I personally do, he actually risked his life to release information about the government spying on people. And there are for sure more advanced ways now. Even your phone is listening.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    A hero is a concept

    It’s a descriptor of a person or personality.

    “Help! Help! I need a doctor.”

    “I’m sorry ma’am, but a doctor is more of a conceptual term. Nobody here can fulfill your request.”

    • BilboBargains@lemmy.world
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      12 days 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.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        12 days 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”.

        • BilboBargains@lemmy.world
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          12 days 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. What Snowden did was pretty heroic in my opinion but the deep state probably have other ideas.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            12 days 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