He managed to ratify the START II treaty limitating nukes launchers.
Obama’s was more or less a “Hooray! You’re not Bush!” award. Al Gore, well, he’s greased a lot of palms in the environmentalist movement, so my guess is they pulled some strings for him in return.
By contrast, Wikileaks is actually a rather admirable choice for the Peace Prize. Perhaps with more nominations like this, journalism might actually begin to fulfill it’s intended purpose- to genuinely inform, rather than to promote the governments that all too many media agencies ostensibly serve at the behest of.
After the award. At the time he had done literally nothing of importance besides getting elected.
As to wikileaks, all it has done is idealized truth at the cost of peace. Lying is integral to maintaing peace, since if people actually knew what we though of them there’d be a lot more wars.
afaik wikileaks basically helped jumpstart revolution in Tunisia, and consequently Egypt, Sudan, and another country I can’t remember atm
that’s pretty good in my book
Oh… I was in favour of both… 
:awesome:
sigged.
ehh I don’t know if that’s such a good idea
True. He was elected because everybody thought he would (in the future) change American policy and promote peace throughout the world. And thanks to the Nobel prize, help him in this task. I guess they were overenthusiastic 'bout him.
I totally agree with you here.
I thought it was a guy who burned himself because of the disastrous economic and social life in Tunisia. Wikileaks just gave munitions to confirm that Ben Ali and his wife clan are greedy bastards.
refering to nietzschesaurus(partly):
oh yeah the government shouldn´t have any secrets, right? what about we all shouldn´t have secrets? sounds great for me…
honestly, if everyone would know everything about a government, diplomacy would be impossible, leading to anarchy and neverending war(because war is the alternative to diplomacy). politics are complex and even if you could see what politicians do, you wouldn´t be able to judge right because you can never know all the facts and circumstances the way someone involved does. also, people tend to not think before saying or writing something. if all the information governements hold would be realeased every idiot would tear every sentence from politicians out of context, which would rather fast lead to more chaos than is here already.
i´m myself not quite sure of this but i´ll go as far as saying that some secrets can safe lifes.
i like the trend that this “evil deeds” are covered up. but i also heard that assange released some names of informants, who are thus in danger even though his staff was against that and the names were basicly completely irrelevant.
some secrets should be uncovered, and some should stay secret, for people´s sake.
everybody has secrets that other people don’t necessarily want to hear about, but we all want to know about government mess-ups, because we trust our lives into it, we make it our way of life, if the government messups get really bad, anarchy becomes a better solution
So what you’re saying is its started violence and thus must get a noble peace prize. Not to mention the whole fact it didn’t…
i can agree with that, except for the anarchy part. i just wanted to point out that even the government should be allowed to have secrets, provided they safe lifes.
knowing about mess-ups is totaly legit.
assange though doesn´t deserve any price for his blind anti-secrecy-wrath, provided what i stated in my previous post is true.
@anarchy: if you refer to anarchy as a part of revolution in order to exchange a government, i might agree. constant anarchy though sounds fun at first, but if you think about it you might find it rather annoying if the guy with the biggest gun and the best shooting skills wins all.(this is a poor example and not sufficient in order to fully explain why anarchy sucks in the long run)
I did say “afaik”… I thought wikileaks published cables which helped (which I also said) the revolution get jumpstarted
also, revolution is a bad thing?
It is if you want peace.
I wish people would stop using that word, it’s so relative it’s useless.
Yes, but it is called the Nobel Peace Prize, so we are forced to. the reality is peace is not the idealized concept most people like to consider it. Very few positive changes occur through peaceful means.
anarchy is never permanent, it’s just the start of a transition to a fresh government with less fail
a revolution that deposes what is basically a totalitarian police state and puts a peaceful system of freedom in its place is a force for peace, I would say
Someonerandm is an idiot.[/SIZE]
There, now thet that’s out of my system I can explain why it’s true.
Peaceful demonstrations often incur violence upon the demonstrator, when they’ve been that badly oppressed. Sitting in the front of a bus, demanding service at a discriminating bar, lying down in front of government vehicles… these are all things that could incite hideous violence upon the peace advocate.
But they’re peaceful people, aren’t they?
Lighting someone on fire is an act of brutality, but when you incend yourself in a meditative trance, it’s considered peaceful because it’s in the name of peace, in the name of activism without intending harm to come to others. And sometimes, no matter how peaceful you are, you bring violence down upon bystanders. A whole crowd might be targeted with teargas and firehoses because someone put a flower in the barrel of a gun.
If riots happen because some government’s secrets got leaked, that government brought it upon themselves. They are not some bystander, but a perpetrator. I’m sure many peace-prize advocates caused indirect violence when their crackdown on crime led to police standoffs.
Perhaps, but the act itself is not peace. Not to mention there is an overwhelming probability that all that happens is another dictator and more violence.
Tiki, you do of course realize that I don’t see peace as this idealized notion. Inciting a revolution, while not creating peace, is a good thing. Its just not deserving of a prize for peace. But then again, a prize for creating peace is not necessarily something to brag about. In any case, the protesters of the middle east are not forces for peace. But this is a good thing. They reject the status quo, and further humanity because of it. Not to mention in egypt both sides are being equally violent, and each less violent than the military.