I keep making the same photograph, over and over. (See, for example, Under the Piano/Across the Street.) I used to think that this was a fault, a lamentable rut from which I had to extract myself by concentrated application of creative power. However, after shooting this way consistently for more than a decade, I have come to realize—reluctantly—that this is how I see. This is how I impose my particular sense of order upon the word. And instead of trying in vain to escape it, I choose to let go of futile ambition and relax into it. I am not going to win any photographic awards with this view of things, but it is my view, however mundane, and I am satisfied with that.
Wherever I am /
That’s where you’ll be.
Camino restaurant, meat-packing district, Copenhagen.
Gulf Island Living /
Long-ago Diptychs /
Stigma and a non-reciprocal special privilege /
“The claim for individual toleration cannot extend to cancelling other people’s right to judge as they will what a given individual does. Much of the modern demand for individualism—including John Stuart Mill’s ‘On Liberty’—is a plea for exemption from social feedback from those negatively judging individual behaviour. Such an exemption is especially inconsistent when it emanates from those actively criticizing the rest of society. However democratic the language in which it is phrased, it is not a demand for equal rights, or a general freedom, but for a non-reciprocal special privilege.”
Under threat of sanction with “hate speech” laws, we are constantly admonished by the anointed to remove the “stigma” (formerly, and more appropriately, called shame) associated with behaviours that in the recent past would have been considered unnatural and abhorrent. Instead, we are told to “normalize” them. But this requirement for toleration runs only in one direction. In trenchant fashion typical of his genius, Sowell cuts through misdirection and bullshittery with clear insight and plain language.