Hmm I've actually thought about that for a long time and I think the prize was in a way for the American people not for the war but peace within the society (or so we though) in electing a black president who went on to take action to get the America/World out of recession wanting change..There is zero evidence of what I'm saying by the way complete speculation, but that's why I believe the prize was given to him overzealously. If I recall Obama himself felt strange about the prize and was taken aback. He considered not picking it up and had his staff ask if he could skip the ceremony.
Great choice, his unexpected acceptance of the Algiers Agreement terms gave so much hope for the region. This is what the Nobel Peace Price was originally intended for.
From a global perspective, awarding two European writers yet again is just a failure.
From a purely literary perspective, Handke is a great and influential writer, who was a hot candidate for a long time. For his work, I think the award is justified.
On a personal level, his ex-wife accused him of physical abuse, he held a eulogy for a war criminal, was known for cursing and berating his audience, ...
If he still should have received it regardless depends on a difficult value judgement: do you purely choose based on a writers work, or does his personality influence the decision?
I can get behind excluding individual authors from the award for being terrible people, but I can't get behind purposely giving the award to someone that's not European if Europeans would have otherwise deserved it based solely on the merits of their writing.
There's plenty of amazing things written by non-white people. However, the Nobel prize for literature should remain a pure meritocracy as much as possible.
That's not to say that its a perfect system. If you point to any given year you can likely find examples of written works that didn't get the award but are arguably as good if not better.
If you intentionally limit the pool of potential awardees to people that are not white, you make a mockery of the award and it loses any sense of prestige or credibility, even if the non-white awardee was truly the best writer. Not only are you discriminating against certain people, you are also doing a disservice to the very people you want to help.
I think a better solution would be to try and make sure the people involved in the process aren't heavily biased towards any specific demographic of authors.
There are probably additional ways to improve the system, but I think if we want the award to mean anything they have to be focused on eliminating discrimination, rather than using it as a tool to generate an equality in outcomes.
Edit: I should note that this reflects my thoughts on prestigious awards being meritocracies, it doesn't reflect my thoughts anything else, there are lots of complicated issues such as affirmative action, university quotas, etc. That I am not making a comment about because I don't know what the optimal solution is to solving those problems.
What do you think about the critiques of our understanding of merit - specifically the idea that our cultural experiences bias our understanding and perception of excellence?
I.e. If all your examples of good writing are written by a european for other europeans, you will likely associate some cultural practices that aren't required for good writing with your understanding of "good writing." The whole idea of developing taste is, of course, that it is somewhat subjective.
I think the idea of meritocracy is one worth pursuing, but I think modern advocates for it as a thing that actually exists today should engage more energetically with the critiques of it in practice.
> What do you think about the critiques of our understanding of merit - specifically the idea that our cultural experiences bias our understanding and perception of excellence?
I think everyone is biased and that objective thinking is a learned skill that you have to constantly re-evaluate. No one will ever be perfectly unbiased or anywhere near it. Even when you are practicing objective thinking honestly and correctly, there are undoubtedly deeply ingrained biases that you can't shake and you may not even be able to know what those biases are.
However, I think through effort we can improve and minimize the impact of bias. Furthermore, over long periods of time, if we adopt a culture of doing this, it may actually reduce bias overall in the generations to come.
The simple version is I think we are not going to be perfect, but surely we can be better than we are if we try. I think that's better than attempting to prevent bias by introducing extreme forms of bias in the opposite direction.
> However, the Nobel prize for literature should remain a pure meritocracy as much as possible.
I don't think it's even remotely the case. If anything, just for the fact that literature cannot be measured independently of times, culture and circumstances. The idea of people in Oslo comparing the merits of an Italian poet with those of a playwright writing in Swahili is pretty ridiculous.
The literature price committee's has zero credibility after the scandal.
The nominations are just trying to signal something related to the functioning of committee. Let's pick man and a woman who signal we are better people now, somehow.
I fail to see how the literature price committee's credibility has somehow sunken because of the scandals within the academy. The committee now consists partly of non-academy members and surely the academy itsel must be better off after its purgatory?
Considering Trump made the decision not to attack Iran and start WWIII after Iran downed a US drone (despite immense pressure from neocons like Bolton), Trump actually deserves a little credit for being a relatively peaceful president.
He hasn't started any new conflicts and just recently started pulling US troops out of Syria. Can't say that for his predicessors. I understand that people don't like Trump due to his pompous and abrasive personality, but his foreign policy has been suprisingly sane (ignoring all his other policy).
I guess I should of expected down votes. People's disdane for Trump is often visceral instead of logical (similar to people's feelings on Obama). But you know, sometimes people/orgs/etc that you don't like or support make some good decisions. But if you "feel" good about down voting, then go for it. I'll stick to the facts.
It doesn't help your case to just try and pretend you're logical and everyone else is just biased. The situation in Iran has been actively built up by Trump, partly through his hiring and support of John Bolton - one of the architects of the foreign policy disaster of the Bush years. Partly by completely unnecessarily walking away from the JCPOA against all the lobbying of his allies. Trump has been actively making the prospect of war with Iran far more likely since 2016 and giving him a Nobel prize for stepping back from a brink that he himself walked up to is pretty ridiculous in my opinion.
> Trump made the decision not to attack Iran and start WWIII after Iran downed a US drone
> He hasn't started any new conflicts
He has started a (completely unnecessary, in the opinion of almost everybody) conflict with Iran. The violation of the treaty and the sanctions are an act of economic war- which is much cheaper and less bloody than a military attack, but almost equally devastating for the victim. Trump is very happy with choking a whole country and he wants it to die in silence, without making too much fuss. Should he get a Nobel peace prize for that? I don't think so.
Not to mention the fact that Iran isn't happy at all at the idea of being silently choked so it'll keep staging provocations until either it can get a relief from sanctions or Trump is dragged into a war of his own making.
He's not showing restraint. He's trying to get what he wants without spending money, risking his ratings, and making the world notice. He's showing as much restraint as someone who, to avoid making noise, prefers strangling to shooting.
I don't see why not? The prizes are handed out by the Nobel foundation, which is independent of government, and as far as I know, financially self-sustaining, so there are no sponsors to upset, and no government that has oversight.
-That they are, but by foreign powers (China is not the only one!), its independence is often cast in doubt. Doubly so as the Norwegian parliament elect members to the Nobel committee, and they tend to choose has-been politicians to put them out to pasture.
The result being that while the committee is nominally independent, its ties to government are strong enough for China, for instance, to put relations with Norway in the freezer for several years after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the prize in 2010.
I'd think that proves the opposite: Even though it hurt the Norwegian government's relationship with China, the committee still went ahead with their decision.
I agree, but the Chinese saw it differently, to put it mildly.
The committee awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident was led by a former prime minister, its members two former members of government and two former members of parliament.
If you are a country in which the powers that be control just about anything, I guess you could be forgiven for being doubtful as to the committee's independence...
Curious why do you wonder that. Is there something in the structure or composition of the Nobel Committee that ties them to China ? (I could not see anything obvious from the current composition [1].)
I think his work has been impactful in his immediate neighbourhood. Hong Kong/China is too far away for his opinion to make a difference. Plus, why limit his opinion to only China/Hong Kong. Should his opinion about the USA and Cuba also matter? What about Russia, Turkey, EU and the USA in Syria? Should his opinion on Trump and the Republican's attitude towards migrants in America also matter? I think the only thing that should matter is based on the resources and opportunities under him what has he done with them.
I will see Greta in Denver Friday afternoon at a climate rally. She is young and a voice of her generation. Many future possibilities for her and repairing the climate crisis.
I respect the Nobels decision to award the prize to this peace broker. So many global issues that need attention.
If you're concerned with how guilty each individual consumer in a country should feel look at per capita emissions. If you're interested in stopping climate change effectively look at total emissions.
Well if you're concerned with effectively stopping climate change a quite important part of your calculation is where you can actually persuade people to address the issue. That's a complex calculation, but I think it's far more credible that you can get the policy supported in the US and then enforced internationally through treaties and negotiations with the support of Europe than trying to do a tour persuading China.
It’s certainly notable how she never directs her anger at China or India, but reserves it for Western countries only. She has a very white-centric view of the world.
Multiply the per-capita numbers by the sizes of the country and you see that in terms of total emissions China is the most critical player. Worse, per-capita emissions are strongly correlated with consumer buying power so the more China's economy grows the more it's per-capita and total emissions are likely to grow.
It's important to reduce emissions everywhere, but China is the key player to watch.
I assume you're looking at overall CO2 emissions rather than per-capita emissions.
I’m looking at the page I linked. Per-capita is basically irrelevant, the issue is the total emissions under the control of any one government. Or should China not act until they match the US per-capita but with 3-4x the population?
Further the US and European trends are already downwards. China’s is dramatically upwards.
> Further the US and European trends are already downwards.
US CO2 emission trends are downwards because the US stopped burning coal. In the same time, they've switched to natural gas produced by fracking. Fracking leaks methane. Taking methane and CO2 emissions together, US greenhouse gas trends are stable and not downward.
> the issue is the total emissions under the control of any one government
Total emissions definitely matter (no need to give speeches in Palau even if per-capita emissions are much greater than in the USA), but considering this number without regard to the population size is completely unrealistic and insensitive.
For China's overall emissions to get to the same level as the USA, that means a Chinese citizen would be expected, on average, to emit less than half of what a US citizen emits.
Would you expect a Chinese citizen to only eat half of what a US citizen eats, just because there are more people in their country ? Of course not.
China's trend is dramatically upwards because a big chunk of the population is still getting out of poverty. Of course CO2 emissions are increasing.
The ecosystem doesn’t actually care whose feelings are hurt, you know. It’s a weird argument to make. China is the single largest emitter of CO2, plastic waste in the oceans, etc etc. Yet we expect them to do nothing about it until 2030 at the earliest, but just stay on their upward trend. Which is about the same time as the ecosystem collapses entirely according to AOC. But we mustn’t be “insensitive” about it!
Well I suppose they could split their country, that would lower the emissions of the individual parts and might bring them down to the US level easily.
(Not that they'd be interested in that, but still.)
She happens to be in the US at the moment and doesn't fly due to environmental concerns. Besides, her physical presence is irrelevant in these times of global communication networks..
There is more than one source of pollution in the world, Greta's English is better than her Mandarin, and much of China's pollution is in service of industrial exports.
Climate change will very nearly directly cause war. It will and already is causing food shortages, flooding, drought, etc. This will cause mass migration and conflict for resources. It's about as close to directly causing war as a thing can be.
Of course. She is creating a lot of attention for the mismatch between scientists' (in particular IPCC) insights and recommendations and politicians (in)actions and failure to reach the goals they set themselves.
> what actions does she recommend
She recommends we listen to the science. Nothing more, nothing less.
How is it not? The IPCC models predict a > 4°C average temperature increase for the business-as-usual scenario. This is means billions of people migrating across national boundaries and/or dead, extinction of most species, a dramatic reduction in farm land, tropical rainforests ceasing to exist. I doubt humanity's technological advances can be sustained when we can't even feed ourselves.
Even a 2°C average increase is very, very bad, with intense weather events every year, countries like India not being able to support their population density, tropical rainforests turning into savannahs. It is also a mass extinction scenario.
> The IPCC models predict a > 4°C average temperature increase for the business-as-usual scenario.
“Business-as-usual” is not the most likely outcome. It completely neglects technological development trajectories which make something like 2.5 deg absolutely achievable by simple market forces without radical action. But in any case...
> This is means billions of people migrating across national boundaries and/or dead, extinction of most species, a dramatic reduction in farm land, tropical rainforests ceasing to exist. I doubt humanity's technological advances can be sustained when we can't even feed ourselves.
All of that is rampant speculation. THIS is what I’m calling out as non-consensus.
> Even a 2°C average increase is very, very bad, with intense weather events every year, countries like India not being able to support their population density, tropical rainforests turning into savannahs. It is also a mass extinction scenario.
That’s a strange thing to say. How do you reconcile that statement with the fact that higher temperatures mean more rainfall, higher CO2 levels mean better plant growth, and geologic record which indicates that when the earth was previously that much warmer it was covered pole-to-pole with lush tropical rainforests?
> Of course. She is creating a lot of attention for the mismatch between scientists' (in particular IPCC) insights and recommendations and politicians (in)actions and failure to reach the goals they set themselves.
Is she? I've only watched her "how dare you" speech and have read a couple of hit pieces about how she doesn't like Trump (granted, it's not necessarily her fault that journalists focus on this part), but I haven't been exposed to any actual content about climate change because of her.
Up front I just have to say that this comment is not meant as a criticism of the choice. These are just my loose thoughts on the particulars of this prize.
Without wanting to say anything about this year’s winner (if only because of a lack of my personal knowledge which, to be honest, is probably embarrasing): The prize has sometimes been awarded in a very aspirational way, i.e. not so much for past work, but more as an encouragement based on not so much past work. I view giving the award to Obama in that way, for example.
I do think that’s a valid and potentially valuable approach to giving out the prize. I’m not sure giving the prize to someone decades after they did something important is very useful, especially for such an overtly political prize. I do think that the Nobel Peace Prize has to dare to be brave and also dare to be wrong. It should not pick safe choices where a wide consensus has already formed.
Of course I also can see the other side, too: If you are wrong too often you risk becoming a joke and irrelevant, all encouragement is for nothing. So this is a hard problem to solve. But still: overall I think being daring is the right approach for a prize such as this. That the goal is to say with the prize: “We want to support the great work this person is doing right now, right in this moment!”
In that light I’m quite tolerant to some missteps if the Peace Prize is willing to be brave and get right into the fray, also of things that are still hotly contested.
Other Nobel Prizes sometimes do get awarded decades after the research they're rewarding, in order to see the impact of the result, whether it actually turned out to be true, etc. I wouldn't mind if they did something similar with the Peace Prize.
Obama's prize, for example, was clearly too early. Although it would have worked if it had been given to the American voter instead. To elect a black president in a country with such a history of extreme racism against black people, that's a fantastic step forward. But it was the voters who did that. Awarding it for getting elected, or even for that nice speech that Obama made, it feels like that's a bit of a thin reason.
Similarly, I know a lot of people would like to have seen it go to Greta Thunberg, and it would have been a lot more deserved than some other recipients, but I still think it's better to wait a year, to see the real impact she's had.
I also imagined that if Greta had gotten it, she might have given an angry speech that she doesn't want awards, she wants people to act, and I would have agreed.
But I would argue that because of the political nature of the prize (and the deliberate political nature of it) the Peace Prize is unlike the other Prizes and should maybe be awarded differently, i.e. while being less certain about whether the choice is a good one.
But I can also see and understand your point of view. It’s just a different (and also valid) idea of what the Prize is supposed to be.
Obama's prize was basically a collective sigh of relief of him not being Bush more than anything. The amount of celebration over Obama's win by non-Americans was at a level I've never seen before.
Expect a similar sigh of relief once Trump goes, though perhaps a bit more muted because we're more cynical about what will come next by now.
I don't think she really has done enough to deserve it. To me it seems like it is forced and just pushed to lend creditably to an obvious political puppet. The poor girl is being used and obvious is abused by her parents.
