Comment on Do you think that Edward Snowden is a hero?

• BilboBargains@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Okay but a doctor is a profession. You could have a heroic doctor but nobody’s full time job is ‘hero’. A hero is a term that’s useful in a novel but some people wanna cosplay the role and that eventually becomes a cult.

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You could have a heroic doctor but nobody’s full time job is ‘hero’.

    Anyone who is regularly engaged in heroics would be a full-time hero, in the same way that anyone engaged in full time medical practice would be a doctor. In Snowden’s case, he effectively quite his job at Booze-Allen and became an advocate for dismantling of the surveillance state effectively full-time. He stopped drawing a salary as an intelligence analyst and focused all his time on assembling, distributing, and propagandizing the nature of the PRISM program and the need to end it.

    A hero is a term that’s useful in a novel but some people wanna cosplay

    It’s a term that is used to describe an individual engaged in a heroic effort on a sustained basis. To your point, you could easily describe a Doctors Without Borders volunteer or a volunteer firefighter as a hero-as-full-time-job. Depending on your ideology and the individual’s circumstances, you could also describe a civil rights advocate or a military operative or a journalist as a hero.

    It’s a weak descriptor, because just calling someone a “hero” doesn’t explain their heroic status. Whereas, calling someone a doctor pretty clearly illustrates how they’re (presumably) spending their time. But “Hero Journalist” definitely conjures an image that is different than “Paparazzi Journalist”.

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    • BilboBargains@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      According to that definition Snowden doesn’t defecate, he goes for a heroic dump. I’m just saying the word gets abused and people are lots of things, including heroic and deplorable. Osama was a hero to many people.

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      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        According to that definition Snowden doesn’t defecate, he goes for a heroic dump.

        If he’s shitting on the right people, I think this qualifies

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