I was about to respond to somebody with "She's not exactly Mother Theresa"

[conuly]

when I remembered that a. Mother Theresa isn't the best example and b. in that place, people probably know that.

Opinion time! What (female) name should I use when disparagingly comparing a person to a really good, philanthropic person? Should be somebody recognizable, with no fairly well-known bad behavior. No propping up corrupt dictators, no comments about how the suffering of the poor is "beautiful", no hypocrisy, and so on.

Edit: No people who are mostly famous for having died in awful ways, or otherwise being in the wrong place at the wrong time, especially if they are still (or died when they were) minors and young adults and didn't have much of a chance to be particularly good or bad people.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

...see I was reading your edit to rule out people like Anne Frank, but not living activists with substantial name recognition and track record such as Malala Yousafzai. I'd hesitate over Emma Gonzalez, because her track record is years shorter and her name is much less recognizable if I don't mention Parkland, but I thought you were ruling in Yousafzai.

[conuly]

She's 21! That makes her a young adult. One who was really unlucky in where she happened to live as an adolescent and who all else was there.

[alexseanchai]

still seeing a relevant distinction between people like Frank, whose story is mostly about how she got dead, and people like Gonzalez and Yousafzai, whose phenomenal ill luck is the beginning of her story but nowhere near the end of it, but okay

AOC?

[conuly]

They're also young enough that I don't want to pin a "good person" or "bad person" label on them. They could have literally cured cancer AND saved the whales AND brought peace to the middle east and I'd be "Okay, but let's hold on and see what sort of people they are at 30-ish."

[alexseanchai]

okay, that makes sense

[conuly]

It's sort of a two-fer reason, crammed into a small package.