Many in Norway and Sweden distanced themselves from the Nobel Peace Prize at the time it was awarded to Machado because it was obvious it was such a bad decision.
Julian Assange even filed a criminal complaint in Sweden last month to try to stop the Swedish Nobel Foundation paying out over $1 million dollars to her, arguing it's going against Alfred Nobel's will, and they have a responsibility to respect his will.
He wrote last month: "Using her elevated position as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado may well have tipped the balance in favour of war, facilitated by the named suspects."
I find it funny that what many saw as a terrible decision has now come to pass, and the Nobel Institute is scrambling to save face.
The problem with the peace prize is it seems like its given out to people who they hope will bring peace instead of people who actually have brought peace.
We don't award the chemistry one to people with a promising research program, we award it to people who actually have discovered things that we actually know changed the field. If we awarded the peace prize based on actual accomishments judged with the benefit of hindsight instead of expected accomplishments, it would work a lot better.
They didn't give it to Machado hoping she would bring peace. In fact, they did it for the opposite reason. They awarded it at the height of tension and build-up of US forces outside Venezuela, while they were blowing up boats in the Carribean, to encourage Trump to go even further. Something btw which Machado wholeheartedly supported and encouraged.
It is just basic logic really. Hypothetically, If the Nobel committee was to right now announce that this year's Nobel Peace Prize was to be awarded to a Greenlandic independence/opposition activist - Some one who applauds and supports all of Trump's current rhetoric and actions wrt Greenland, someone calling for armed intervention/invasion. What would that say about the committee's opinion on the matter. What would the timing of such an announcement signal to the Trump regime and the wider world? What conclusion could one draw reasonably?
To be fair, it's not the first extremely questionable Nobel Peace Prize award, for example, Henry Kissinger. While not nearly as egregious, Barack Obama was a bizarre choice, too.
> "We have not given the prize for what may happen in the future. We are awarding Obama for what he has done in the past year. And we are hoping this may contribute a little bit for what he is trying to do,"
> 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.
> Nominations for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize closed just 11 days after Obama took office.
Obama entered office on Jan 20th; was nominated before February; was announced in October; and it was justified by actions he'd taken between nomination and announcement.
Obama's own acceptance speech included
> "perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the commander-in-chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars."
It does seem like a bizarre choice, and it does seem like an attempt to raise the awards profile which has meaningfully cheapened it.
The Nobel Prize was given at the beginning of his tenure. Of course it was a majestic failure because by the end, he held the record of "most dropped bombs by any US president"... IIRC it must have been something 25-30k.
I need to note that my understanding of geopolitics have changed since then, but I recall thinking that putting John McCain and Sarah Palin as VP in the White House would have spread political and physical wildfire over the whole world, not quite unlike the situation we have now. From that perspective I considered the Obama Peace Nobel fully earned just by virtue of getting elected.
This is the most absurd mental gymnastics I’ve read in a long time.
“The political party I don’t like might have done bad things, so even though my guy did bad things, he stopped the other guys from doing bad things by winning. So it’s deserved”
I'm a bit left of Bernie, and I agree. Obama's Peace Prize was BS theatrics, and a world-stage attempt to flip a middle finger at the outgoing POTUS, GW Bush.
> I cannot recall Obama doing one single thing for peace internationally? Which conflict did he help stop?
It's an interesting choice for sure. In 2009, he had only killed 50-100 civilians via drone strike by the time they awarded the prize. And he didn't kill US citizens via drone strike abroad until 2011.
Being realistic about things, it's because he was black.
I think the criminal complaint in Sweden route is the only path that has had some success in the past in trying to make these organisations accountable for the peace prize. Swedes like to wash their hands of Nobel Peace Prize responsibility, pointing to Norway instead (it's the only prize where the comittee deciding is in Norway and not Sweden). But the foundation that pays all the winners, including the peace prize winner is in Sweden. And in 2012 the Stockholm County Administrative Board ruled that the Swedish Nobel Foundation is legally responsible for ensuring the Norwegian committee follows Alfred Nobel's will.
Of course the Nobel groups were not happy about that decision so it's rarely talked about. But it's probably a reason Assange went the route he went with the criminal complaint.
• Krigsbrottsenheten (Swedish War Crimes Unit), Kungsholmsgatan 43, 106 75 Stockholm.
[snipped]
The political decision of the Norwegian selection committee does not suspend the fiduciary duty of Swedish funds administrators. Where a decision by the selection committee is in flagrant conflict with the explicit peace purpose of the will, or where there is evidence that the awardee will use or is using the prize to promote or facilitate the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity, or war crimes, administrators must resolve the conflict in favor of the will. They must safeguard the endowment by declining to disburse funds. The Norwegian committee’s selection does not grant them criminal immunity.
Thanks for posting the link to the PDF. I've long tried to find the specific references to the legal grounds for the complaint.
You don't happen to have a reference to the status in the Swedish legal system? The police are responsible for referring this stuff to a prosecutor, and that status should be public.
> The report contained no information indicating that a crime had been committed. Therefore, no preliminary investigation is being initiated, Rikard Ekman of the police told AFP.
That's unsurprising. There's no willingness to challenge the Nobel Foundation on the basis set out by Assange, even though they themselves reluctantly admitted in 2012 that they have a duty to ensure the will is respected:
> "...pursuant to the current legislation governing foundations, the Board of Directors of the Nobel Foundation is legally accountable for ensuring that [...] the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in accordance with the criteria stipulated by Alfred Nobel."
I think a serious examination of Nobel's will and how the Nobel Committee chose Machado over other candidates would make the Norwegian Committee look very bad. It would also show that the Swedish Nobel Foundation failed in its legal duty to ensure the will was respected. A result that would embarrass both Norway and Sweden. So what you get instead is quick dismissal of any such complaints.
The Swedish press has also been terrible in reporting this. I saw articles trying to make Assange out to be stupid for filing in Sweden. Journalists either didn't bother reading the Wikileaks press release, or wanted to keep their readers in the dark about it.
Here's one example from Aftonbladet (Sweden's largest news site):
> WikiLeaks alleges that Assange sent his letter to Swedish authorities, although it is the Norwegian Nobel Committee that appoints peace laureates. ("Wikileaks påstår att Assange skickat sitt brev till svenska myndigheter, även om det är den norska Nobelkommittén som utser fredspristagare.")
There's a book by Norwegian lawyer Fredrik Heffermehl that goes into the 2012 challenge to the Nobel Foundation. I've only skimmed it, but looks quite interesting: The Real Nobel Peace Prize - A Squandered Opportunity to Abolish War https://www.kobo.com/se/en/ebook/the-real-nobel-peace-prize-...
There was also Abiy Ahmed, who went on to commit a genocide [1] the following year in Ethopia, it's less talked about than the one Palestine. Imagine giving Benjamin Netanyahu the nobel peace price, what a joke of an institution.
To be fair in this case, they gave it to him for making peace and ending a long-running conflict. A peace which didn't last evidently and was overshadowed by his later actions. Not unlike Aung San Suu Kyi.
I think it's currently the best route to challenge the way the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded. See my earlier comment. In 2012 the Stockholm County Administrative Board ruled that the Swedish Nobel Foundation is legally responsible for ensuring the Norwegian committee follows Alfred Nobel's will. So that's probably a reason Assange went the route he went with the criminal complaint.
Machado seems fine. There are always going to be controversies around any political figure, and the complaints ahead of the award were... kinda routine, I thought? She was an opposition leader who was denied power won by democratic election, and didn't start an insurrection or whatever. Checks the right boxes. Make the call and move on.
Now, sure, she then went on to personally hand over the medal (or statue or whatever it actually is, I genuinely don't know) to the thin-skinned leader of a foreign superpower in a transparent attempt to be corruptly granted the office by an interventionist coup de tête. Not a great look!
But to claim that this is "what many saw" is sort of ridiculous. No one saw this. The world we live in is simply too ridiculous for predictions like that.
Assange's lawsuit is kind of silly, but his point about the incorrectness of the award to Machado stands up to scrutiny. She overtly encouraged military intervention by the US in Venezuela. That's a blatant contradiction of everything the Nobel Peace Prize is purported to stand for.
Well, she did call on Trump to intervene violently, which he did. She also defended the bombing of civilian boats. Even if you don't count those as insurrection, I certainly count them as a pretty damning whatever.
The world's oldest peace organisation, the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, distanced itself from the Nobel Peace Prize, writing in October:
"...it is becoming increasingly clear that she is a political actor who also gives her support to Trump and Israel, and with an agenda that stands far from peace, disarmament and reconciliation between peoples. Not least, her uncritical positions in favor of Israel, the USA's violations of international law in attacks against ships in the Caribbean and for a military intervention in Venezuela raise a multitude of questions about how the Nobel Committee made its choice."
In Norway, the Norwegian Peace council also distanced itself:
'The Norwegian Peace Council announced that it will not organize this year's traditional torchlight procession through downtown Oslo on the day the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded due to its disagreement with the choice of Venezuelan far-right politician María Corina Machado as the winner.
'The organization, which brings together 17 Norwegian pacifist organizations and some 15,000 activists, declared on Friday, October 24, that it made this decision because its members "do not feel that this year’s winner is in line with the fundamental values of the Norwegian Peace Council."'
When Yahoo! Pipes was still running (long time ago), their official position was:
> Because Pipes is not a web crawler (the service only retrieves URLs when requested to by a Pipe author or user) Pipes does not follow the robots exclusion protocol, and won't check your robots.txt file.
Aw man, they say it's available but then the instructions refer to "getting the API key from the console". I'll play around with the installation command again, thank you!
EDIT: The command does it now, thanks! I tried if a few weeks ago and it didn't, so this is great.
Absolutely. Chinese companies shouldn't have chips because their government has "committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage". And the US government hasn't?
To say the two are remotely comparable is either insincere or naive. Like I'm not saying the US always acts utterly virtuously, but they aren't running concentration camps and chemically castrating entire ethic groups.
They also aren't imprisoning people for speech, which is important when we're discussing who we want controlling AI in the future.
Don't forget Central America and Iran; supporting military dictators in Southeast Asia (Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia); invading Haiti and raiding it of the entirety of its gold reserves, condemning its people to poverty -- one could go on and on.
DeepSeek model not providing answer on the Tiananmen Square and ChatGPT providing answer on ethnic cleansing of Palestine are two sides of the same coin.
I made no such comparison, but if you really want to start comparing government crimes and human rights abuses, I think you'll find we can make a stronger moral case arguing for chip bans for US companies than Chinese companies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BOBKTmaQ9M
if you're chinese you'll know some chinese were sterilized because they _didn't_ believe in a religion
muslims were pardoned of child policy because of their ethnics, it's a privilege of them
people can not imagine something they never saw, try dig your own history, you'll find why it's always about religonal genocide, religonal sterilization, and religonal concentration camps
> To say the two are remotely comparable is either insincere or naive. Like I'm not saying the US always acts utterly virtuously, but they aren't running concentration camps and chemically castrating entire ethic groups.
They absolutely did directly and indirectly several times in their history. A few of those times were recently:
> In September 2020, it was revealed that ICE had performed mass hysterectomies on immigrant women in several detention centers, reminiscent of the long-standing US policy of sterilization of black and brown women. 2
> The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies. 1, 2, 3
> In the present day, ICE (U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement), the police tasked with immigration enforcement, operates over 200 prison camps, housing over 31,000 undocumented people deemed "aliens", 20,000 of which have no criminal convictions, in the US system of immigration detention. The camps include forced labor (often with contracts from private companies), poor conditions, lack of rights (since the undocumented aren't considered citizens), and forced deportations, often splitting up families. Detainees are often held for a year without trial, with antiquated court procedures pushing back court dates for months, encouraging many to accept immediate deportation in the hopes of being able to return faster than the court can reach a decision, but forfeiting legal status, in a cruel system of coercion. 1, 2
> During the 2020 coravirus pandemic, it was found that a law that empowered police to arrest those for not social distancing, lead to 80% of those arrested being black and latino.
I find this line of reasoning a whole lot less convincing now than I would have 2 weeks ago, and it wasn't all that convincing two weeks ago.
When the controlling party of the US is discussing concentration camps for immigrants while also happily calling to revoke birthright citizenship and deport citizens of the US that criticize Trump or the Republican party (eh - who am I kidding - it's the maga/heritage party now)...
It feels like we have no legs left to stand on here, and the support was DAMN shaky to begin with, seeing as we were routinely knocking over governments that we see as inconvenient in our geopolitical sphere of control for the last 100+ years.
Essentially, I think your argument is about 3 elections stale.
True, providing complete military support, with special deliveries of bombs and ordinance to Israel, knowing full well that it will go towards obliterating a city and killing tens of thousands of civilians is more humane. It's not genocide if an ally is doing it!
Note how interesting it is that you can read about these on the internet in the US on US hosted servers by US companies. At least we own up to it and don't just throw you in a mental asylum like they do to anyone who dares to stand up to the CCP.
Oh, people are thinking it now for sure, but it takes a while to retool your relationships and build out a new trade network so you can safely tell a major trading partner to fuck themselves to threats of 100% tariffs.
If Europe and Latin America want to buddy up with the concentration camp gang, I really don't care. We do not need fascists and communists as our partners.
Funny you mention fascists. As for China being a concentration camp gang, that's not going to matter when their former big brother/ally is just relentlessly bullying them and trying to extract all sorts of concessions under duress, and the alternative has demonstrated to be a reliable ally and partner.
Once again, I don't really care if Europe decides that is who they want to be friends with. If your country thinks that trade is more important than the country currently directly committing a modern holocaust, I don't want us to be allied with you at all.
Yeah. I personally think we should just sink the middle east into the ocean because not a single problem there will ever be resolved in a meaningful way.
Ironically, if Trump keeps running this playbook, it's going to end with a USA/Russia/Israel bloc and a Europe/LatAm/Africa/China bloc. Which one of those sounds like the evil empire to you?
Article 1 Section 8 does not enumerate Congress with the power to provide healthcare, so Medicaid should onoy be a state level program.
I know removing it harms those at the low end of the income spectrum, and that is a bummer, but I really would prefer Congress ammend the Constitution instead of just passing laws of which they have no authority to pass.
Well according to the unitary executive theory the US president has complete authority over all government actions and congress is only able to give legitimacy to the president's actions. Under this regime the president would be allowed to stop the execution of any law passed by congress.
I think this is insane and a complete destruction of the balance of power written in the constitution that congress can't enact enforceable laws but only "suggestions" for the president
> UET is a constitutional law theory that gives the President sole authority over the executive branch.
I think UET applies only to the Executive branch, which to me makes sense as he is the head of the Executive branch.
It would seem a violation of checks and balances for Congress to be able to install unfirable persons in the Executive. The checks and balances come from Congress's subpoena and investigatory powers, which can ultimately result in impeachment and removal of office of the President if he is derelict in his duties of executing the laws set forth by Congress.
Though I would agree that UET would violate the balance of the Constitution if it applied outside the Executive branch.
That is... bonkers. At the risk of feeding a troll, I find it difficult to take the argument that voluntary contributions to public health through charity is more "moral", which in the case of health care I would argue is equivalent to "effective", than a system implemented by an organization with enormous power (the government) which at least theoretically has a direct duty to its stake holders (voters), who in turn have the power to enact change in that system if it's not serving them? (by voting)
They just kind of have to give up their power and hope?
Buddy, one cursory glance at history will show that hoping gets you nowhere.
I assure you I'm no troll. I think difference in our perspectives is that I form the basis of my "moral" at the individual vs. the collective.
"Moral" for me means that individuals are empowered to own their private property and should only need to sacrifice it to society for public goods, where I take the economic definition of a private good: nonrivalous and nonexcludable.
Forcing all persons to pay taxes to cover healthcare for only a subset of the population is, to me, akin to forcing all your friends to give to the charity you like because you like that charity and want it to be able to do more, where that more is a level of spending above what you can or are willing to provide.
Economically, this creates deadweight loss: people's individual preferences are violated because they are forced to spend money for something of which they receive no benefit, or at least the direct/indirect utility occupies a lower utility than the opportunity cost of those specific taxes.
I'm not saying that such a policy won't result in undue death. But since I use the individual as the basis for morality, I consider it more moral to have some death than it is to steal from others to prevent it.
Do you really think the US is going to come out on top as the "lesser evil" if we start listing all the "bad things" each side has done related to human rights abuses and behaving aggressively on the world stage? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BOBKTmaQ9M
I really like the latest PHP release, 8.4. If anyone does any web scraping or HTML parsing, I've written a blog post about the big improvements made to the new DOM API: https://blog.keyvan.net/p/parsing-html-with-php-84
> There was no guarantee further charges would not be brought more serious than those which had already been laid, in particular with regard to the Vault 7 publication of CIA secret technological spying techniques. In this regard, the United States had not provided assurances the death penalty could not be invoked.
> The CIA had made plans to kidnap, drug and even to kill Mr Assange. This had been made plain by the testimony of Protected Witness 2 and confirmed by the extensive Yahoo News publication. Therefore Assange would be delivered to authorities who could not be trusted not to take extrajudicial action against him.
I don't remember the incident where Israel killed 1200 Palestinians on a music festival with unmarked troops.
I'm sure Chomsky would find some justification for that too, but that's why the only thing I care about he did is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy - from there it's all been downhill, especially in the last few years. Before that it was at least from time to time worth thinking about.
> I don't remember the incident where Israel killed 1200 Palestinians on a music festival with unmarked troops.
You mean 364 on festival?
The final death toll from the 7th October attack is now thought to be 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving a total of 1,139.
that’s the cool part about being the hegemon: you get to wear uniforms while doing your atrocities, and you have tanks and planes and ambassadors wielding real power at the UN to prevent consequences.
Just like the US killing hundreds of thousands of people in the firebombing campaigns of Japan was probably a war-crime. We wore uniforms while doing it. What are you gonna do about it? You already lost the war, not like you have any leverage.
Hamas could absolutely wear uniforms too. But they couldn't hide behind civilians anymore then and that's their preferred tactic.
There's a reason one of the most important parts of modern international law on wars - which has the primary goal of minimizing civilian deaths - is that all combatants have to be clearly identifiable. If you cannot distinguish easily between both, war gets even worse than it already is. And the current conflict is the perfect example.
And bombing of Dresden[1] and dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All of that would be considered war crimes using the law that was created after world war II but unfortunately not before:
> The Hague Conventions, addressing the codes of wartime conduct on land and at sea, were adopted before the rise of air power. Despite repeated diplomatic attempts to update international humanitarian law to include aerial warfare, it was not updated before the outbreak of World War II.
What do you suggest the US should have done? Did you look up war crimes Japan did in the rest of the world? Should the US have just let them roll over Asia and rest of the world? During the war, all cities that could be attacked were attacked.
Throughout history, wars were fought between inequal sides. Only a very few times did combatants hide among civilians.
> You already lost the war, not like you have any leverage.
How? Look up when Japan surrendered.
> that’s the cool part about being the hegemon: you get to wear uniforms while doing your atrocities, and you have tanks and planes and ambassadors wielding real power at the UN to prevent consequences.
Don't nearly all Muslim countries and a majority of the UN support Palestine? Aren't China/Russia on Palestine's side?
Is there an UNRWA for the rest of the world? UN leans heavily towards Palestine and a ton of wealth supports them. Aren't Hamas's leaders billionaires?
> IRAN 1953: MI6 PLOTS WITH ISLAMISTS TO OVERTHROW DEMOCRACY
> Declassified British files highlight a little known aspect of the joint MI6/CIA coup against Iran’s democratically elected government in August 1953 – UK covert action in support of leading radical Shia Islamists, the predecessors of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Ah right, because 3 years later the UK couldn't mount an actual military operation in Egypt, without the assistance of the USA, there's no way that they and the US could have helped a coup take place in 1953.
I created Feed Creator, so nice to see it mentioned in the comments :)
I've written two blog posts about how we go about using CSS selectors when working with Feed Creator. Might be useful for those looking to do the same with RSS-Bridge.
How to turn a webpage into an RSS feed using Feed Creator
Julian Assange even filed a criminal complaint in Sweden last month to try to stop the Swedish Nobel Foundation paying out over $1 million dollars to her, arguing it's going against Alfred Nobel's will, and they have a responsibility to respect his will.
He wrote last month: "Using her elevated position as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado may well have tipped the balance in favour of war, facilitated by the named suspects."
I find it funny that what many saw as a terrible decision has now come to pass, and the Nobel Institute is scrambling to save face.
https://x.com/wikileaks/status/2001260159432290686
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