, etc... all encouraging young women to attend school and get an education no matter what.
At any point during all of this she could have simply attended private school and shut her mouth to avoid the threats but she refused.
Nobel Prizes are given for a lifetime of achievement. This girl has already done more in the less than 2 decades she's been alive then the whole of the Slashdot community combined. There are a lot of questionable Nobel awards out there, but this is not one of them.
And I thought John Kerry was a shoo-in for his Israeli Apartheid comments...
"People of Pakistan and people of India have long been hostile?" Wrong. "Was the only time they were not hostile was during the Raj?". Utterly wrong again, rather the opposite. People of areas now comprising India and Pakistan were never so hostile except since Raj. As a mattef of fact these hostilities were sown due to Raj's divide-and-rule approach.
I think I'll have to invoke Godwin on this one or for that matter post 9/11 US, education doesn't stop wacky wars. At least not education with a high degree of political slant and indoctrination, people can read/write or for that matter be an engineer/developer and still swallow political propaganda hook, line and sinker.
This is far older and simpler than this, it's opposition to equality of the sexes. They'd rather have their women be ignorant half-slave housekeepers, sex servants, child bearers and nannies. The first step is denying them any education so they're illiterate, then wrap them in burqas and make them terrified of contact with any other male who might treat them like a human being and finally subjugate them in law, to refuse your husband is never rape, no divorce, the kids belong to the father and if a woman gets raped let's punish her because obviously she tempted them in some way.
And just to get back on that education track, if the choices are no education, religious indoctrination (ev-uh-lution? what's that?) or government indoctrination I think for the most part I favor democratically imposed standards of education over individual whack jobs who want to inflict their wacky world view on their children. Not that I think public school is necessarily a good school, but most of them are pretty bland and expose you to a wide variety of other children with different backgrounds.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The Nobel "Peace" prize is such a farce. First we have warmonger Obama. Then we have Snowden completely ignored.
Is there any proof for your hypothesis?
Yes, there is evidence. The US invasion of Iraq was not history's bloodiest war, but it was one of the dumbest. Polls taken in 2002-2003 clearly show that opposition to that invasion was strongly correlated with education level. High school dropouts were the most likely to favor invading, and people with graduate degrees were the most likely to oppose it.
This doesn't mean that education can prevent all wars, but maybe it can prevent the really dumb wars.
few lately meet the original criteria of fostering peace and reducing war,
I think it's been very broad for the last 50 years, and what they also now recognize is nonviolent resistance to tyranny. That's why MLK and Lech Walesa won the prize (among others), and I have a hard time thinking of anyone more deserving.
Did you not see how ISIS tries to control what is being taught in the schools about mathematics and chemistry?
The Taliban also do the same to keep women and girls out of education because they might learn about other possibilities and lose their dependence on men.
In the US, it was illegal in the early 1800s to teach slaves how to read or write. If a slave were to learn, they would quickly overpower their masters.
Why else do you think there were times when the Catholic church would shun science? Education of the stars took away the geocentric theory and was bound to take away our importance of being the center of the universe.
Authoritarians have throughout history done what they could to control education. An ignorant populace is not a threat. An educated populace is capable of organization and can quickly create problems for the powers that be.
Examples of racism in South Africa were actually greater towards the Indian population than the African population because Indians
Place something witty here
Libertarians in practice are just conservatives without the context of history and social forces.
Education, and the education of women in particular, begets peace. Well demonstrated fact. Find another way to attack her credibility. You've failed here.
In the interviews with her I've heard, she has also talked quite a bit about peace and how the likes of the Taliban do not stand for Muslims and how she understands her religion.
This cuts to one of the big problems facing us, namely the fact that groups such as the Taliban and ISIS are trying there hardest to make the west think that they are representative of Islam and therefore promote religious war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism