Don't Feed the Humans!!

[Scooter]

Once again, this was a case where you initially misread the situation and are unwilling to admit it. Not interested in chasing down this rabbit hole any further.

[Big RR]

rubato--do you give the same deference to the ridiculous regulations states and municipalities sometimes impose on abortion clinics (staff must have admitting privileges to closest hospitals, abortions can only be performed in hospitals (or surgical centers) and not in offices etc.) designed to close them, not protect the public? I see this as much of the same.

I understand you do not like Food not Bombs, but if anyone is feeding the people who don't have enough to eat, I'll defend them, whatever their alterior motives.

[Lord Jim]

Once again, this was a case where you initially misread the situation and are unwilling to admit it.

"Food Not Bombs" have been active locally for a very long time using this kind of tactic to attempt to appear morally superior without actually accomplishing anything

Rube is spot on about that...

Food Not Bombs has done no good at all; the people they appear to be feeding are all actually professional actors just pretending to be fed...

If the city wanted them to get a $50 or $100 permit that would bring them under an inspection regimen to ensure the safety of the food they were distributing, that would be fine. But requiring them to buy insurance that no carrier is going to give them except for an exorbitant price, simply because they would view the "clientele" and neighbourhoods being served as "risky", is nothing but a sideways method of banning people from giving away food.

This.

So neither of you grasp the idea that the protections of the law should apply equally to charity as well as paying customers? The parallel is direct.

While I can cook up a hearty and tasty pot of soup or stew and ladle it out to people without anyone consuming it getting sick, you probably wouldn't want me performing major surgery on you...

(Unless of course your only other choice for a surgeon was rube; at least I have a sufficient knowledge of human anatomy to know the difference between the testicles and the penis...)

[BoSoxGal]

No offense intended to Guin or BSG; I believe they are more ethical than this.

-"BB"-

It's actually Sue you should apologize to, as she's our resident personal injury attorney. I will wholeheartedly endorse in advance any excellent defense of plaintiff tort attorneys she may offer; consumers are basically cannon fodder in the minds of corporate shills and if not for tort law, they would maim & kill us with impunity in pursuit of the almighty dollar.

[rubato]

Food not Bombs are a group of feckless, confused, pseudo-liberals who have been running this same scam for > 30 years. And they gotcha. They are not bad people just silly and stupid.

If their actual goal was to distribute food they could easily do so without interference by any variety of means, including doing so on private property. The fact that they don't use methods which they know will be successful in meeting that goal proves that their real motives are other. Their desire was not to distribute food (which generates no income or ego-satisfying publicity) but to provoke a confrontation and so they got what they actually wanted. They wanted a confrontation so that they would get publicity and use it to recruit and fundraise. The tactic is very old-school and dates back to the Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman days and you can find it described in "The Student as Nigger" by Jerry Farber. You find a way to provoke "the man" to respond in a heavy handed way to gain moral superiority and publicity. It can be a good tactic when it is done honestly and morally but here neither is true.

You suckas. You fell for a very old and very cheap tactic.

They distribute food locally two days a week in the most visible spot they can find. Do they not know that people need to eat seven days a week, after being here for 28 years? Do they not know that the local post office (where they distribute food) is not close to where most of the homeless actually live? Supporting FnB is a waste of money. They do nothing to reduce or eliminate the problem and, in fact, depend on the problem never being solved to justify their own existence.

You suckas.

Or prove me wrong and send them $1,000. Suckas.

yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

[BoSoxGal]

Broken link, LJ.

[Lord Jim]

I can see it...

[rubato]

rubato--do you give the same deference to the ridiculous regulations states and municipalities sometimes impose on abortion clinics (staff must have admitting privileges to closest hospitals, abortions can only be performed in hospitals (or surgical centers) and not in offices etc.) designed to close them, not protect the public? I see this as much of the same.

I understand you do not like Food not Bombs, but if anyone is feeding the people who don't have enough to eat, I'll defend them, whatever their alterior motives.

Not an apt analogy.

You have failed to show that regulations requiring people who distribute food to the general public to do so in inspected and hygenic circumstances or requiring them to have some insurance is unreasonable.

It is more like requiring doctors who perform abortions to be licensed and trained.

A better one is that they are acting like the pregnancy crisis centers set up to dishonestly propagandize women not to get abortions or phony charities which do very little of their programmed activities and exist to perpetually fundraise and provide for the group leaderships need for material and emotional support.


yrs,
rubato

[BoSoxGal]

I can see it...

Yes because it's in the cache of your browser - what the image shows up as for us is a wagging finger with a note saying it's okay to use our image, but don't hotlink to our page, save it on your own.

Honest!

[RayThom]

[Lord Jim]

Okay, that's what I posted...

(It kind of loses something not being seen right after rubato's post...)

[Big RR]

rubato--do you give the same deference to the ridiculous regulations states and municipalities sometimes impose on abortion clinics (staff must have admitting privileges to closest hospitals, abortions can only be performed in hospitals (or surgical centers) and not in offices etc.) designed to close them, not protect the public? I see this as much of the same.

I understand you do not like Food not Bombs, but if anyone is feeding the people who don't have enough to eat, I'll defend them, whatever their alterior motives.

Not an apt analogy.

You have failed to show that regulations requiring people who distribute food to the general public to do so in inspected and hygenic circumstances or requiring them to have some insurance is unreasonable.

It is more like requiring doctors who perform abortions to be licensed and trained.

A better one is that they are acting like the pregnancy crisis centers set up to dishonestly propagandize women not to get abortions or phony charities which do very little of their programmed activities and exist to perpetually fundraise and provide for the group leaderships need for material and emotional support.


yrs,
rubato

No, it's more like putting unreasonable insurance demands on abortion clinics designed to close them, while allowing other medical offices to insure or not at their option.

[Big RR]

Jim--re food not Bombs--face it, the only way the hungry can be fed is through governmental action; individuals and charities can try as much as they want, but this is a fundamental problem that must be addressed by a society as a whole. If Food not Bombs is courting the spotlight, perhaps they are doing so to demonstrate the problem to the public at large--a problem the local government would rather just sweep under the rug.

[Jarlaxle]

Doesn't matter..rube HAS SPOKEN, and therefore, what he posts MUST BE THE TRUTH, anything contrary must be HERESY!

[Scooter]

There are HUNDREDS of FNB chapters throughout the United States. In 35 years, FNB volunteers have been arrested for distributing food in exactly four cities. If there was a master plan to use food distribution as a means to incite confrontation with the authorities, it has failed spectacularly.

FNB has never claimed that it was going to eliminate world hunger, so it found one thing that could be locally driven and managed, without the need to build any kind of organizational bureaucracy: collect donations of unsold food and make soup/salad/bread meals to distribute. Yes they have broader policy goals and have never shied away from forcing confrontations with government to bring attention to them. FNB volunteers have been arrested far more often for reasons unrelated to food distribution, surely if food distribution was conceived as a means to provoke confrontation, they could have found a way for it to get them arrested more often.

Yes, they operate only two days a week, because that is what can be achieved on donated food with a few volunteers. It is two more meals added to the mix of resources available to homeless people. If you know a way to get enough food and enough labour to provide meals seven days a week, for no money, then you should let the world in on the secret because no one else has figured it out yet.

Yes, they choose very visible locations because more people passing by and seeing them there means more people who know they are there. And I don't know where your knowledge of the geography of Tampa comes from, but Lykes Gaslight Square Park, which is populated with homeless people day and night, as is N. Franklin Street on which it sits.

You keep thrown out the food safety red herring, when in fact the permit required is a facility use permit, which has no provision for food inspection.

The insurance requirement is bogus, because the federal Good Samaritan Act says that neither the donor nor the donee of donated food can be held liable for it, except for gross negligence or intentional misconduct, which insurance wouldn't cover anyway.

Bottom line, section 1643 (c), under which the volunteers were charged, addresses commercial activity, and the bit about needing a permit to "provide for the distribution or sampling of any materials, merchandise, food, and/or beverages to the general public" needs to be read in that context.

The mayor of Tampa is pretty clear that he doesn't want them in the park anymore, permit be damned. It is an "incompatible" use of the space and becoming more "intrusive" with time. It is "destroying the neighbourhood".

Seriously, a few dozen homeless people (FNB says 35-40, the police say 60-70) who gather in the park twice a week to pick up a meal are "destroying the neighbourhood"? Where does he imagine they are coming from? Not the 50 or more years of blight as the city's commercial core was hollowed out. Someone has cause and effect mixed up.

Does that sound like someone who gives a rat's ass about ensuring the safety of the food given to homeless people?

And I'm sure that timing the arrests in the week before the college football championship was a coincidence.