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Milestones

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RacingRodent said:
I am not sure that was actually what the Peace Prize demands, the criteria is have effected an action that contributed to world peace. Specifically it aims to promote efforts at arms reduction, dialogue between nations and the resolution of specific conflicts.

So TR for the Treaty of Portsmouth resolving the Russo-Japanese War, Gorbachev for reducing the world stockpile of nuclear weapons and yes even Yassir Arafat for the Camp David Agreement. I would agree that Obama did little to earn his peace prize under the criteria of the award but subsequent military actions nor prior do not invalidate awards. Nobel it should be remembered made the money for the prize from the production of explosives and military firearms propellants. He realised that to encourage peace he would need to deal with men (and later women) who had to deal with a real and all too often violent world. The path to peace being incremental steps not impossible standards.
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As you know I am not a fan of Obama but his award was a salute to being the first black president of the US and had nothing to do with his peace efforts...
 
Praefectus Praetorio said:
Lysistrata lived too long ago to qualify.
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Or perhaps most famously (at least in myth), the Sabine women. After their "abduction" (rape?), by the Romans, the Sabine army entered Rome and the slaughter on both sides was terrible but then (as told by Livy):

[They], from the outrage on whom the war originated, with hair dishevelled and garments rent, the timidity of their sex being overcome by such dreadful scenes, had the courage to throw themselves amid the flying weapons, and making a rush across, to part the incensed armies, and assuage their fury; imploring their fathers on the one side, their husbands on the other, "that as fathers-in-law and sons-in-law they would not contaminate each other with impious blood, nor stain their offspring with parricide, the one their grandchildren, the other their children. If you are dissatisfied with the affinity between you, if with our marriages, turn your resentment against us; we are the cause of war, we of wounds and of bloodshed to our husbands and parents. It were better that we perish than live widowed or fatherless without one or other of you."

victo malis muliebri pavore, ausae se inter tela volantia inferre
 
poem21045 said:
It is the MEN who have always mythologized the effects of women's beauty. Unfortunately, it is myth, and it does nothing for sexual equality. In fact, it just furthers the separation.
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Zenobia, Elizabeth I of England, Catherine the Great of Russia, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher.

All adopted the approach of "peace through superior fire power" (okay strictly Zenbia used mostly muscle power but do you really think she would have blinked at using guns if they had them in the Third Century?)

I mean I have no data to contend that women do not broker more peace than men but I am sceptical it is at a 5-1 figure :p
 
thehangingtree said:
As you know I am not a fan of Obama but his award was a salute to being the first black president of the US and had nothing to do with his peace efforts...
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All prizes are political, but the Nobel Peace and Economics prizes (which are not awarded by the same bodies that award the others) are particularly so. It is said that Nobel himself lost a woman to a mathematician, and so decreed that no mathematician could ever win his prizes. I believe that is why when physics prizes are awarded for theory, it has to be for a theory confirmed by experiment. So relativity didn't get it, nor did Hawking, nor did John Bell (who died before experimental confirmation).
The satiric song writer Tom Lehrer was once asked why he stopped writing songs. He said something to the effect that when Henry Kissinger can win the Nobel Peace Prize, satire has become reality and is no longer possible. He's still alive, and I imagine his feeling on this has been reinforced mightily.
 
Praefectus Praetorio said:
155 years ago today, Confederate spy, Rose O'Neale Greenhow, drowned off Cape Fear, NC, not far from where I live.

I wonder if this would be grist for a story? Rose actually captured and abused by damn Yankees before her cover-up death.;)
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Greenhow was captured for a time. A popular Washington socialite, she used her connections to gather information to pass to the Confederates. Allen Pinkerton, head of the Secret Service had her placed under house arrest August 23, 1861 and moved her to the Old Capital Prison January 18, 1862. She was essentially deported to the South on May 31, 1862.
After that, she was sent to Europe to act as a sort ambassador-at-large. She was returning from Europe on a blockade-runner that ran aground in the mouth of the Cape Fear River near Wilmington, NC (my mom's hometown). She was trying to get ashore by rowboat, but it capsized and she was weighed down by $2,000 in gold sewn into her underclothes.

A story could be written about what might have happened if she were imprisoned in a less genteel Union.
 
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