Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel peace prize

On that note, even Bush got nominated at least once... for not not being Bush.

There are thousands of people in government and the military who broke the law and defended their actions because they believed them to be morally justifiable. Surely those people should have a similar sentence to Manning?

Let's have a look at how the Norwegian Nobel Committee works, that is, the people in charge of selecting the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. Currently, the committee is made up of five members, who have to represent the political parties of the Norwegian Parliament. Here is the list of these members :

Mr Jagland (for 4 years) Mrs Kullmann Five (10 years) Mrs Ytterhorn (13 years) Mrs Reiss-Andersen (2 years) Mr Stalsett (1 year)

Jagland has been a member of the Nobel Committee since 2009. The same year, he was elected Secretary General of the Council of Europe. Note that Norway is part of the Council of Europe, but not of the European Union. Jagland is in favor of the EU, although Norwegian people have voted against joining the EU two times.

All of the other members are politicians from national parties. According to Wikipedia, Mrs Kullmann Five is also member of the Board of Directors of Statoil, an oil company which is the largest company in Norway. Mrs Reiss-Andersen is a lawyer, and she has written two novels. Mr Stalsett is the Protestant bishop in Oslo.

As we can see, the committee is not a group of international law experts, famous scientists or peace activists. The truth is, it seems the five members of the committee do not have the right profile to be responsible for one of the most important international awards in the world.

In fact, an additional person helps the committee to make decisions. Geir Lundestad is the director of the Nobel Institute and has been the "secretary" of the Norwegian Nobel Committee since 1990. He was a researcher in charge of international relations at Harvard for three years, and a researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center, which is the eleventh biggest think tank in the world (according to the Go-To think tank ranking) with famous members like Hillary Clinton and Arne Duncan. Then, in 1990, Geir Lundestad came back to Norway and became the new secretary of the Nobel Committee, and went on for 23 years.

The bottom line is that Geir Lundestad is the real decision-maker. This guy calls the shots, and he will of course not choose Edward Snowden as the next Nobel Peace Prize.

This is clearly something that we as a society are going to have to wrestle with.

It seems reasonable to me that this person, having XY chromosomes and all the hardware that go with them, may be correctly referred to using masculine pronouns.

There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the individual in how they'd like to be addressed. But there's definitely a point at which that drifts off into absurdity. Just because I can claim descent from Henry VIII doesn't mean that I can reasonably expect people to address me as "lord".

So I'm interested in respecting people, but think we need to let this percolate through society first, and determine where to draw reasonable lines, before you accuse someone of disrespect for failing to honor someone's alternate world view.

It's going to be tough to buy (him) a beer.