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Obama awarded Nobel Peace Prize


Alorael at Large

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Originally Posted By: mMessenger mMangler
Okay, maybe, but that doesn't make them collectively not so bad, that makes the state of world leadership abominable.
This is so true. Americans often forget how medieval the standard of life is for people across the rest of the globe. My Ukrainian parents remind me of this all too often. frown
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You could maybe make an argument that it's criminal negligence, but trying to pin a legal violation to something that is, as of this writing, legal isn't going to work.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't think it's even negligent. People die because the system is bad, not because anyone wants them dead. You cannot convict nebulous collections of people of crimes. Well, you could. You v. United States?

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Still I don't like the idea of getting in a car accident being taken to an emergency room and having the doctor say

"Sorry you your not important enough to save, next."

 

That said I don't think America can afford to give everyone medical coverage. So while I want everyone to have medical coverage I don't believe it to be logistically feasible and our current attempts to achieve this will just screw up the system even further.

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Originally Posted By: Lord Safey
Still I don't like the idea of getting in a car accident being taken to an emergency room and having the doctor say
"Sorry you your not important enough to save, next."


Try going into a hospital without insurance. This pretty much already happens.

And why can't America afford to give everyone free medical coverage if the UK can? Are you saying your country isn't as good as the UK?
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In away yes

 

Going off what my experience and others have been in work for and try to apply for any kind of finical assistance is they typically are only good at giving you the run around. The people who are designing it now are designing it in a fashion (or at least trying to) that will get them the most votes (not that the people opposing it are any better) with little to no care as to providing more people with health coverage.

 

I imagine if you could some how find away to cut through all the political bull crap you might get a system that would work but as it is I have little faith in the US government to get it right

 

P.S I have no health coverage for the time being. Hope I don't sick.

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So what you're saying is that America can but the American government can't. That's a distinct possibility, but it's not necessarily true.

 

—Alorael, who finds it frustrating that for lower bureaucratic cost and less complicated legal posturing the U.S. could simply insure everyone. The fact that the political will isn't there is a sad thing.

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Originally Posted By: Lord Safey
In away yes

Going off what my experience and others have been in work for and try to apply for any kind of finical assistance is they typically are only good at giving you the run around. The people who are designing it now are designing it in a fashion (or at least trying to) that will get them the most votes (not that the people opposing it are any better) with little to no care as to providing more people with health coverage.

I imagine if you could some how find away to cut through all the political bull crap you might get a system that would work but as it is I have little faith in the US government to get it right


Oh, don't get me wrong, the proposal that's on the table right now looks like it's probably going to turn out to be pretty lousy. But there's no inherent reason why the US can't or shouldn't provide good healthcare to all of its citizens.
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If we stopped waging war, we could feed the world, heal the world, and have cash for infrastructure and pleasures left over. What we choose to do, individually and collectively, says everything about what we truly value on this planet. We value property, possession, privilege and policy more than one another, do we not? Does not history readily demonstrate this, so far? We see our neighbor as separate from the life we are, something in competition with us to be beaten, something alien to us, something suspicious to us, something wrong compared to us because our neighbor believes in a different god or a different system than we do. We do not yet see how it is that when we hurt any other, we have done it unto ourselves.

 

We are all responsible to change this first within ourselves (and therefore ultimately without) if we do not believe in the daily sanctioned murders and negligence unto death of our fellow human beings. To allow 20,000 people on our planet to starve daily, while we spend millions or billions on killing more of them, speaks for itself resoundingly. War will not stop in our governments until war stops in our own hearts. That takes seeing your brother/sister as neither inferior nor superior to you, to cherish them with their differences, Muslim, Jew, Christian ad infinitum, to see their existence as vital and precious as yours. And worth protecting. We have the means. We must choose.

 

I see Obama's Nobel Peace Prize as a vote of confidence and a desire for the gestures and attitudes he has displayed to continue. The world, and its 6.7 billion souls is hungry for peace even more than for food. I don't know how much Obama can or will do, but I think many are seeing him as a hopeful shift towards peace in the world, talking to your brother, even to the "terrorist" who is lashing out in anger and in fear, because he has not felt heard by any other means.

 

-S-

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The US simply doesn't have the money to keep waging wars like this. Very soon the world will for better or for worse have to learn to fend for it self. America can no longer afford to be the world police and I don't see any replacement coming up. UN soliders can't shoot there weapons at the enemy if the enemy asked them too.

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Hubris much?

 

Now don't get me wrong - I can think of a number of cases where peacekeeping intervention from the States has improved matters, and other cases where support from them was sorely needed. But there are also cases where intervention from the States has made things worse.

 

Regardless of any of that, no one has voted the States to be the world police.

 

EDIT: @Synergy (and others): That's all well and good, but I (and other people I know) don't think Obama has deserved the award... yet. Yes, he's an eloquent speaker, but talk is cheap.

 

Heck, if you don't mind, we'll pick you for an example. You're one of the more eloquent writers here on Spiderweb. Say years from now you run for President (The horror! The horror!). On the campaign trail you make a number of moving speeches. You get elected... and then spend a year mostly dealing with domestic issues. At the end of the year you get a Nobel Prize. Would you think you deserved it?

 

Of course I'm not saying you wouldn't deliver on your promises, just like I'm not saying Obama won't. But I'd rather the Prize be awarded based on specific actions. Y'know, like the other ones are? If the members of the committee just wanted to endorse him, they should have done so by other means. They're intelligent men and women, I'm sure their words (as individuals) would have carried a lot of weight.

 

It's not just the Nobel Prize; I dislike it when any award is given for reasons other than specific merit in a narrowly defined area (don't get me started on the Order of Canada).

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Originally Posted By: Synergy
If we stopped waging war, we could feed the world, heal the world, and have cash for infrastructure and pleasures left over. What we choose to do, individually and collectively, says everything about what we truly value on this planet. We value property, possession, privilege and policy more than one another, do we not? Does not history readily demonstrate this, so far? We see our neighbor as separate from the life we are, something in competition with us to be beaten, something alien to us, something suspicious to us, something wrong compared to us because our neighbor believes in a different god or a different system than we do. We do not yet see how it is that when we hurt any other, we have done it unto ourselves.

We are all responsible to change this first within ourselves (and therefore ultimately without) if we do not believe in the daily sanctioned murders and negligence unto death of our fellow human beings. To allow 20,000 people on our planet to starve daily, while we spend millions or billions on killing more of them, speaks for itself resoundingly. War will not stop in our governments until war stops in our own hearts. That takes seeing your brother/sister as neither inferior nor superior to you, to cherish them with their differences, Muslim, Jew, Christian ad infinitum, to see their existence as vital and precious as yours. And worth protecting. We have the means. We must choose.

I see Obama's Nobel Peace Prize as a vote of confidence and a desire for the gestures and attitudes he has displayed to continue. The world, and its 6.7 billion souls is hungry for peace even more than for food. I don't know how much Obama can or will do, but I think many are seeing him as a hopeful shift towards peace in the world, talking to your brother, even to the "terrorist" who is lashing out in anger and in fear, because he has not felt heard by any other means.

-S-

Why do you have to hate or feel someone is inferior or superior to you in order to kill them? Maybe you're both hungry and there's only enough food to feed one of you. We destroy non-human life to sustain ourselves, so why should we value human life any differently?

I actually agree with you on a moral level, but there's that whole duality of man thing and I can't seem to bring myself to accept a world full of people that watch MTV.

EDIT: I also don't care whether Obama deserved his reward or not (I agree with Synergy here too) because it's ultimately good for this country. Arguing about it isn't going to change anything, and why act upset over a gesture of goodwill from the rest of the world?
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Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith
EDIT: I also don't care whether Obama deserved his reward or not (I agree with Synergy here too) because it's ultimately good for this country.


hahahaha yes, because giving henry kissinger the nobel peace prize clearly made him less of a monster and led to improvements in US foreign policy

why do you expect that rewarding people for doing nothing will encourage them to do something
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The world really is at a critical crossroads, running out of time for business as before. I think this time it's all about choosing someone who has the power to make a very large impact, and giving him a vote of confidence and hope that he will carry forth what he has begun. It's almost a desperate, yet hopeful gesture. It's unusual. I agree, it's not based on deserving, per se, but right now, whatever will make the most impact on the most people might be the best thing we can do, as far as "Peace Awards" are concerned. Who else has the degree of world attention and potential influence currently, and is demonstrating intentions towards peace? The Dalai Llama is the only other who comes to my mind, and he has received the award in the past.

 

Awards and the like are going to mean nothing in some decades on this planet if we don't find the way to peace with one another. I too would be horrified to ever find myself in political office. I think I could make good counsel for someone of influence one day.

 

-S-

 

P.S. - Enraged Slith - All of life feeds on life, for there is nothing else to feed upon. You are right. But we could feed all of one another right now. We don't need to be killing each other for food. Most of our warring is being fought over religious differences, oil, ethnic hatreds that span back centuries, and various resources. If we believe we are merely clever animals who have nothing better to do with our awakened self-awareness, ability to love, sense of a spiritual interconnectedness in the universe, and increasing understanding of the oneness of all life through quantum physics, biology, etc., then maybe we should just rape the planet, kill everything, and pollute, breed, and war ourselves into obvlivion this century. Life will go on without us. It wouldn't speak too highly of our great big brains, spirituality, or wisdom, though, now would it?

 

What we are doing is badly broken. The only solution to things that aren't working is to...do something different. Our belief in competition rather than cooperation and unity as the ideal for survival is broken. Even your own body is a demonstration of cooperation for survival. You are a colony of 50 trillion cells which have decided to all get along for the survival of you and them together.

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Originally Posted By: Thuryl
Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith
EDIT: I also don't care whether Obama deserved his reward or not (I agree with Synergy here too) because it's ultimately good for this country.


hahahaha yes, because giving henry kissinger the nobel peace prize clearly made him less of a monster and led to improvements in US foreign policy

why do you expect that rewarding people for doing nothing will encourage them to do something

Because it's what I'd do, and I consistently make the mistake of assuming people will behave like me. But I was mostly refering to the fact that receiving an award from the rest of the world is hardly a bad thing, no matter what we do with it.
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Eventually it is going to actually be true. We're running out of time till we truly cross some point of no return for our sustainability en masse. Statistics for population, resources (especially water), climate changes, and the fact that we are still spending ourselves into oblivion to kill one another instead of addressing these mounting perils should make it clear that humanity is likely to make a big step forward or take a huge step back before this century closes.

 

Actually, though a crossroads is a useful, if not overused, metaphor, our situation can also be seen as two entirely separate streams of consciousness and thought in the world—one centered on the ego and its inherent fears, and the other on something more unifying and capable in the human being. The question is simply, which one is going to have the reins as we hit critical crossroads, because both streams are increasing rapidly in the world right now.

 

The human ego, with its insatiable demand for more of everything (because it seeks to fill a false void that is never satisfied) is using technology to much more rapidly expand the insanity and destruction its endless demands create. The 20th century saw more death and destruction than ever before, because the human ego thrives on having an enemy to be "better than." Who thinks we can withstand another order of magnitude in this department in the 21st century? This can't persist too much longer, not only at the current rate, but at the ever-accelerating rate at which it is progressing. Watch India and China clamor for the resources and luxuries of the world America has long enjoyed dominating and squandering. We have 380 million people. China and India, rapidly industrializing and surging in demand for more of everything, have what, nearly 3 billion?

 

The ego has grown to monstrous proportions in the world, our temporal adolescent insanity handling this developing thing we call mind and consciousness as human beings. We've gone nuts with our new toy. It doesn't have to remain that way perpetually. The pattern of life is to keep growing up. Life does adapt and has taken huge steps forward in the past when the environment became toxic and required a new adaptation, and startlingly rapidly at times too. If it did not respond rapidly, it perished. We'll do this with our growing consciousness and the use of our minds too. Right now, what we're doing with it largely is quite literally, insane.

 

I see a point of no return and a critical threshold for both streams of consciousness in the world. One is presently much more visible than the other. I've said before I have great hope and faith for the resourcefulness and spirituality of humankind to make critical shifts before it is too late.

 

-S-

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While I agree with the general timbre and thrust of your analogy, I too question whether there's anything unique about the current moment. Isn't the world always at a crossroads of this nature? And I say that not to demean the crossroads label, but to make the point that people don't realize this because they don't examine things critically. We should always live as if we are at a critical crossroad.

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Originally Posted By: Golgoth
I went to church the other day and the pastor said that now was the end of times and I thought to myself"Isn't everyone saying that, just to make them feel they can make a difference?"
Putting aside the fact that your pastor would say such a thing is kind of scary, I can't help but feel the opposite. If the end times are here already, why bother trying anymore? Lucky for me, I think humanity and the world still has a ways to go, so I like to live my life making the world a better, more sustainable place with that in mind. smile
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There are unprecedented situations in our current time that have not (to our knowledge of earth history) ever occurred on this planet before: the excessive proliferation of one species using up an unsustainable amount of the earth's resources to the detriment (if not outright anihilation) of all species, and an inevitable showdown with escalating warring over the basic necessities. If we wind up with 10 billion people by mid-century, and we haven't decided to do things differently in how we negotiate with one another, conduct our consumerism, conduct our rapacious exploitive, corporate business practices, and learn to come to terms with our religious and cultural differences...how long can we maintain the relatively thin veneer of civilization we have enjoyed for a relatively short time, historically speaking?

 

We've run out of new lands to explore, conquer, and exploit. There are only so many trees, whales, and tuna in the world. Current rates show us we're in big trouble if we don't start doing things significantly differently, like now. Salmon, for one, I expect, has got to be aware of what's going on with just salmon as a species. I wonder how much longer I will even be able to eat and afford such a food, which was once extremely proliferous in all the rivers and Puget Sound around here.

 

I agree we are always at any number of crossroads, as Slarty points out, and that we are also going to be facing some we never have before, and the consquences of which will be critical. We've never been here before. I think one of the most threatening factors to this time is the apathy that comes from, "it's always been like this, it will always continue on like this." I don't think it can, and I think there are many scientists, sociologists, etc. in the world warning us loudly that this is the case.

 

I'm not an alarmist about this, I don't think fear is a good motivator, and I do not care at all for "end of the world" prophetic stuff, which to me just clouds the realities we should be looking at. I have hope, because, like times in evolution past, when a critical threshold of toxicity and challenge has been encountered in the environment, life finally shifts in a new direction and takes another big step up. We're facing a similar, well, yes, crossroads. Sink or swim. I think we're going to swim, but it involves us taking this time right now seriously, and doing our part. Apathy and denial are going to be the greatest obstacles, if not outright killers, in this process. I really don't see that we have any time to sit back, watch, and wait to decide if things are reaching the critical point. We have plenty of information to show us it is the case. It's just math. And we're going to have to get our act together and do some unprecedented things, like choose a new attitude toward our fellow humans, to successfully make this jump. It's quite simple really. If we don't, greed and hatred will ravage us and civilization as we have known it, this century. We have the technology and the numbers to do it all too easily. It's just a matter of time till nuclear, biological, and other chemical nightmares are unleashed by the disgruntled or the desperate—if we continue on with our apathetic, selfish, myopic, unsustainable ways. Growing terrorism is the most visible warning. The world's fed up with the increasing, gross disparity between the tiny number of haves and the vast numbers of have nots. And like WWI, something very small and local can quickly spread to the scale of global warfare.

 

So, let's look at changing our thoughts and attitudes about who we are, how we are connected, and what's really important, because our future is not going to look like our past. It can't. Let's work to make it better, because we cannot perpetuate civilization as it is for much longer.

 

-S-

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Originally Posted By: Synergy
when a critical threshold of toxicity and challenge has been encountered in the environment, life finally shifts in a new direction and takes another big step up. We're facing a similar, well, yes, crossroads. Sink or swim.

Yes, this. The problem is that nobody listens to earnest pleas like yours above. The answers are more or less obvious; some might be up for debate, but some are so blatant. But how do you get people to listen?

"Ay! what 'mong men as knowledge doth obtain!
Who on the child its true name dares bestow?
The few who somewhat of these things have known,
Who their full hearts unguardedly reveal'd,
Nor thoughts, nor feelings, from the mob conceal'd,
Have died on crosses, or in flames been thrown."
-- Goethe
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Slith is on to what I would say in answer to Slarty. That the best thing any of us can do to do our part to shift the world in a new, much-needed direction is to do the work in ourselves, to become the thing we believe in, to model it and demonstrate it. Modeling is the single most powerful agent each of us has to affect the world. It is a huge part of how every child is shaped into the being they become. When we consistently model a truth, it does affect any number of people around us, even if you don't see the effect personally. You see, George Bailey, you really did have a wonderful life.

 

I agree that pleading issues does not effect great change in itself, though I doubt it's the case that nobody listens. It may usually be a small number who respond to most kinds of communication. Only when we are truly desperate, do I think large numbers really start paying attention, because the very trademark of our time is a high degree of unconscious living. I believe in a critical mass of 5-10% of people having the power to shift the world.

 

The great exhortation is to "be the change you want to see in the world." I will continue to work on me to do that. I also believe each of us should be confident to express and share out of the heart what we are passionate about, even if only one out of a hundred or thousand is likely to connect with your offering. Who says that's not enough? I'm sure my kind of communication is just for those who appreciate my heartfelt and admittedly provocative style.

 

-S-

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Originally Posted By: Base Quylthulg
Yes, this. The problem is that nobody listens to earnest pleas like yours above. The answers are more or less obvious; some might be up for debate, but some are so blatant. But how do you get people to listen?

"Ay! what 'mong men as knowledge doth obtain!
Who on the child its true name dares bestow?
The few who somewhat of these things have known,
Who their full hearts unguardedly reveal'd,
Nor thoughts, nor feelings, from the mob conceal'd,
Have died on crosses, or in flames been thrown."
-- Goethe


how him alone all hope abandons never
to empty trash who clings with zeal untired
with greed for treasure gropes and, joy-inspired,
exults if earthworms second his endeavour
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Originally Posted By: Synergy
There are unprecedented situations in our current time that have not (to our knowledge of earth history) ever occurred on this planet before: the excessive proliferation of one species using up an unsustainable amount of the earth's resources to the detriment (if not outright anihilation) of all species, and an inevitable showdown with escalating warring over the basic necessities.

-S-


Exception #1:

Oxygen Holocaust

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Hey VCH, I am glad you solicited this very example of the Oxygen Holocaust, because that is the example I had foremost in my mind in referece to how life has adapted out of toxicity through its ingeniuity to survive and thrive. The reason I stated the scenario I described as unprecedented, is because human beings have found ways to exploit resources out of every conceivable nook and cranny of earth all at the same time, far beyond the ones we need for survival. We also have learned to pollute far beyond the scope of our body waste. This, I think, no other species has done before us. In other ways, it is indicated there have been several "crossroads" points in evolution where life was forced to make a significant shift in a new direction to continue.

 

The point remains that life has to make a significant adaptation and change in behavior to survive the toxic crisis it itself may have created. Some, many, or most lifeforms may not make the transition, by failing (or being unable) to respond adequately. Yet Life itself, in our earth history, has found the most remarkable ways to perpetuate itself in some form, including beyond the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, which opened up the path for mammals to thrive, and ultimately, apparently, us.

 

This is the primary reason I remain an optimist in light of the challenges and toxicity we face. Life has a way of responding to the need. I think we are the best bet to be the Life that does.

 

-S-

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