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Comment by eterevsky | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, Nobel Prize has a history of expanding the traditional bounds of respective fields when awarding the prizes:

Bertrand Russel got the Nobel prize in literature

Daniel Kahneman got Nobel in economics

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Don't forget Barack Obama for absolutely no valid reason.

Hey he got the Peace Prize for conducting a war in the middle east!

The economics prize is not a Nobel prize.

"Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony."

- Wikipedia

It's propaganda for liberalism. It's just that at a certain point that propaganda became so successful, that you sound like a lunatic if you call it propaganda. Unfortunately there was no reason to make propaganda for Mathematics so they never got their own Nobel prize.

That's all true, but it doesn't do anything to diminish my suspicion that there is a fair amount of coattail-riding behind it.

Winston Churchill got a Nobel in literature, too.

Yes, but for his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and more broadly, for his lifetime as an author.

(Admittedly, even more broadly, the prize was the Nobel Committee wanting to acknowledge his leadership in WW2, but still.)

Bob Dylan on literature was another "hmm" one.

Not against nor in favor, it was just an unexpected awardee.

Bob Dylan is the Boomer poet laureate.

War criminials got Nobel prize in peace.

Which were you referring to?

Yasser Arafat is one

Kissinger another.

Also Barack Obama. It's hard to be POTUS without commiting war crimes.

Do be fair to the Nobel committee, he commit his purported "war crimes" after getting the prize.

He also got it for being half black since by the cutoff date he'd been president for all of 11 days. Had they waited a year they would have had the pleasure of finding out he ordered 50% more drone strikes than Bush did.

Content of his character indeed.

We're well into flame war territory here, so I apologize, and am treading carefully.

The list of war crimes I can pin on US during that time is mostly indefinite imprisonment in Guantanamo if you allow for the efforts Obama made to reduce torture.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/01/09/barack-obamas-shaky-lega...

Drone strikes are not war crimes according to this definition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crime#Definition

Probably Yasser Arafat

Aung San Suu Kyi?

There's quite a few.

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