h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.guardian.co.uk/firefighters/story/0,,2183057,00.html

A group of firemen in Bristol have been demoted and fined for disrupting illegal activity. How on Earth is this fair?

B/c the firemen don't have a mandate to be police officiers?

perhaps a tad excessive (I only have that story to go on) but certainly not unfair. They were in fire service equipment, using fire service time for their own personal reasons.

They were done for "being accused of bringing the service into disrepute and misuse of fire equipment." which, if the overtones of homophobia are accurate (and we can't know that from the article) is true on both counts.

They shouldn't have done what they did, they got caught, they got punished. Seems fair to me.

And if your house had burnt to the ground because the only available fire tender was out on a jolly?

Fair do's then. No debate here, we've got it all sown up!

d**n! And I was just looking forward to a good argument!

we could argue about the spelling of 'sown' if you want

I know, I know, it's sewn...

Maybe you meant we'd scattered the arguments uniformly across a tilled field?

And then conclusions would grow, ready for harvesting? What a nice metaphor.

As a member of the PC brigade and by the powers invested in me by Brussels (or the loony left, take your pick) I herby rectify the title of this thread.

more like Firefighter's find

However, they *were* all men

What sort of worthless scum have sex in a public place and then complain when caught? PUBLIC place, people.

What sort of people complain, not to the police (who would, one hopes, have arrested them for admitted illegal activity), but to a frickin AIDS charity?

Plus, story says it happened at 10:30pm on June 27th. That close to the solstice, it's light enough to read a book at that time of night. So here we have some people having sex in public, in reasonable *daylight*, and when a member of the emergency services shines a torch on them, THEY are the ones disciplined? I mean, wtf?

WHY haven't the complainants been arrested and charged? Presumably the AIDS charity passed on their details to the police...? Yeah right.

SoRB

Unless the person that reported what the firefighters were doing also told the THT that he was indeed one of the people having sex in public what cause would they have to pass his details onto any authority?

I'm all for the people have sex in public being arrested, etc. - but how , SoRB, does that exonerate the the fire-people?

Yeah, the issue isn't that someone got caught having sex outside, it's that the firefighters used their job to practice homophobia.

It's homophobic to interupt someone committing a crime ?

The firefighters didn't go a for a joyride in their appliance to spot known to frequented by straight folk did they?