It won’t wipe out the fact that he got one in the first place, basically for existing, and that the Nobel Prize was reduced to the gold paper stars they give kids in kindergarten for being quiet and washing their hands after using the toilet.
But it does provide useful information: if I didn’t already know the “Peace” prize was meaningless, I certainly do now.
In the limit, they could just award everyone a Nobel at birth, then take them away from those who don’t perform.
The prize was a joke from the start. From my 2002 blog post “The Nobel Peace Prize Isn’t Worth A Warm Saucer Of Spit” –
The first prize was shared by Jean Henri Dunant, founder of the International Red Cross (which itself won the prize several times over the years), and Frédéric Passy, founder of the Société francaise pour l’arbitrage entre nations. Passy had founded an earlier “peace society,” the Ligue internationale et permanente de la paix, a vain attempt to avert war between France and Prussia. In France’s Chamber of Deputies he opposed colonialism and pushed for disarmament and international arbitration of disputes. The French peace evangelist died in 1912, two years before World War I proved that the European peace efforts of that time, his included, were on the wrong track.
My conclusion: “[T]he roster of Nobel Laureates is dominated by ineffectual stabs toward promoting peace, and a handful of stabs against it. To judge the award by the worthy few who won it is like judging a factory that produces 90% scrap by the ten percent products it manufactures correctly. The award is meaningless.”
There will come a day when someone refuses a Nobel on principle, not wishing to be associated with the likes of Gore and Arafat.
It won’t wipe out the fact that he got one in the first place, basically for existing, and that the Nobel Prize was reduced to the gold paper stars they give kids in kindergarten for being quiet and washing their hands after using the toilet.
But it does provide useful information: if I didn’t already know the “Peace” prize was meaningless, I certainly do now.
In the limit, they could just award everyone a Nobel at birth, then take them away from those who don’t perform.
The prize was a joke from the start. From my 2002 blog post “The Nobel Peace Prize Isn’t Worth A Warm Saucer Of Spit” –
My conclusion: “[T]he roster of Nobel Laureates is dominated by ineffectual stabs toward promoting peace, and a handful of stabs against it. To judge the award by the worthy few who won it is like judging a factory that produces 90% scrap by the ten percent products it manufactures correctly. The award is meaningless.”
There will come a day when someone refuses a Nobel on principle, not wishing to be associated with the likes of Gore and Arafat.