James Ramsden

Born in London, live in Liverpool, Newcastle United fan. Don’t ask how. He/Him

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@Old_Hellequin @Finumus1 As Hemingway once said about bankruptcy, the collapse of the climate/UK water system is very much “gradual, then all at once”.

This is, on both counts, the result of utter imprudence, the failure to expend resources wisely (ie at all).

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@Old_Hellequin @Finumus1 Agree that not enough reservoirs have been built in the last 30 years, but the point is also that we’d never have needed any infrastructure at all to irrigate recreational green space were it not for climate change. Both things can be true at once

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@lukas_ohl To have a housing crisis is to have house prices be too high. Therefore, solving the housing crisis is logically identical to declining house prices.

What has yet to be reckoned with is: any future solution to the crisis will *logically require* today’s homeowners to take a hit

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@holisticbaddie If you care about child slavery or exploitation, even the tiniest little bit, you should boycott natural diamonds and go with lab-grown instead.

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@holisticbaddie There is no way to ensure a natural diamond has had no child labor involved in its production, either. Much like coffee/cocoa, the supply chains are too long and unregulated to ever know for sure. Lab-grown diamonds, on the other hand, are manufactured, so there’s a paper trail.

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@notayesmansecon @GrahamBlackshaw Not as much as relying on LNG has

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@Sc_Meerkat @kfvalues @BBCPanorama That doesn’t happen unless something has gone very wrong in the parent/school relationship (something that has to work if we want to educate any population of children). This is a failure so bad that it destroyed the Trust; you’re defending an instance of organisational suicide.

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@Sc_Meerkat @kfvalues @BBCPanorama The sheer volume of complaints is what I suspect you're failing to account for. There are enough complaints about this Trust to force its dissolution, enough to overturn consent for its existence as an entity. That’s not just a few worrywarts, the outrage literally overwhelmed it

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@Sc_Meerkat @kfvalues @BBCPanorama Mate, are you deliberately misunderstanding the point? Firstly, if you request time flexibility at work, your employer does now legally have to consider that request, but also, you said it yourself; the relationship is chosen. Therefore, kids need to learn to make those choices!

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@kfvalues @Sc_Meerkat @BBCPanorama The contradiction in their worldview is that one can’t raise a child to become a “good person” unless and until one can accept that said child is in principle a “person”. Personhood is a form of liberty, something they do not want children to have, so they fail before they begin.

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@kfvalues @Sc_Meerkat @BBCPanorama Yes, as the goal is to raise people who make good choices. But making any choice at all supposes that one is at liberty to do so, and affording children genuine liberties is what people like this guy are scared of. Refusing children their liberties is the fundamental problem here

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@Sc_Meerkat @kfvalues @BBCPanorama And that’s because in adult life, the consequences of breaking a rule are rarely “consistent”. The world doesn’t work that way.

A moral life requires freely choosing your behaviour. The task is to get kids to consistently make good choices, not to consistently enforce our own

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@Sc_Meerkat @kfvalues @BBCPanorama I don't disagree with that, but that isn’t all they need. Consistent beatings, for instance, wouldn’t be a good method of discipline. Consistency is necessary but not sufficient.

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@Sc_Meerkat @kfvalues @BBCPanorama As an adult in a democracy, it’s rarely the case that “the rules” governing your behaviour cannot be challenged, in fact by default they can be. Why flip that script for children? Why never show them that they can challenge authority and win? Doesn’t that hurt them?

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@Sc_Meerkat @kfvalues @BBCPanorama But the point we’re making is that the “rules” one comes across in adult life are rarely the sort of immutable absolutes that you never consent to that you usually get in school. If your employer institutes a rule that you think is unfair, you have the legal right to challenge it

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@Sc_Meerkat @kfvalues @BBCPanorama I didn’t say that. But in this case it’s pretty clear that they went too far; we’ve got loads of complaints from parents, a pupil saying she cried every night, and a teacher that they enforced silent focus in *music* lessons. All of that indicates an unacceptable carelessness

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@kfvalues @Sc_Meerkat @BBCPanorama This results from a dysfunctional politics, a politics without real change. Education is for reproducing society, but we have no compelling articulation of our collective future, the society we want to see. Of course it has become a nasty, the fundamental question is almost taboo

[James Ramsden @JamRam96]

@kfvalues @Sc_Meerkat @BBCPanorama This persons account of child rearing contains no informed notion of “development”. His worldview is that to raise a child is to carve into a blank slate, rather than to shepherd a living being. The realities of working with lots of kids will often disaffect one of such a view.