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Something that's overlooked both in the comments here and in the article itself is that one of the figures behind the unionisation effort at Anchor was a guy ca
by smcl 3y ago
Something that's overlooked both in the comments here and in the article itself is that one of the figures behind the unionisation effort at Anchor was a guy called Brace Belden. He's a pretty interesting and slightly controversial guy who shot to fame by joining Kurdish fighters in Syria, periodically posting little snippets about the war to Twitter under his handle @pisspiggranddad.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/brace-belden-pisspiggranddad-syria-isis.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/brace-belden-pisspig...
He could easily have written a book on his time in Syria or leveraged that somehow to join Vice or some similar company (he's charismatic and funny, so he probably would've been good in front of the camera) but he opted not to do any of that, joined Anchor and helped organise a union.
- noSyncCloud 3y agoAlso does the TrueAnon podcast which is pretty good.
- pmarreck 3y agothe stubborn leftist idealism in the face of a mass of evidence that communism can't work, at least as it is usually idealized, is a bit off-putting
- smcl 3y agoIf you don't like him then that's fair enough. But I've found him to be quite entertaining and at times intelligent and thoughtful, and I'm definitely not alone.
- Shawnj2 3y agoNot sure how that’s relevant here. Worker owner co ops and tank style communism are vastly different things
- smsm42 3y agoThe guy is a communist (yeah I know "democratic socialist", same beer, differeng label), it's a fact, and no communist can be ignorant of the mass crimes communist governments committed and keep committing, and of gigantic failures they presided over. If he still chooses to march under that banner, that tells us something about him, and making conclusions based on that is appropriate. That doesn't mean the business he's associated with will fail as a worker coop - maybe not, but it's still not entirely irrelevant.
- smcl 3y agoAlright so "I don't like the left" - loud and clear. Thanks for your input.
- smsm42 3y agoHistory us not just an opinion, it's not subject to personal likes or dislikes. And the modern history offers plenty of support for my "not like".
- smcl 3y agoAn American volunteered to fight ISIS and helped fight for workers rights in a brewery. That's about as close to an American hero as you can possibly be. If you're not happy with that and want to cast all sorts of other aspersions on him then I don't know what to tell you. If you're looking for someone to debate some kind of "-ism" then I suggest you check out Twitter or Reddit.
- r00fus 3y ago> no communist can be ignorant of the mass crimes communist governments committed and keep committing You fail to contrast with the even larger atrocities committed by non-communist governments.
- smsm42 3y agoI don't see how this is an argument. When we say we must condemn nazis for crimes against humanity - do you raise an objection that "non-nazis committed crimes too, and if we sum up all the crimes in history of humanity, they'd surely dwarf the nation crimes?" I don't think so. Pointing to somebody else having committed a crime is not a defense.
- r00fus 3y agoThe real argumentation is the numbers. The claimant has to bring the data. So where's your data?