If You Don't Pay, The House Burns Down!

[bushwacked]

Bushy, why don't you have insurance on your car?

 

Because Jeebus told me not to.

[WaterMan]

They went out there to protect the neighbor's property from the fire spreading.

 

This really turns my stomach, especially after the man tried to pay it on the spot. Would it have hurt them to take the fellow's money and put out what was then a small fire?

 

Read up on the way fire departments worked in Roman times. Buy a token to put on your house, and they would come put it out. No token, no help. Nice to see how far we have come.

 

Their attitude was, "I'm not getting paid to do this for him." That's alot of people's work ethic now days.

[westvirginia]

Their attitude was, "I'm not getting paid to do this for him." That's alot of people's work ethic now days.

 

Kinda like the union/government "not my job" mentality, huh?

[Dr. Sacrebleu]

Kinda like the union/government "not my job" mentality, huh?

 

We have so vilified government and unions, that we have lost sight of the fact that the greatest selfless heros of this century are government employees, and union members (that would be our soldiers at war, and the firemen of 9/11 should you have forgotten).

I realize this sounds dickish on my part. You obviously are deeply grateful to our soldiers and firemen. So I aplogize. But I am getting so annoyed at this new knee jerk reaction that is sweeping the nation that often without thinking slams anything other than strict individualism.

The new Me Generation is just as annoying and rotten as the old Me Generation

[TimC]

Kinda like the union/government "not my job" mentality, huh?

 

Do you think a modern-day Jonas Salk would give away the patent to the polio vaccine?

[Yukon Cornelius]

Do you think a modern-day Jonas Salk would give away the patent to the polio vaccine?

no

[SEC=UGA]

What Would Jeebus Do?

 

WTH is that!?!?! Has to be a satire piece... I particularly liked this:

The fire department did the right and Christian thing. The right thing, by the way, is also the Christian thing, because there can be no difference between the two. The right thing to do will always be the Christian thing to do, and the Christian thing to do will always be the right thing to do.

 

Who decides what "The Christian thin to do" is? There has to be, oh, say, a hundred or so Christian sects, most of whom disagree with one another to an extent about what truly is "The Christian thing to do." Not to mention all of the people within those sects who have varying opinions of what "the Christian thing to do" is.

 

Is "The Christian thing to do" buggering little boys after Sunday Mass, conquering the better part of the word and murdering the millions who chose to not convert, destroying ancient/historical texts that espoused differing philosophies from yours, refusing to acknowledge scientific advances despite overwhelming evidence supporting those theories, etc...

[Perchoutofwater]

We have so vilified government and unions, that we have lost sight of the fact that the greatest selfless heros of this century are government employees, and union members (that would be our soldiers at war, and the firemen of 9/11 should you have forgotten).

I realize this sounds dickish on my part. You obviously are deeply grateful to our soldiers and firemen. So I aplogize. But I am getting so annoyed at this new knee jerk reaction that is sweeping the nation that often without thinking slams anything other than strict individualism.

The new Me Generation is just as annoying and rotten as the old Me Generation

 

 

Protecting the nation is part of the federal governments job as outlined in the constitution. I don't think you will find any that rail against having a standing military force. I think you will find several on both sides that say defense spending needs to have a better auditing process, and excess needs to be trimmed. We need to make sure that we aren't spending $500 for a hammer and $1,000 for a toilet, but nobody that I know of has ever argued against the armed forces or for privatizing them, at least not seriously.

 

Fire fighters and police are both under the local government, so there isn't an issue there regarding government as most of us that are for a weaker federal government argue that our local governments should be strengthened, or at least take on many of the issues that the federal government now does so poorly. Yes they police and fire fighters in many areas are unionized, but in many they are not. In any event, it isn't their union association or lack there of that makes them heroes, it is their actions. I will say that even though they are largely corrupt, I really don't have a problem with unions for police and firefighters, as they help with legal issues that arise out of doing their jobs. Now if we could get away with the scum sucking lawyers there would be no need for the unions in these fields.

[westvirginia]

We have so vilified government and unions, that we have lost sight of the fact that the greatest selfless heros of this century are government employees, and union members (that would be our soldiers at war, and the firemen of 9/11 should you have forgotten).

I realize this sounds dickish on my part. You obviously are deeply grateful to our soldiers and firemen. So I aplogize. But I am getting so annoyed at this new knee jerk reaction that is sweeping the nation that often without thinking slams anything other than strict individualism.

The new Me Generation is just as annoying and rotten as the old Me Generation

 

I get your point, but soldiers are in a different class altogether, IMO (and firemen/policemen to an extent). They are servants, pure and simple, not some surly clerk in the DMV. But you've been around long enough to know my military roots and feelings, as you acknowledged.

 

My point was more a poke at watertard and his idiotic unthinking little snarkisms.

[Dr. Sacrebleu]

Protecting the nation is part of the federal governments job as outlined in the constitution. I don't think you will find any that rail against having a standing military force.

Where these government workers came from is not the issue. The point is that they are government workers who do a great job.

Senators, congressmen, and Barack Obama (lady.hawke's claim non withstantding) also have unequivocally constitutionally mandated jobs. I am pretty sure I have heard you 'railing' against them. So you see it's not the constitutional vs non consititutional aspect that make govt employees good or bad employees (unless you think BHO and pelosi are doing a great job).

I just think it is wrong to paint government employees with such a large brush. There are many selfless, idealistic, and good people who do government work. I think the knee jerk reaction of ALL GUBMINT IS BAD GUBMINT is a real disservice to the American people

 

 

 

 

Fire fighters and police are both under the local government, so there isn't an issue there regarding government as most of us that are for a weaker federal government argue that our local governments should be strengthened, or at least take on many of the issues that the federal government now does so poorly. Yes they police and fire fighters in many areas are unionized, but in many they are not. In any event, it isn't their union association or lack there of that makes them heroes, it is their actions. I will say that even though they are largely corrupt, I really don't have a problem with unions for police and firefighters, as they help with legal issues that arise out of doing their jobs. Now if we could get away with the scum sucking lawyers there would be no need for the unions in these fields.

 

Once again, the point is that these are government employees. local vs federal is not the issue. Today people are villifiying the local government the same way they do the federal one. local vs federal control is a conversation for another day.

I am also going to go out on a limb here, but I am guessing that the amount of non-union firefighters on 9/11 was close to zero. Lastly, it is nice to try to blame the unionization of cops and firemen on lawsuits, but I can guarantee you that that is not the reason that cops and firemen want a union. They want to be unionized for EXACTLY the same reason other union members do. To try to explain away the unionization of these heroes is a bit silly ('i am sure they are anti-union at heart, they HAD to do it because of those darn lawyers' is kind of, excuse the expression, a cop-out)

[redrumjuice]

Should have had a Union FD.

 

Consider what happened in Memphis 32 years ago. On July 1, 1978, 1,400 union fire fighters walked off the job after rejecting the city’s offer of a 6 percent pay increase, leaving only 150 non-union personnel to assist supervisors. “Over the weekend of July 2 and 3, fires broke out around the city in far greater than normal numbers,” recounted professors Armand Thieblot and Thomas Haggard in their comprehensive book Union Violence: The Record and the Response, published by the Industrial Research Unit of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “On Saturday, the first day of the strike, 225 alarms of fire were reported, and on the following day, there were about 125.” Memphis mayor Wyeth Chandler told a local newspaper that the group of fires &l dquo;was one of the most unreal scenes I’ve ever seen. It was like a World War II newsreel.”

Observers of Obion County debated the issue of whether fire fighters should ever let a fire burn even if a citizen neglected his responsibility to pay a fee. But in the heat of the Memphis pay dispute, members of the fire-fighters union went beyond simply letting buildings burn. They actively obstructed rescue efforts and started at least some of the fires themselves.

 

Two striking fire fighters pleaded guilty to burning down a vacant apartment building, and the pattern of other fires looked suspicious. “A number of the fires broke out in the areas served by fire companies which were already engaged in fighting fires at other locations within their area of responsibility,” wrote Thieblot and Haggard. “Officials speculated that only persons with knowledge of the internal organization of the fire department could set fires in such a strategic pattern.”

 

Some of the strikers also “welcomed” their replacements — from volunteers to National Guardsmen — in unique ways. Tires were slashed on fire-department vehicles and ambulances. The ambulances also had their engines sabotaged and their medical equipment damaged. “At the central fire station, a small group of strikers broke into the building by smashing a glass door and then physically removed nonstriking firemen from the building, striking and injuring several in the process,” reported Thieblot and Haggard.

 

Similar damage and destruction occurred in the 1975 fire fighters’ strike in Kansas City, Mo. In The Municipal Doomsday Machine, his 1970s exposé of corruption in public-safety unions, journalist and National Review founding editor Ralph de Toledano vividly described a city paralyzed by union violence. According to his and other accounts, when fires hit — in suspiciously high numbers, as in Memphis — non-striking firefighters found fire extinguishers that had been filled with flammable liquid, oxygen tanks that had been emptied, and fuel tanks of fire trucks that had been fouled with water.

 

The 23-day Chicago fire fighters’ strike in 1980 was mostly free of the violence that plagued Memphis, Kansas City, and other places, but its duration made it much more deadly. On February 14, all but 400 of Chicago’s 4,300 fire fighters gave the Windy City a valentine by walking off the job. They formed picket lines in front of its 120 fire stations, shutting down more than half of them.

During the strike, “24 people died in incidents involving calls for help from the fire department,” the Chicago Tribune would recount 20 years later