Links: Nobel Peace Prize, Spanish immersion, Gene Sharp, and OK Cupid

Posted by Sappho on October 10th, 2009 filed in Peace Testimony, Quaker Practice, Sexuality

Reaction from Quakers, on blogs and Facebook, has been mixed to Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win; while the Quakers I know tend to be Obama-friendly, and aren’t exactly jumping on the Glenn Beck bandwagon of indignation about this event, some are enthusiastic and others feel it’s premature. Here are a couple of Quaker blog posts on the subject, shared with the understanding that, where you have ten Quakers, you may well have ten different opinions:

John, from my own meeting, on Eight Things Barack Obama has Done to Make the World a More Peaceful Place.

Anthony Manousos, whom I also know in real life, shares an open letter urging Obama to take this as a call to further action, in Does Pres. Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize? Yes, he can!

Another member of my meeting, on semi-retiring from her faculty position at UCI, spent the summer in a Spanish immersion program in Mexico; here is her summer blog.

Online books by Gene Sharp, advocate of civilian-based defense.

The free Internet matchmaking service OK Cupid has an interesting blog analyzing trends that they’ve found in which of their users’ messages get responses, from Online Dating Advice: Exactly What To Say In A First Message to the news that Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back. A lot. Even though their analysis is that race is just about as irrelevant as zodiac sign to how compatible people’s views are on the questions users are actually rating as important to them.