Metacommentary

If you're interested in Photoshop technique, I've just posted a new Featured Comment to "T.O.P. Technical Book of the Year 2006" by David Mantripp, including a link to David's mini-review of the book.

And speaking of comments, I've closed the comments for "T.O.P. Photographer of the Year 2006," so anyone who comments further shouldn't be offended if it doesn't show up (it will show they didn't read the post all the way to the end, anyway).

I do tend to pay for it whenever I venture to post controversial things here. If something I say makes people feel bad, the bad feelings are magnified back on me, via comments. My little observation about Saddam drew fiercely unhappy complaints from both sides—the usual ones from conservatives objecting to what they see as reflexive Bush-bashing, and even more of them—about a third again as many—from people who provided copious links to evidence that Saddam was put in power by the U.S. in the first place, and to other sites asserting that Bush was simply eliminating a witness to U.S. complicity in the region. Then I had to deal with comments from people who were angry that I hadn't posted their first comments. I even got several examples of a quixotic type of response I've gotten before, namely, from non-Americans holding me personally responsible for U.S. policy. I hate to say it, but I have very, very little influence over my nation's government. (In effect, I just live here.) I vote, but that's about where the reach of my power ends. Believe me on this. I can't get Condi Rice on the phone.

The reason I ended the comments to the Jill Greenberg post was that I perceived that people who've already been immersed in this argument had linked back to T.O.P. and were coming here to contribute arguments they had already been involved in elsewhere; I was getting comments from people, in other words, whose views on the matter had already been radicalized, and seemed to have hardened that way. I don't think it's as big a deal as some other people do, obviously, but at the same time I'm sort of sorry I got into it. In any event, I don't think that T.O.P. is the proper place to hash out emotional issues unto exhaustion. We can argue all day—but why?

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON