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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I do have a PTSD diagnosis… but, still on the road. Love it!
Bernie Sanders would be my first thought
Mine too
The kids protesting on campuses right now.
Yes
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).
For me personally, Cory Doctorow. Here’s an inspiring talk by him.
That guy’s a good egg, and a pretty good author too
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.
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.
Richard Stallman
I would’ve said the same some years ago, but then I actually went to a lecture by him in person at my university and… I’ll just say that it was not a very pleasant experience and very much a “never meet your heroes” kind of moment.
Oh dear, what happened?!
I don’t know how accurate each of the claims in this article are, but this is the kind of stuff that he’s been accused of, and as a result most people don’t really worship or admire him much anymore: https://www.wired.com/story/richard-stallman-and-the-fall-of-the-clueless-nerd/
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.
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