Who Are Todays Heroes?
Who are the heroes of our time? Who is driving us to a better future? And who is inspiring and guiding us?
Anything goes: famous people, people in your own life, fictional people who represent something to your culture, groups of people working behind the scenes etc.
The only rule is they must be current.
Raymond Hill, the uBlock Origin guy
That's the real hero
I’ll also throw VLC guy in there too
Open source software maintainers, thanklessly (and often without pay) maintaining infrastructure without which the global economy would collapse immediately
I second this, big time.
Any garbage man that picks up my trash. Any sanitation engineer that cleans my sewage.
EMS ; chronically underpaid and overstressed.
When a cop complains about the terrible things they see on their job, they are talking about the stuff the saw watching EMS work.
This. "Overstressed" doesn't begin to cover it. It's an unimaginably stressful job even when things are going right.
Under appreciated movie from the 1980s, "Repo Man."
Harry Dean Stanton tells Emilio Estevez "I hate normal people. Normal people spend their whole damn lives trying to avoid tense situations. Repo man spends his whole life putting himself into tense situations."
Well, I do have a PTSD diagnosis... but, still on the road. Love it!
Anyone who is still doing the right thing and not in it for money or themselves. Which is fucking rare as shit these days.
Making a living and doing this is hard mode.
Plenty of people do a lot of good out there taking care of others. They are just not seen because of the narcissists in the spotlight.
Eh, nothing wrong with making a living and still doing the right thing. Doing the right thing is right regardless of your motives.
The transgender population, especially transgender youth. If one group’s rights can be stripped away, then any group’s can. They are the front line soldiers against the spread of fascism.
Bernie Sanders would be my first thought
Mine too
The kids protesting on campuses right now.
Yes
not in any specific order:
SPI, the foundation supporting debian and arch projects.
boeing whistleblowers, and anybody willing to step up against these kinds of corpo shenanigans.
people who wear masks.
stephen colbert, john oliver and their news team
lemmy posters
Teachers. It is such a widely known trope that teachers are overworked and underpaid. So many that want to pursue teaching now enter the market, understanding that they will likely need a second job at some point. Although internet kudos do little to actually address the problem, my respect goes to the teachers.
Stephen Hawking.
He has influenced how physicists look at the world, and they in turn have taught us how to see the world, and nearly everybody believes what he has told (even though some of the topics do not fit with newer observations anymore, but still nobody has come up with really better explanations).
Kind of on the tail end of their careers, but Senator Ron Wyden on privacy/surveillance, and Bernie Sanders on most stuff. Good question for a thread.
For me personally, Cory Doctorow. Here's an inspiring talk by him.
That guy's a good egg, and a pretty good author too
Mick Lynch and Shawn Fain
Mick Lynch is definitely one of mine. We're lucky to have him.
Are these made up names? Never heard of them. Must be an American thing?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Fain
A American labor unionist
Mick Lynch is currently the most badass man in Britain. Absolute unit.
Alexandra Elbakyan (Scihub) has probably done more for scientific progress than anyone alive.
EMS, the scientists who made the vaccines which have prevented millions of deaths from COVID, and the mothers who are making the effort to raise up their kids to be the best people they can be.
Greta Tintin Thunberg
Huh. Cannot unseen.
Shawn Fain
Scientists and other rationalists. If you wanted to be dramatic, their fight to save ourselves and the planet would be against the inertia of "common wisdom", known bugs in human psychology, the resistance of wanting to disregard the unknown or unpleasant, everyone for whom the truth (to the best of our knowledge) is economically inconvenient with the considerable economic and societal power they wield.
They are not good odds, but it is correct against incorrect and often against malignantly incorrect, and they are all extremely formidable villains.
It makes me sad David Attenborough has this world in his later years rather than the one he fought for. But without he how much worse would it be.
I was so keen to hear everyone else's that I forgot to put my own! In no particular order:
Actually, I'm pretty sure the main character of real life is a girl I know. Unfortunately, revealing infos about her at this point might he harmful to the plot.
Is it Fenchurch from Islington?
No.
Still Noam Chomsky, David Graeber (rip). Prof Michael Hudson, Prof Danny Dorling, Grace Blakely, Michael Sheen, Mick Lynch, Dianne Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, Alexi Sayle, Rutger Bergman, Thic Naht Han (rip), Matieu Ricard, bob Marley, , and the countless comrades on the front lines of the fight for equality And protection of the environment
Honourable mentions:
Jolyon Maugham, Aaron Bastani, Marcus rashford, burning spear, Peter Geohagan, Ian hislop, chuck D, killah Mike .
Europeans
While flattered, the real heroes are the EU
They been killing it lately with how they leached all the unbridled tech companies of the US. And it isn't stopping soon.
To quote Måns Zelmerlöw: "WE are the heroes of our time, but we're dancing with the demons in our minds"
He said like about 9 years ago.
My parents and parents-in-law.
Your parents and your in-laws are my heroes too. Because whatever they did, it must've been really great.
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman.
They noticed that naively adding test tube synthesized mRNA elicited immflamatory responses from immune cells, while mRNA derived from cells did not. They figured out that chemical modifications to mRNAs were responsible for avoiding these immune reactions to the mRNAs.
These results would open the path for development of mRNA-based vaccines, like the vaccines repsonsible for limiting the damage of the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/press-release/
You said "Elon" and regretted it immediately, didn't you?
Paul Hogan
Downvoters, pump your brakes. The man's a national treasure!
Mothers. For raising up kids.
I'm surprised to see this has been downvoted. I know not all mothers are perfect but just keeping a baby alive and healthy is pretty heroic IMO.
Humans identify power/mighty ( even angry ) people as Heroic. Those ones with empathy, love are considered as cowards.