AP:
In a move that might make some people scratch their heads, a loosely formed coalition of left-leaning bloggers are trying to band together to form a labor union they hope will help them receive health insurance, conduct collective bargaining or even set professional standards.
Health insurance? Collective bargaining? From whom, and versus which institution? Being a blogger myself, the last I looked, there is no central agency or corporation that hires someone to be a blogger.
This business about “setting professional standards” needs some explanation:
But not everyone is on board.
“The reason I like blogging is that it’s very anarchistic. I can do whatever I want whenever I want, and oh my God, you’re not going to tell me what to do,” said Curt Hopkins, the founder of the Committee to Protect Bloggers.
“The blogosphere is such a weird term and such a weird idea. It’s anyone who wants to do it,” Hopkins said. “There’s absolutely no commonality there. How will they find a commonality to go on? I think it’s doomed to failure on any sort of large scale.”
(snip)
Mark Noonan, an editor at Blogs for Bush and a senior writer at GOP Bloggers, said he worries that a blogger union would undermine the freewheeling nature of the blogosphere, regardless of its political composition.
“We just go out there and write what is on our mind, damn the critics,” he said. “To make a union is to start to provide a firm structure for the blogosphere and that would merely make the blogosphere a junior-league (mainstream media). … Get us a union and other ‘professional’ organizations and we’ll start to be conformist and we’ll start to be just another special interest.”
What this essentially means is that the Kos people, who had their yearly convention in Chicago last weekend, and who are the ones pushing this union idea, are actually doing it to enforce left-wing conformity and (probably) ideological “purity.” Once again, this is another example demonstrating how the supposedly “non-conformist” and “anarchist” left can be bigger despots than anyone.
