If anything were guaranteed to salve a bruised faith in human nature, it is the video of the dramatic rescue of a baby in Paris on Saturday. Mamoudou Gassama, a 22-year-old “sans papiers”, or undocumented migrant, from Mali, saw a lone toddler dangling from a fourth-floor balcony in the 18th arrondissement, and scampered up the outside of the building to save him, while onlookers cheered. The exploit made him famous as the “Spider-Man of the 18th”, and yesterday he went to the Elysée Palace to meet Emmanuel Macron. Awarding Gassama a medal for bravery, the president told him he would be immediately naturalised as a French citizen, and given a job with the Paris firefighters.
Macron, however, himself highlighted the contrast with France’s usual policy towards migrants. “We can’t just give papers to everyone who comes from Mali, from Burkina,” Le Parisien reported Macron as telling Gassama. “We’ll grant them asylum if they’re in danger, but not for economic reasons. But you did something exceptional. Even if you didn’t think about it, it’s an act of bravery and strength that has drawn everyone’s admiration.” It’s hard to say if Macron really intended the tone of patrician condescension to the noble savage from the former colony, but he made his general point very clear in the press conference afterwards: “An exceptional act doesn’t change politics.”
[…] Gassama himself, who made the dangerous boat crossing to Italy before arriving in France last year, was impressively modest (“It’s the first time I’ve ever won an award”), but his experience underscores how hard it is for people like him to gain acceptance in French society. Macron’s attitude, indeed, sends the message that you can only become French if you do something so extraordinary that the vast majority of French people would never even attempt it.
A friend of mine from university had a faceless teddy bear. As we were living in some kind of Bloomsbury Set novel at the time, we named it Little Alfie, after the prototype creepy fungus creature in The Death Guard (1939).
listen… i’m a lesbian and i know full well what oppression based on love is like… but i wish white gay folks wouldn’t act like sexuality is the only reason anyone’s ever felt that
there are people in my family who’ve been disowned because they married someone of a different colour to them… i’m mixed race and the very concept of my existence would’ve been illegal in the us when my parents were born. the supreme court only ruled against discrimination of mixed-race marriages in 1967! that’s barely 50 years ago. homophobia is an awful thing to experience and i know that from first hand experience but i’m begging you to remember that gay people aren’t the only ones being killed for who they love. please remember the struggles faced by Black and brown people when you talk about oppression. please have some solidarity with your nonwhite friends (especially your nonwhite gay friends!) when you talk about dismantling the systems that keep us alone and isolated. please remember the horrible history that is anti-miscegenation laws when you talk about equal marriage rights, because they aren’t just for white gay people.
Daniel Logan is the only one who should be considered to play Boba Fett in the movie. Boba needs to be of Maori decent. Taika Waititi would be okay, but no. Everyone who fights for Ewan to play Obi-Wan should fight like hell for Daniel Logan to be Boba Fett again. Daniel Logan was the little boy who played him in Attack Of The Clones
and he’s voiced him in all his appearances in The Clone Wars. He’s all grown up now and he even made an appearance on the official Star Wars YouTube channel for their science of Star Wars show about Boba Fett’s flamethrower. And he has been recently been outfitted his own Boba Fett armor. Check his instagram out, his Boba Fett costume is glorious. Daniel Logan is the only choice that should even be there. Daniel deserves to be Boba Fett again.
No but the history behind this picture is really interesting
The reason that everyone always looked miserable in old photos wasn’t that they took too long to take. Once photography became widespread it took only seconds to take a picture.
It was because getting your photo taken was treated the same as getting your portrait painted. A very serious occasion meant so thst your descendants would know that ypu existed and what you looked like.
But one time some British dudes went to china to go on an anthropological expedition, and they met some rural Chinese farmers and decided to take their pictures. Now, these people weren’t exposed to the weird culture of the time around getting your photo taken, so this guy just flashed a big grin during the photo because he was told to strike a pose and that’s the pose he wanted to strike.
Okay, I’ve always loved this picture and was going to reblog it to my personal blog, but decided to look at the comments before I did. Long story short, the part of me that has spent the last decade collecting and researching old photographs ended up wanting to bang its head against the wall so I’m going clear up a few things here (I apologize ahead of time for any ranting, but this historical misconception is seriously one of my biggest pet peeves)…
So going off of and adding to the poster above…
No. The photo is not a modern fake. The accession record from the American Museum of Natural History is RIGHT HERE.
PHOTOS DID NOT TAKE A LONG TIME TO TAKE IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY/EARLY 20TH CENTURY.
They did not take minutes and they certainly didn’t take hours as I saw several commenters saying rather confidently.
I have no idea why this idea is still so widespread, but by the time commercial photography took off (mid-1840s) the absolute longest you were going to end up sitting for a daylight photograph was about 60 seconds. By the Civil War, daguerreotype exposure time was somewhere around two seconds. By the 1880s you were looking at ¼ of a second.
I’m not going to go into why people didn’t smile and the transition of the cultural mindset about photography around the turn of the century because it’s complex enough that I have literally taught a class about the subject, but in conclusion…
– Photos didn’t take long to take.
– Believe it or not people have always had personalities.
I will now illustrate/back up these points using a few images from my personal collection…
Here’s a building falling down in 1893. Not easy to pose bricks in mid-air.
Here’s a train “running full speed” in 1897. It’s a little blurry, but something tells me if you tried to take a picture with a modern camera of a car driving 60mph, there’s a pretty good chance the results would be similar.
And here are some people with personalities…
Thank you for your time.
yeoldenews tagged this # don’t even get me started on post-mortem photography I would in fact like to get them started on the topic as I have been frustrated by the myths myself.
Saw this earlier today and this immigration lawyer makes a good point (short version: the 1500 kids “lost” by the Office of Refugee resettlement are a separate issue from the kids being forcibly taken by their parents by ICE, and conflating the two things is actually dangerous):
Mooncustafer 