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Many in Norway and Sweden distanced themselves from the Nobel Peace Prize at the time it was awarded to Machado because it was obvious it was such a bad decision.
Julian Assange even filed a criminal complaint in Sweden last month to try to stop the Swedish Nobel Foundation paying out over $1 million dollars to her, arguing it's going against Alfred Nobel's will, and they have a responsibility to respect his will.
He wrote last month: "Using her elevated position as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado may well have tipped the balance in favour of war, facilitated by the named suspects."
I find it funny that what many saw as a terrible decision has now come to pass, and the Nobel Institute is scrambling to save face.
The problem with the peace prize is it seems like its given out to people who they hope will bring peace instead of people who actually have brought peace.
We don't award the chemistry one to people with a promising research program, we award it to people who actually have discovered things that we actually know changed the field. If we awarded the peace prize based on actual accomishments judged with the benefit of hindsight instead of expected accomplishments, it would work a lot better.
To be fair, it's not the first extremely questionable Nobel Peace Prize award, for example, Henry Kissinger. While not nearly as egregious, Barack Obama was a bizarre choice, too.
Aged perfectly. [0]
The peace prize has lost all credibility.
I'm just wondering if they'll end up revising the blurb about her on their website to include the words "craven pandering."
I'm pretty sure he just wants an "I told you so" on the record. I don't think he has many illusions about recourse through the Swedish court system.
Machado seems fine. There are always going to be controversies around any political figure, and the complaints ahead of the award were... kinda routine, I thought? She was an opposition leader who was denied power won by democratic election, and didn't start an insurrection or whatever. Checks the right boxes. Make the call and move on.
Now, sure, she then went on to personally hand over the medal (or statue or whatever it actually is, I genuinely don't know) to the thin-skinned leader of a foreign superpower in a transparent attempt to be corruptly granted the office by an interventionist coup de tête. Not a great look!
But to claim that this is "what many saw" is sort of ridiculous. No one saw this. The world we live in is simply too ridiculous for predictions like that.
They can say whatever they want but Usain Bolt gave me his gold medal so now Im the fastest 100m runner in the world
Sorry you got scammed, FIFA awarded me their 100m sprint gold medal so I'm the real fastest 100m runner in the world
But if Usain Bolt truly believed that you were better than him and indeed gave you the medal, then maybe you really were the fastest runner in the world?
I had a physics professor I worked with who had a Nobel Prize.
He didn't win it. It was won by a team of students / collaborators / mentees, who felt he deserved it. I can't disagree with them. Among the nicest people in the world.
I don't think anyone meant it in the sense of "You're a Nobel Prize Winner," so much as "We couldn't have done this without your mentorship, and you deserve to hold onto this." He certainly doesn't consider himself to be a Nobel Prize winner.
Fun fact, Oscar winners don't fully own their statues since 1950. AMPAS reserves the right to buy it back for $1 if they want to sell it. Ownership of the statue is conditional, meaning it can't be freely sold or disposed of.
The underlying issue here is that the Nobel Peace Prize is a useless, politicized joke. It appears to be almost designed to give newspapers something to write about.
It's a shame it gets tied with scientific prizes which represent actual merit.
For whom are they writing this? For the sane people it's not needed and for the not-so-sane it doesn't really matter ...
True enough. Poor Watson tried to get rid of his, only to have someone buy it for $4.1M and hand it right back.
https://www.britannica.com/question/Why-did-James-Watson-sel...
Quote: "Knut Hamsun (Literature Prize 1920): In 1943, the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun travelled to Germany and met with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. After returning to Norway, he sent his Nobel medal to Goebbels as a gesture of thanks for the meeting. Goebbels was honoured by the gift. The present whereabouts of the medal are unknown."
He can have my old 10 metre swimming proficiency certificate.
Maybe the denigration of the award process should be the basis for revoking the award in question
This shows why Machado didn't deserve the prize in the first place.
She was asking for military intervention to own nation, in other words, she wanted people get killed because she wanted to rule the government and she was ready for every possible brutal solution
Even worth, Nobel committee lost its credibility, subsequently diminishing the importance of Nobel prize itself
The Nobel Peace Prize is meaningless. No matter who or why and to whome it was given. It has nothing to do with the other Nobel Prizes.
That this even has to be clarified is just a joke.
I mean if I buy an oscar statue off Ebay, how many Oscars do I have? Zero. I have an oscar Statue. But no one cares how many Oscar Statues actors get. They care how many times they were awarded.
Wasn't there a similar story about some bravery medal (purple heart)?`
I don't know why this even needs an official statement.
I could collect Olympic gold medals and nobody thinks I won them.
Didn't they relabel DEI as "Didn't Earn It". That is amusingly applicable now.
It’s clearly a bribe for Machado to get the Venezuelan presidency for herself. And it’s one of many ways in which the Trump family is enriching themselves. News articles have said they’re already worth billions more than a year ago. Unfortunately there is no check and balance against this type of corruption.
Laureates are already such a mixed bunch why not make it fungible.
What's the worst that's gonna happen, the Kissinger estate gets a second prize?
Written in such a civilized manner that one would wish them to be in the White House. Enough to be qualified nowadays.
This institution lost my respect when they handed Obama the price for not being Bush, I guess.
The other day I read this article about Grigori Perelman, Russian mathematician who declined to accept any medal or prize related to him solving the Poincaré conjecture. He declined the fields medals and millennium prize on the basis that he didn't view himself as a hero, and thought such awards were irrelevant.
And then you have Trump, on the complete other side of that spectrum.
Sloppy seconds seems to be his thing.
I can't imagine being somebody who voted for him and thinking this is what an "alpha" man does, bitch and moan about prizes and recognition instead of actually doing things of value.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a large cohort of people who never admit they voted for Trump in the future out of embarrassment.
> The controversial DNA researcher
What a gratuitous attack!
They embarrassed themselves by giving the prize to such an obvious neocon toady. It was a weak attempt at appeasing Trump and the neocons by using the prize to burnish another foreign intervention, while using the compliant press to spin it as a snub against him.
Got to hand it to Trump. He hit 3 birds with this one - He de-legitimized yet another European/International institution, while simultaneously using the same to bless his war of aggression. And he got half a nobel out of it too.
what instigated this blog post ? This ?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/15/maria-corina-m...
Epstein, NATO, Russia
Ignore distractions such as the Nobel
I’m pretty sure Trump received a peace prize without becoming another person, so no they are indeed separable.
Honestly if it keeps the toddler occupied then I’m all for it
The whole Nobel Peace Prize has already been sabotaged by the committee in the past - I don't disagree with their current opinion, but quite frankly, they invalidated the peace prize idea numerous times before. You can look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Peac... - ignore the ones in the decades ago, but have a look in the last 30 years or so. Many people simply should not have gotten that price, including Obama; and neither Trump. And that's just a factual observation really - the committee politicized the price.
Trump will. Oe be able to sit at the head of the round table!
The whole situation is a disgrace for all involved. It's blatantly obvious that Machado is trying to suck up to Trump. I bet she will get nothing out of it. And Trump looks like a complete fool. Maybe it's time to shut down the peace nobel prize. Too many questionable winners like Arafat, Obama (for what did the get it?), Kissinger, now Machado.
On the bright side, I always wanted to get a physics noble prize. I think there is hope.
Kissinger, one of the worst war criminals in history, got a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 (and didn't steal it from someone else). Those prizes don't mean much. Time spent by Trump toying with medals is time not spent doing harm.
We should award him a medal every minute -- and, at the same time, stand firm against his aggressive stances. An eye for an eye, but a medal for everything else.
This is not quite the outcome I foresaw. I genuinely expected Trump to entirely ghost Rodriguez, because she had the gall to accept the Peace Prize, whereas she should, of course, have refused it outright and demanded it to be awarded to Trump instead.
Absent that scenario, I fully expected a tearful ceremony in the Rose Garden, where she would hand the medal to him, as the only True Recipient. That didn't happen either, and what we got right now seems a bit... forced? Like: Trump's advisors got through to him (no simple feat!) and positioned her as the only slightly viable path toward success in Latin America, and got him to take the L?
Anyway, total insanity...
As a reminder, Machado:
1. promised to privatize various companies, particularly in the oil extraction business to the benefit of, primarily, American oil companies [1]; and
2. is very pro-israel and thinks it's important that Venezuela moves their embassy to Jerusalem [2].
Either Machado is a CIA-backed puppet or wants to be. Trump has now joined a club with Joesph Goebbels of being gifted a Nobel prize [3] (also in article).
It makes a complete mockery of the Peace prize to hand it someone who is either an American puppet or a grifter and the Nobel committe should rightly be lambasted for this.
[1]: https://fortune.com/2026/01/03/maria-corina-machado-nobel-pr...
[2]: https://en.royanews.tv/news/66321
[3]: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/from-giving-it-to-nazis-to-s...
It's such a joke that we're even having to discuss this. Has there ever been such a thin-skinned, self-absorbed leader of a major power before? Even his biggest fans have to admit, if only to themselves, that he acts like a toddler.