Hello everyone :)

This thread is about those men and women, past and present, who you look to as role models on how to lead your life and how to fight for what you believe in. Rules are:

1. Positive role models only please

errrm....thass the only rule :D

.....but just to clarify, "positive" in this instance, means those people who try to enhance and enrich the lives of everyone in society or who's inventions/ways of thinking have benefited us all.....

my person today is:

Nelson Mandela

"Robben island was the harshest, most iron-fisted outpost in the South African penal system. Mandela spent a total of 27 (:shocked:) years in prison for advocating a racially equal South Africa."

He was released in 1990 and within a year, apartheid ended and Mandela was elected President of South Africa. He never sought to punish his abusers and always looked forward to justice.

Its that last sentence that gets me, everytime. What a guy, not to seek revenge :love:.

Although I think Nelson Mandela is a great man and has accomplished a lot in the world, not just South Africa, he was a guerrilla and committed acts of violence and sabotage against military and government targets. Many people seem to conveniently forget about this and only praise the positive aspects of his work.

Muhammad Ali

Gee Walker

A remarkable lady who forgave the racists that murderdered her son.

i often find myself wanting to coat people in zinc : obviously to protect them from rust. (the last one got a little shirty for no discernable reason)

i often find myself wanting to coat people in zinc : obviously to protect them from rust. (the last one got a little shirty for no discernable reason)
Wasn't meant to be shirty, I just feel strongly about incidents like these

Spose mines Eminem, not cos i'm white, it's cos i hate my ex-wife, and shot her new boyfriend. :hihi:

Richard Feynman - Nobel prize winning physicist, teacher, player of the bongo drums and raconteur. For the enjoyment he showed in practising his vocation of science.

Winston Churchill - for doing the right thing when it was very unpopular. For exhibiting courage and determination against the odds, and for being the 'come-back kid' of British Politics just when the country needed him.

General George Patton III - old 'blood and guts'. A man ho believed in old-style courage and fighting spirit. Anachronistic, politically incorrect and often offensive, he got the job done when others were just talking about it.

George Orwell - for writing good, clear English and his astonishing political honesty at a time when people were tying themselves in knots to excuse Communism and Fscism.

Galileo (1564-1642)

He was the first to write about a sun-centred universe, something we all take for granted today. At the time, the church was in uproar about such heresy! He was forced to renounce his work and teach the traditional arguement that if the earth were to rotate, it would disintegrate and the clouds would be left behind. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest -but his ideas were free :)

Although I think Nelson Mandela is a great man and has accomplished a lot in the world, not just South Africa, he was a guerrilla and committed acts of violence and sabotage against military and government targets. Many people seem to conveniently forget about this and only praise the positive aspects of his work.

Yeah this is true but don't forget about what these millitary and governments did to the people they were supposed to be looking out for.

Gee Walker

A remarkable lady who forgave the racists that murderdered her son.


A truly marvelous and remarkable woman, her speech made me catch my breath and cry.

Rosalind Franklin. She was a chemist and crystallographer whose work contributed greatly to the discovery of DNA's molecular structure. She died in 1958, thus preventing her from sharing the Nobel Prize.

JoeP
Because he's the fairest Mod on here.

Ken Foree
Because he starred in my fave films ever "Dawn of the Dead" and "Devils Rejects" and i've met him in real life.

Colin J Campbell
Because he didn't care about putting his reutation on the line to admit Peak Oil will take place before 2010 and give all the evidence to prove so; despite being at the time a big player and highly paid Oil company worker.

James Howard Kunstler
Because he gave up Rolling Stone magazine to write The Long Emergency (explaining Peak Oil and the consequences) and still has time to return emails personally to me.

Muhammed Ali
Enough Said

Arnold Schwarzennegger
I was once in to bodybuilding and have to ask how far can a normal person go in life - if he becomes president then I see no boundaries.

Nigel Mansell
Skill can always overcome lack of funds.

Al Pacino
Scarface

Robert Deniro
What more characters can he play?

Winston Churchil
He realised the importance of Oil in a war before anyone else, hence why we don't talk German in the UK.

Ayrton Senna
What could he have achieved???

Mike Tyson
He continued to protest his innocence even though he was offered early release if he admitted his guilt - I believe him.

Stanley Tookie Williams
A man who admits he was on the wrong path early on but he never did the crimes he was finally killed for. Also his book opened me up to the the type of oppression African Americans suffered and suffer in the US - although now I feel its more to do with your financial status rather than colour and that counts for anywere in the civilised world!!!

Einstein
His Theory

That guy who invented Penicillin
I probably would be dead if not!

That guy who discovered Electricity
I wander if he knew what it would've lead to.

I'm sure i've missed some but aye who cares???:hihi:

Rosalind Franklin. She was a chemist and crystallographer whose work contributed greatly to the discovery of DNA's molecular structure. She died in 1958, thus preventing her from sharing the Nobel Prize.

Evenin hun :). yes, this has to be one of the academic injustices of the twentieth century. everyone's heard of crick and watson...but not Ms Franklin....and it was she whose crystallographic portrait of DNA sparked everything off. I blame those 'men-only' pubs at cambridge...

Al Pacino
Scarface


Perrlease explain this to me cliff. it keeps popping up time and again and i just don't see it! i may have even have fallen asleep during it....??

Evenin hun :). yes, this has to be one of the academic injustices of the twentieth century. everyone's heard of crick and watson...but not Ms Franklin....and it was she whose crysallographic portrait of DNA sparked everything off. I blame those 'men-only' pubs at cambridge...
Hi Sol :wave: . Franklin was certainly denied recognition for many years. I believe Crick was rather more gracious than Watson in acknowledging her contribution to their molecular model-building too.

Perrlease explain this to me cliff. it keeps popping up time and again and i just don't see it! i may have even have fallen asleep during it....??

Well it's one of the best acting performances of all time and the film, character and whole scenario is so cool!!!:hihi:

My person for today is:

Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948 )

In 1930, Ghandi set off on a 241-mile march to the Arabian Ocean to protest the British salt tax and the law that prohibited Indians from making their own salt. He was arrested for picking up a small lump of natural salt. The thousands that followed him, began doing the same and were beaten with police clubs. The visual impact of wave after wave of Indians being attacked and falling to the ground, only to be picked up by fellow protestors and put on stretchers before another line would come to receive a similar fate, just for picking salt, was perhaps the greatest example of Gandhi's non-violent strategy in action. This incredible demonstration of self-control and non-violence against brute force, exercised in such a trivial cause, could not help but reinforce the immorality and injustice of British rule. India gained its independence in 1948.

My person for today is:

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Having been expelled from Germany and France for concluding that history was a continual conflict between the majority who created wealth and the few who owned it, Marx moved to London in 1849. He was not the first to draw attention to the corrupting and exploitative nature of capital, but he was the first to advocate that the working classes revolt against the repressive capitalist classes. All class boundaries, he believed, would then be destroyed, and each individual would find their own personal fulfillment, having no need for religious or capitalist institutions.

Whilst living in poverty in a loft in Soho, Marx produced his most important body of work, Das Kapital (Capital). These thoughts, which became known as Marxism or Communisim, were to be the greatest influence and impulse of social change in the 20th century; spurring revolutions all over the world and inspiring colonized countries to throw off their colonizers.

My 'person' for today is actually a movement:

CHIPKO

The first tree-hugger died beneath the axe of a Maharajas tree cutter, according to 18th century Indian stories. Her tactic of opposition, embracing a tree, gave the name Chipko (meaning embrace) to a movement opposing the felling of forests in the Himalayas.

In 1973 a sporting goods store had been given the contract to fell trees in the Uttar Pradesh. When the tree cutters arrived, 27 women led by an elderly widow, began hugging the trees and threatened to die with them. This simple act of love, captured the world's attention. The contractors backed down, and the Chipko movement thus branched out to other areas of India. In 1980 they achieved a major victory as tree felling was banned for 15 years in the Himalayan forests. Since then they have significantly influenced natural resource policy in India.

My 'person' for today is a union:

The Suffragettes

At the turn of the 19th century, the Women's Social and Political Union (known as the suffragettes) began presenting arguements to Parliament with the aim of obtaining female suffrage. Fed up with being ignored, the Suffragettes began a campaign of civil disobedience; they would no longer obey the rules if they didn't have a say in them. They burned churches as the Church of England was against female suffrage, they chained themselves to buckingham palace as the royal family were against women having the vote. They sailed up the Thames and shouted abuse through loud hailers at Parliament as it sat. Many were thrown in prison and only released when they were about to die from hunger strike. One woman died by throwing herself under a police horse. In these actions , the Suffragettes challenged the perception of women as meek second class citizens, demonstrating that this was a fight they would continue to the bitter end. It was not until after the 1st World War, that the injustice of depriving women representation when they were put to work by the government, became so glaring that those who previously belittled the Suffragettes saw the sense in their demands. Women were finally made eligible for the vote in 1918.

Samuel Holberry

http://www.gencem.org/explore/residents/holberry.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/southyorkshire/sense_of_place/cemetery/frightful.shtml

lance armstrong... for the simple yet profound message which his foundation is based upon... "live strong"

and also anyone who can look at life and see the beauty that it holds and be inspired...

My person for today is:

Angelina Jolie (1975 -

For giving 1/3 of her income to charity and for actively lobbying for change in Africa