Since the award for Obama I can't take this serious anymore
Think of the absolutely immense amounts of political capital that any of those things require, and how likely it is to find a person in any given year who could be personally credited with improving relationships between countries, or reducing standing armies.
It's also not democracy-friendly, funnily enough. In most democratic countries such actions are a collective effort. A single member of a parliament can't get anything done on their own, and there doesn't necessarily need to be some sort of charismatic leader pushing such efforts. An army can shrink just because we have a general consensus that war isn't a good thing and the army can do with a smaller budget, and who do you award for that?
So it makes perfect sense to me that the committee ends up blundering it. Maybe if it was a once a decade thing it'd be a more reasonable one.
To paraphrase: give it a chance.
Obama was just another warmonger, in my opinion.
"Jagland said the committee was influenced by a speech Obama gave about Islam in Cairo in June 2009, the president's efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and climate change, and Obama's support for using established international bodies such as the United Nations to pursue foreign policy goals."
What he accomplished was to set a new tone for peace. This is more than many other presidents.
That 'warmonger' label is just bonkers. He prevented an engagement in Syria, this caused and still causes a lot of harm.
Mother Teresa sounds very unsurprisingly as an extremely religious person. She constantly talks about God and Jesus and how people's spiritual needs are paramount, and how abortion and contraception is evil, and how her agenda is spiritual, and how she's not a social worker. All of that is said in very plain language.
Now as an atheist that doesn't cause any particular positive impression on me, but what I find it interesting is that she's 100% clearly a religious worker first, second, third and probably fourth before she's anything else. The Catholic Church was very right in canonizing her, if you take canonicalization as a recognition of somebody's religious work, not as some sort of "very good person" stamp of approval.
With her there seems to be no "dirty landry" like Gandhi having his weird tests of will or whatever that was. No, she's very upfront about what she is, and barely shuts up about it.
So it baffles me why she ended up with the reputation she did. She's very clearly a religious worker and has that as a first priority above anything else. Seeing her as somebody would want to take care of people in a manner people who aren't religious zealots would approve is just a mistake.
One needs to remember that for many religious people, the spiritual “health” is as important, if not more important, than the physical health.
I would assume her argument about using funds for the church rather than healthcare would be something like “the money is used to for both the spiritual and health needs of the destitute”.
You can clearly disagree with that take, but it’s not like she was stealing the money or diverting it for her own gain.
I would definitely not put him in the same category as awarding it to either Obama or Kissinger. If anything they initiated or architected some of the worst conflicts in the last 50 years.
The Obama award was from one of his years as president.
From wikipedia: According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize shall be awarded to the person who in the preceding year "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses"
> All: please don't post if you have a reflexive-indignant reaction rather than a curious one. This site is for the latter, not the former, and the former tends to drown out the latter.
> I'm not saying you owe Nobel Prize committees better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
And why not use this opportunity to discuss this year's worthy recipients, instead of derailing the thread?
You’re not just recognising the progress he US might have made, but signalling the current leader that hey, you could also leave your mark. Obama seems like a pretty reasonable and intelligent person to me. He probably thought about why they awarded it to him.
But it is indeed as you say: the thinking process is somewhat opaque at times. I watched the announcement just now from the Nobel museum in Stockholm where they discussed it. It was inevitable that the award this year would relate to Russia somehow, but they thought it inappropriate to award to a leader actively waging war (even a defensive war).
Discussed yesterday when we were there was your talking point about Obama's award being about what he represented and not about anything he did.
Also I think the civil rights argument seems wrong to me. Citing Wikipedia:
"Jagland said the committee was influenced by a speech Obama gave about Islam in Cairo in June 2009, the president's efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and climate change, and Obama's support for using established international bodies such as the United Nations to pursue foreign policy goals."
If you want to award to him I think awarding it for his nuclear treaty with Iran comes closest to making sense.