October 10-October 17: Did they actually get the Nobel Peace prize right?

In an effort to instill some positivity into another death-drenched week, we take a break from roasting presidents (ok, maybe just a little bit). Sports, nobels and.. ex presidents make it into this week’s iteration, which surprisingly merges rather than separates our good and abhorrent categories.

1. –THE GOOD…OR MAYBE THE ABHORRENT – DID THEY REALLY GET THE NOBEL PRIZE RIGHT??

You’d be excused if this week’s announcement of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize winner left you bewildered. The rational cynic’s source of disbelief was likely twofold: i) did they really give this transhistorically tainted award to someone who actually deserved it? & ii) wow, they did, but why now? Sadly, we’re not going to get into what renders this prize as well as the person named after it a dubious affair, but it suffices to say that some of the planet’s premier despicable butchers have been proud winners.

At any rate, Nihon Hidankyo-a Japanese organisation representing atomic bomb survivors from Nagasaki and Hiroshima- reached the category’s Mount Rushmore…68 years after being founded, in virtue of the fight it conducts daily towards ridding our beautiful planet of nuclear weapons. True, it’s never too late to recognize a meaningful initiative; at least they didn’t give it to the IDF. Now let us briefly examine the three other leading candidates in this year’s campaign: Greta Thunberg (famous hater of genocide), UNRWA (the UN institution responsible for supporting Palestinians), and the International Court of Justice (abominably telling Israel it can’t just continue killing random innocent people). Even the biggest Zionist supporter wouldn’t particularly struggle to see a pattern here.

Now, Israel may have used about 137 different ways to murder folk, but nuclear weapons hasn’t been one of them. On the other hand, who is feared to be extremely close to achieving nuclear capabilities in the future (careful, capabilities does not imply use but rather the potential ability to be ready to use), hence explaining Netanyahu’s obsession with taking such capabilities out of the question? Kamala’s (and likely Trump’s too) favourite adversary, Iran. Who else keeps ‘threatening’ the world with nuclear weaponage? The US’s other nemesis. Put it in your head peeps: RUSSIA=FASCIST, IRAN=FASCIST, ISRAEL= KINDA OKAY. Because not all imperialist and human rights violations are created equal; after all, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.

Unfortunately for the global deep state, the Japanese institution’s co-chair is by all accounts a brave and rather awesome human being, given he couldn’t accept the award without crying about the people in Gaza, whose treatment rather resembles that of Israel’s current biggest ally back in 1945. Of course, you’d have to spend a significant chunk of time to find any footage of those tears on youtube, or more than a sentence hidden at the very bottom of any article on legacy media for that matter.

2. -THE UGLY- RAFA NADAL BIDS FAREWELL TO A PUNK CAREER

Properly appreciating elite Spanish athletes the past few decades has proved to be relatively hard. Call it the ‘conquistador’ mindset and air of superiority, call it their ability to win everything in all sports that people genuinely watch, call it whatever else you will. That said, it’s almost impossible not to bow down to the King o’ clay. If Federer was classical music and Djokovic gypsee jazz, then Rafa is probably the closer thing to hardcore punk produced by a sport meant for the bourgeoisie. This is not to suggest anything about Nadal’s politics, which, for all I know, could be disappointing. Yet his gutsiness and rebellious spirit on the court could never be harnessed.

Nadal was certainly not the most talented guy out there. His serve was average. He decided to spend his career being a lefty for pretty much the fucks of it, although he eats, writes and performs all other regular homo sapiens activities with his right. But he just wouldn’t break down. He’d grab impossible points out of thin air. He’d outhustle opponents and win Grand Slams playing on one leg. Where others jogged, he sprinted. That one match against Federer in his prime (the healthy and prime version of whom noone else could conceive of beating in Wimbledon) is the one game you should watch, if you were to force yourself to watch one game of one sport you never really cared about. If you’re not a tennis aficionado, I feel you; but sometimes watching Nadal was about more than that silly racket affair.

3. –THE BAD – OBAMA IS MAD AT HIS OWN EX-VOTERS

If you’re a black American and remotely entertained the thought of not voting for Harris, you’re causing the ex-president quite the distress. In an apparently unscheduled visit to the swing state of Pennsylvania, Obama said some “brothers” are not as stoked about Kamala as they used to be for him. After being briefed that about 25% of his ill-informed “brothers” (his words, not ours) were contemplating a non-vote or giving it to the Orange Man, it was time for him to take a break from producing Netflix documentaries and take his talents to lecturing people about the perils of investing too little towards proselytizing the community to remain a useful cog in the two-party system.

Let us not contemplate the possibility that these men are not so much sexist, as disillusioned with Democrat governments using their tax money to bomb the crap out of women and babies overseas. His hipster populist plea included the phrase “I am the hope-y, change-y guy, so I get why people wanna shake things up”. We get it too; these campaigns fish for votes in whatever shape or form there is, and I’m sure a few people will feel a sense of guilt and oblige to Obama’s call. But the last thing I’d want a few weeks before the election is an ex-president spanking me about being an unserious, reticently sexist idiot.