Social Services run by basket cases

While checking the IOM Newspapers site (to see if anything about the Civil Partnership Bill had made it there yet) I found a sick joke I’d missed in January and will now share with you all.
Take a look at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/politics/Dealing-with-govt-departments-likened.6010556.jp , but not until you have a bucket to puke into.
For the benefit of off-island readers, or those who don’t track Manx evangelicals, Stanfield is pastor at Port St Mary’s Living Hope Church – better known as Living Hell for the damage it inflicts on the community. Living Hell started out as a Baptist church, and changed its name to avoid confusion with Broadway Baptists in Douglas, who are the Crips to Living Hell’s Bloods in the turf war that passes for evangelicalism on the island. It also linked to a US megachurch to get all the benefits of international spook franchising, but they don’t like to talk about that. Stanfield even used to boast that he once went to a prayer breakfast with George Bush, but I think he wants us to forget that too.
And look at this quote:
“Mr Stanfield said when it came to dealing with government departments, such as hiring schools, 'it is like dealing with Eastern Europe — the Soviet bloc. There is not the commercial thinking we could earn money from that building'.”
Funny thing that, because if you look carefully at any collapsing Eastern European country you’ll see Stanfield clones, usually with US accents and double figure IQs, collaborating with neo-fascist political groups, taking jobs from conscientious local teachers and care workers while closing schools, hospitals and orphanages, taking an increasing percentage of EU and other development grants under the pretence of opening their own sub-standard ‘facilities’ instead, and siphoning the loot back to huge US ‘religious foundations’ via complicated chains of churches and shady ‘faith charities’. As even Eastern European clerics have said to me, at least with Ceacescu and chums you dealt with total bastards who never pretended to be anything else.
But this ‘Third Sector’ scam is all part of the Balkanisation of the Isle of Man.
For as long as I’ve lived here we teetered on being an embarrassing third world adjunct to the rest of the British Isles. These days any developing African nation would also look at us with horror, and East Europeans laugh quite openly at the village idiots posing as cultural missionaries we send there because they’re too illiterate to be employable here.
For a handy way to judge the competence of institutions you could ask two questions.
Firstly, is the service provision worse than the State? Secondly, is the management and ethos more addled with superstition, tradition and nonsense in general than the Church? If the answer is’ Yes’ or even ‘Similar’ then the institution is unfit for purpose and responsible adults would avoid it like the plague.
The Third Sector, in practice, serves the same purpose as the Ocupational Therapy Unit in the Victorian era mental hospital I once worked in. Here the long term deluded were kept in a safe but secure environment and given baskets to weave for pin money, to keep them too busy with practical but useless tasks to dwell on their delusions and do harm to the general public.
So what we have then, to be blunt, is not a paramilitary wing of the Social Services (which, like the faithful’s Magic Invisible Friend, also don’t exist) but a basket case convention which hangs out in government broom cupboards.
It would be OK for Manx society if they just stayed there, chuntering to each other about their collective delusions and not bothering the real world. But the idea that we should pay them, allow them to hang out in public buildings or let them loose on our vulnerable relatives?
Now that is one very, very sick joke.