If flattering a superpower by giving them a meaningless statue can help her do that ... why wouldn't she?
I really don't care about any of this but I don't see the need to play ignorant as to why many people might understandably find what she did distasteful.
> Come on, you know exactly why: integrity.
> I really don't care about any of this but I don't see the need to play ignorant as to why many people might understandably find what she did distasteful.
Please go into more detail what you mean by "integrity." Because, that can mean a lot of different things, and what I think you mean sounds like a priority inversion.
If a Venezuelan giving the stupid hunk of metal away could help Venezuela, who cares about how some Norwegian committee and its fans feel about it? They're comfortable an unimportant.
It's obvious isn't it? An award has an element of consensus, we choose to make the Nobel prizes mean something by agreeing they mean something.
I don't think it's controversial to say that they are considered a highly prestigious award.
I also don't think it's controversial to say that treating them as transferable undermines the whole point of the award (that they are exclusive, that they are awarded based on merit and careful judgement not just some free-market commodity that can be bought and sold). If they were, they would be completely worthless.
This is like.. the whole point of awards, trophies etc.
I vehemently have no horse in this race, I'm just trying to live my life, but I refuse to believe that someone who browses HN and articulates themselves doesn't grok the generally well-understood social contract which underpins things like the Nobel prize and how some might see giving one away as undermining not just to the prize but to the many others who have been deemed worth enough to earn said prize.
Honestly I don't care and I wish I hadn't said anything, but surely you're not sat genuinely scratching your head at why some groups find it objectionable
imagining that matters.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/15/maria-corina-m...
> Earlier in the day the Nobel organizers posted on X: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel peace prize laureate cannot.”
> (…)
> Earlier this week, the organisers of the Nobel peace prize announced the award could not be “shared or transferred” after Machado told Fox News she wished to “share” it with Trump. “The decision is final and stands for all time,” they said.
That one links to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/11/nobel-institut...
Back to the original:
> Machado is not the first Nobel laureate to divest themselves of the award.
> After winning the 1954 Nobel prize in literature, Ernest Hemingway entrusted his medal to the Catholic Church in Cuba – where it was briefly stolen from a sanctuary in 1986 before Raúl Castro ordered its return.
> In 2022, the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned his medal to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees. Leon Lederman, who won the 1988 Nobel prize for physics, sold his after it had spent 20 years “sitting on a shelf somewhere”.
> Machado appears to be the first person to give away her medal for such explicitly political reasons, although in 1943 the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun gifted his decoration to Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, as a sign of his admiration for the Nazis.
The five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament while the Swedish Nobel Committee is composed of institutions proposing laureates and a larger body of experts to choose the recipients. The Norwegian part does both: selecting candidates and choosing the winner.
I think it's important to know so the Peace Prize process doesn't diminish the achievements of the other prizes.
Henry fucking Kissinger got a Peace Prize...
Machado vows to lead Venezuela 'when right time comes'
Per HN Guidelines [0]
Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
I think they have to shut down the Noble peace price at this point, there's no recovering from such an embarrassing turn of events.
tehjoker•1h ago
IAmBroom•1h ago
Citation?
spwa4•1h ago
Of course in practice the current government ... let's call them "billionnaire communists". They defend, in words, the principles of global socialism, and in deeds they defend their own wallets.
tokai•1h ago
>she was viewed as a radical, far-right politician, too extreme even for her own party coalition
>most radical wing of the right
>the most radical wing of the political right
>maintained an extreme right-wing stance
It's rare that anyone picks the fascist label themselves so its hard to pin on anyone. But I guess it could be said in the slur sense of the term.
nikolay•1h ago
tehjoker•38m ago