Patterico's Pontifications

10/12/2007

Which Has Become More Irrelevant In Our Lifetime?

Filed under: Awards,Nobel Peace Prize — Justin Levine @ 1:37 am



[posted by Justin Levine] 

1. The Nobel Peace Prize?

2. Time’s “Man of The Year”?

Hard choices…

But seriously, it seems that over my life time every award recognizing human achievement has diminished not only in stature, but even in the actual seriousness of the prize presenters.

It’s not just the awards over public figures on the world stage. Best Picture Oscar winners? Olympic Medal winners? Somehow these things seemed to actually signify something important in years past, even if I would have chosen differently.

Was it a mistake to ever take them seriously?

Have the quality of the winners actually diminished in the last generation? Or is it merely a matter of my own personal taste and perspective on life? Does anyone else understand what I am getting at here? Or am I just whispering in the wind?

Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize For Promoting The False Religion Of Global Warming

Filed under: Buffoons,Environment,Nobel Peace Prize — Justin Levine @ 1:10 am



[posted by Justin Levine] 

News just coming in that Al Gore has indeed won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Let’s see here – Yasser Arafat awarded the Peace Prize for his terrorism against Jews, Jimmy Carter awarded the Peace Prize explicitly as a way for Europeans to protest George Bush’s foreign policy….Seems like the Nobel Peace Prize committee continues to build a steady track record of evolving into a collective left wing circle-jerk.

12/28/2006

Gee, What A Surprise…

Filed under: General,Nobel Peace Prize,Scum,Terrorism — Justin Levine @ 12:24 pm



[published by Justin – not Patterico] 

It turns out that the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize murdered a couple of Americans in a terrorist attack.

Not that this news should be a surprise to anybody who is well read on the subject, but it is still astonishing to see primary source documents illustrating the depth of knowledge and cynicism from the U.S. State Department and the international community.

[published by Justin]

12/23/2005

Jill Stewart on the Worthlessness of a Nobel Nomination

Filed under: Crime,Morons,Nobel Peace Prize — Patterico @ 10:35 pm



Jill Stewart has an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle on the worthlessness of a Nobel nomination. Yours truly is mentioned.

12/6/2005

Poopy-Pants Tim

Filed under: Accepted Wisdom,Blogging Matters,Nobel Peace Prize — Dafydd @ 12:03 am



Posted by Dafydd the Great, Mr. Lizard himself. Not by Patterico, thank goodness.

Those of us who read and love Patterico’s Pontifications (I resist the impulse to link to the same blog you’re reading) know that Tim McGarry’s charge that the tone of PP “frequently descends to the emotionally puerile” is a load of kakky-doody.

— Dafydd

12/2/2005

More on Rules for Nobel Peace Prize Nominations

Filed under: General,Nobel Peace Prize — Patterico @ 9:48 pm



Clinton Watson Taylor passes along this flyer from Stanford University, with the rules for Nobel Peace Prize nominations. It appears to clarify that nominators need not have a personal invitation from the Committee in order to submit nominations; all that is required is for a nominator to fit within one of the relevant categories.

(more…)

Tookie Williams: Murderer

Filed under: Crime,Nobel Peace Prize,Scum — Patterico @ 9:36 pm



Here is the response of the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office to Tookie’s Petition for Clemency. Chock-full of compelling evidence of Tookie’s guilt. Anyone who harbors doubts — either about his guilt or about his essentially evil nature — has not read this document.

Bill Handel Steals Patterico’s Idea Coincidentally Has the Same Idea as Patterico

Filed under: Crime,Nobel Peace Prize — Patterico @ 8:27 am



Xrlq phoned me yesterday as I was going in to work, to inform me that local radio personality Bill Handel stole my idea, and got himself nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. (My campaign is still on track, but action has been delayed because my potential nominator has been out of the country at a conference.)

Why did Xrlq say Handel “stole” my idea? Well, there is an interesting factor at work here. Handel’s producer is my good friend Justin Levine, who has a report on Handel’s nomination here.

However, in an e-mail, Justin tells me that it’s pure coincidence that Handel happened to come up with the same idea as me . . . unless, he says, Handel has been regularly reading Patterico without telling Justin — something Justin characterizes as “a theoretical possibility.” (Heh.)

Of course, Handel did mention Patterico on his program once — which could, on its face, support that “theoretical possibility.” But it turned out that Justin was behind that — which kind of puts us back to square one.

I think this is yet another instance where an aphorism I like to use applies: Great minds think alike — and sometimes they think like me, too.

And, after all, Justin notes: “But hey, you can still be the first Blogger to get a nomination. That would still be a badge of honor.” With Tookie Williams among my company, I’m not sure “honor” is really the word Justin was looking for.

12/1/2005

Tookie’s Handiwork

Filed under: Crime,Morons,Nobel Peace Prize — Patterico @ 6:13 pm



Regular readers know that I am seeking a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, since I believe I am more deserving than murderer Stanley “Tookie” Williams. In evaluating our respective qualifications, I think that the public should be able to evaluate our handiwork. Mine is available on this blog. Flopping Aces has examples of Tookie’s handiwork, here.

11/29/2005

Tookie Williams Nominations Made to Save His Life

Filed under: Crime,Dog Trainer,General,Nobel Peace Prize — Patterico @ 7:04 am



Congratulations to the L.A. Times for digging into the motivations behind the nominations of Tookie Williams for Nobel Prizes — and for finally reporting that it is “surprisingly easy” to make such nominations.

The story is titled Telling His Story to Save His Life. Reversing the usual habit of burying such information exclusively on the back pages, the story states on Page A1:

[Anti-death penalty writer Barbara Becnel] arranged for Williams to speak by telephone to youth and criminal justice groups, and edited his series of children’s books. Death penalty opponents also took up his cause, pushing him into the limelight by nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature, prestigious nominations that are surprisingly easy to make.

More detail is provided on Page A15. Writer Bechnel obtained the first nomination during a campaign in Switzerland to save Williams from the death penalty:

Around the same time, Becnel met a woman who was active in anti-violence efforts in Zurich, Switzerland, and took Williams’ campaign to Europe. Zurich, like many California cities, was troubled by gangs, with Somali and other immigrant youths engaged in violence, Becnel said.

She made several trips to Zurich and eventually met the Swiss national legislator Mario Fehr, who would nominate Williams for the Nobel in 2001. Legislators and professors in certain disciplines can nominate Nobel Prize candidates.

“The Nobel Prize nominations really catapulted his name into the media,” Alonso said. “That’s when reporters started calling me.”

Further nominations were also made by death penalty activists, primarily to save Williams’s life:

In the meantime, Philip Gasper, an anti-death penalty activist and a professor at Notre Dame de Namur University, a small Catholic school in Belmont, near San Francisco, heard Williams speak via telephone to a UC Berkeley panel and decided to submit more Nobel Peace Prize nominations.

Barbara and I came up with the idea, and she helped me through the process,” Gasper said.

“All you need to do to nominate is to write a nominating letter to the committee in Norway,” Gasper said.

Gasper’s prime motivation in writing the four-page letter was to save Williams’ life, he said, but he also thought that Williams deserved the prize because “his message has had such resonance with kids in the U.S. and in other countries.”

“I think he has probably saved a few hundred lives, at least,” said Gasper, who has nominated Williams four times for the peace prize.

Brown University English professor William Keach, who is also active in the campaign to end the death penalty, nominated Williams for the Nobel Prize for literature.

We had, of course, guessed all along that the primary motivation behind these nominations was to save Williams’s life. Now we know for sure.

As regular readers know, I am involved in a campaign to get myself nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, to make a point about how easy such nominations are to make. Eugene Volokh suggested yesterday in this post (referring to my campaign, though not by name) that such a nomination would not be legitimate, because the nominator wouldn’t really mean it.

I think my nomination would be every bit as legitimate as Tookie Williams’s. If I can talk someone into nominating me, their motivation will be mixed. Their primary motivation will be to expose such nominations as less prestigious than they really are. But they need not be dishonest in making the nomination. Indeed, given the fact that terrorist and murderer Yasser Arafat actually obtained such an award, someone could nominate me and sincerely argue that they believe I am more worthy of the prize than Arafat was.

If Eugene Volokh thinks that Nobel Peace Prize nominations are not truly legitimate if they are made with some ulterior purpose in mind, as he seems to suggest in his post from yesterday, then I assume that he believes Williams’s nominations are not truly legitimate either. I’d love to see him weigh in on this topic in light of today’s Times article.

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