Machado gives Nobel peace prize medal to Trump | Hacker News Reader

Machado gives Nobel peace prize medal to Trump

bbc.com

30 pointsspwa426 comments

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Actual title -

Machado vows to lead Venezuela 'when right time comes'

Per HN Guidelines [0]

Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The title accurately describes what happened without any sense of editorial sensationalism. The title doesn’t match word for word with what the original had but that’s not even close to the same thing you’re complaining about.

If I were on the Nobel Prize committee, I’d feel deeply ashamed seeing the prize reduced to a kind of political currency. It’s meant to recognize extraordinary contributions to humanity, not to be leveraged as a gesture or bargaining chip in political theater.

I much prefer The Guardian’s coverage. It includes the organiser’s answer and examples of other situations where the medal was given away.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/15/maria-corina-m...

> Earlier in the day the Nobel organizers posted on X: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel peace prize laureate cannot.”

> (…)

> Earlier this week, the organisers of the Nobel peace prize announced the award could not be “shared or transferred” after Machado told Fox News she wished to “share” it with Trump. “The decision is final and stands for all time,” they said.

That one links to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/11/nobel-institut...

Back to the original:

> Machado is not the first Nobel laureate to divest themselves of the award.

> After winning the 1954 Nobel prize in literature, Ernest Hemingway entrusted his medal to the Catholic Church in Cuba – where it was briefly stolen from a sanctuary in 1986 before Raúl Castro ordered its return.

> In 2022, the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned his medal to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees. Leon Lederman, who won the 1988 Nobel prize for physics, sold his after it had spent 20 years “sitting on a shelf somewhere”.

> Machado appears to be the first person to give away her medal for such explicitly political reasons, although in 1943 the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun gifted his decoration to Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, as a sign of his admiration for the Nazis.

Then there's James Watson who was given a Nobel prize medal twice. First by the Nobel Committee, and second by Alisher Usmanov, who had purchased the medal at an auction in order to give it back to Watson, who had put it up for auction.

Just to note that the Peace Prize committee is a completely different one than the other prizes.

The five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament while the Swedish Nobel Committee is composed of institutions proposing laureates and a larger body of experts to choose the recipients. The Norwegian part does both: selecting candidates and choosing the winner.

I think it's important to know so the Peace Prize process doesn't diminish the achievements of the other prizes.

Henry fucking Kissinger got a Peace Prize...

Thank you for reminding me about the Nobel War Prize.

It's a shame that history has repeated itself here, political satire has yet again become obsolete.

Of course she did. Her interest is in helping her country (in her terms at least), not vanity awards.

If flattering a superpower by giving them a meaningless statue can help her do that ... why wouldn't she?

Come on, you know exactly why: integrity.

I really don't care about any of this but I don't see the need to play ignorant as to why many people might understandably find what she did distasteful.

>> If flattering a superpower by giving them a meaningless statue can help her do that ... why wouldn't she?

> Come on, you know exactly why: integrity.

> I really don't care about any of this but I don't see the need to play ignorant as to why many people might understandably find what she did distasteful.

Please go into more detail what you mean by "integrity." Because, that can mean a lot of different things, and what I think you mean sounds like a priority inversion.

If a Venezuelan giving the stupid hunk of metal away could help Venezuela, who cares about how some Norwegian committee and its fans feel about it? They're comfortable and unimportant.

Surely this is sophistry?

It's obvious isn't it? An award has an element of consensus, we choose to make the Nobel prizes mean something by agreeing they mean something.

I don't think it's controversial to say that they are considered a highly prestigious award.

I also don't think it's controversial to say that treating them as transferable undermines the whole point of the award (that they are exclusive, that they are awarded based on merit and careful judgement and not just some free-market commodity that can be bought and sold). If they were, they would be completely worthless.

This is like.. the whole point of awards, trophies etc.

I vehemently have no horse in this race, I'm just trying to live my life, but I refuse to believe that someone who browses HN and articulates themselves well doesn't grok the generally well-understood social contract which underpins things like the Nobel prize and how some might see giving one away as undermining not just to the prize but to the many others who have been deemed worth enough to earn said prize.

Integrity is exactly the right word IMO because awards rely on the integrity of the participants to not do exactly what has been done in this instance at the risk of basically throwing the honor they were given back in the faces of the ones who bestowed it.

Honestly I don't care and I wish I hadn't said anything, but surely you're not sat genuinely scratching your head at why some groups find it objectionable

It is sophistry. Common problem around here is that a lot of tech people are too busy thinking they're incredibly smart and always need to be playing 5D chess instead of being decent human beings. I hate to blame Paul Graham for that, but holy shit that /r/iamverysmart shit needs to stop.

It's not sophistry, it's just the assertion that there are far more important things than the feelings of the Nobel committee and the "integrity" of their award. If you're ranking the committee's feels over those other things, then you've got your priorities out of whack.

> Common problem around here is that a lot of tech people are too busy thinking they're incredibly smart and always need to be playing 5D chess instead of being decent human beings. I hate to blame Paul Graham for that, but holy shit that /r/iamverysmart shit needs to stop.

I agree with you there. Another problem around here is getting kinda morally unglued, and prioritizing some weird abstract thing over more important and practical considerations.

It is sophistry because that's not the point. Of course there are things that matter more than awards. But pretending like there's some world where we're trading the integrity of awards to solve important problems is a laughable fantasy.

> I also don't think it's controversial to say that treating them as transferable undermines the whole point of the award (that they are exclusive, that they are awarded based on merit and careful judgement and not just some free-market commodity that can be bought and sold). If they were, they would be completely worthless.

My point: what's more important "the whole point of awards, trophies etc," or the well being of your country?

I'd gladly "undermine the whole point of the award" if that act offered some more important benefit to the people I care about. The integrity of the awards process is not a very important thing to me, in comparison. If I took such an action, maybe the award-granters would be mad, but who cares about them? They're comfortably ensconced in some paneled office somewhere. They'll be fine.

But will it help her do that, or did she just increase Trump’s self-assuredness while accomplishing absolutely nothing of worth? There was no agreement stipulated that we know of, so why would he do something in return for her now?

> or did she just increase Trump’s self-assuredness

imagining that matters.

Well, at least she admitted she didn't deserve the Peace Prize, since she's been advocating war! Yet, "Two wrongs don't make a right!"

First the fact that she received the price when a ton of people where far more deserving of it in terms of raw achievements toward peace. Then the fact that she would sell the price and what it represents for a slim (read inexistent)k shot at being instated as the president of Venezuella, where I read that the majority of people have a very unfavorable opinion of her. And finally the fact that she would sell away the Peace price to Donald Trump, the very same person considering invading Greenland for aura farming purposes!

I think they have to shut down the Noble peace price at this point, there's no recovering from such an embarrassing turn of events.

I... don't think that's how any of this works.

It is said that Trump did not give her dominion over Venezuela because he was miffed over her getting the Peace Prize and not him. She's a fascist by the way.

> She's a fascist

Citation?

Supposedly the current government are communists. That's what Chavez promised and Maduro was his right hand man.

Of course in practice the current government ... let's call them "billionnaire communists". They defend, in words, the principles of global socialism, and in deeds they defend their own wallets.

On wikipedia her political views are describe by multiple sources as:

>she was viewed as a radical, far-right politician, too extreme even for her own party coalition

>most radical wing of the right

>the most radical wing of the political right

>maintained an extreme right-wing stance

It's rare that anyone picks the fascist label themselves so its hard to pin on anyone. But I guess it could be said in the slur sense of the term.

No. She is just literally nobody in Venezuela.

That’s true too.

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