National Trust AGM

[PRAMtran]

I’ve received an email from the National Trust inviting me and all other members to vote in their AGM. Does anyone know if there are any things a woman’s rights advocate should vote for or against. Eg TWAW by stealth.

We've been accused of "rejecting black history" -and yet above I named several authors, novels, and other examples of having been taught, and taught myself, literature that deals with the black experience - over many years - including slavery.

I still really want to know about the UK garden which was 90% (iirc) planted with species that allegedly hail from sugar plantations. How are they keeping these plans alive?

I'm never going to go near a National Trust stately home, cos I is too fick to take an interest in history, but I do have a laywoman's interest in botany and entomology. Since this thread started, I've recollected that I routinely drag the protesting kids onto National Trust woodland, in order to force them to stare blankly at trees, while they endure my lectures on how many species of insect a mature Quercus might support.

Ignore that, the land I take them on to is Woodland Trust land. My pleb credentials are intact. Possibly not as intact as they would be if I was a genuine teen mum, but honestly, I'm glad I got though school without a teen pregnancy. I always thought life looked shit for my female peers who had to handle that.

You do not recall correctly.

Excellent. Educate me then. You've got a pleb here with no degree, who went to a school with a very high teen pregnancy rate. Awe me with your wisdom. It can't be that hard, surely.

Which garden is it? What proportion of plants do hail from a sugar plantation? They will have a website, so I can do the rest of the work from there, and learn all about these plants.

No no, Potholes. We are middle clarrrsss!".

Just let me quickly stand in front of my flatscreen TV...

Have I ever told you the story of how I asked my midwife a question, and in the middle of her explanation she stopped to say, "do you know what viable means?"

That's how I realised you should not attend any antenatal appointment in adidas tracksuit bottoms, unless you enjoyed being treated as if you were on the same cognitive level as a mushroom.

Adidas? I think this is something my hypothetical grandchildren might wear.

Oh good, you’re back.

Perhaps you could address the historical accuracy of cotton tapestries while you’re here?

I honestly don't know why MNHQ allow it, TAAT are usually always deleted outside of site stuff.

This has been going on for months though with a certain group of posters, although tbf I haven't seen this thread's double act doing it before. Usually it's confined to the long thread in BMN so it goes under the radar more, and of course many of us do not feel that's a topic we can post on. I reported a few a couple of months back and there was a bit of a kerfuffle 😬

A bit coming from someone who cannot spell their own username.

This is typical of where this type of thinking goes. Along with comments suggesting posters are somehow "against narratives about slavery."

I always wonder whether people who take this approach really believe there is only one way to think about how to do history, and all the white people (or at least the bad ones) are against it, while all the black and other non-white people, along with the good whites, are in agreement with that approach.

Which is clearly counter-factual, you will find people of all races that agree with the identarian approach, and people of all races who oppose it and prefer another approach to historical study (literature, politics, and so on.)

So these individuals either are actually naive enough to believe that all black people think alike, (and lacking the self-reflection to see how reductive that is of black people;) or they do know that they don't all hold the same view, but somehow are of the view that the wrong thinking ones don't count (if you don't vote for me, you ain't really black.)

I'm sure some of it comes down to the bad habit among many progressives of always trying to paint people who disagree about anything remotely political as being bigots of some stripe, but there is something really distasteful to me about this tendency to box in views with race like this. Maybe because it results in public figures like KB or many others we could think of being called some pretty nasty names if they don't toe the approved lines. But it's really no better to accuse white people of bigotry because they don't accept queer theory and American identarianism, in its own way its just as cruel. It's all clearly intended to shut people up.

@MyLadyDisdainlsYetLiving

Why are people obsessing over this?

Voila: www.1stdibs.com/en-gb/furniture/wall-decorations/tapestry/17th-century-antique-tapestry-79-x-32/id-f_35471622/

This one is 17thC, wool and cotton.

Not my field but it may well be the warp that's cotton and the weft that's wool. Wool was traditional and the weft is what is seen so, that is wool. Cotton bears tension better than the wool so makes sense to use it for the warp.

If it possible to have a career that encompasses more than one phase and role you know.

And heritage requires marketing, plus have you not noticed there’s quite a bit of history in the media - on the telly and in books, and often those books can relate to exhibitions?

I’ll take your attempt to rummage through my post history as a sign you’ve exhausted any actual argument.

I just imagine you wouldn't be particularly good at marketing because you strike me quite self absorbed and fond of your own opinions, and the rummaging in your post history was another poster, not me. I'm not interested in arguing with you as you don't understand why people you disagree with think differently to you. Again you project your bias onto various people without really having any clue who said what.

But consider it a "win" if you like, dear

I followed the link it says nothing about the fabric contents in the description.

@PRAMtran

It does, click on continue reading and scroll down

I wonder if I "older"? Maybe, there's a thought.

I'm not, however, poorly educated, and I don't really fit well into any of the modern political categories so not really a conservative as such, and generally people consider me to be a quite good analytical thinker and I typically score very high on openness.

It's true I don't think intersectionalism comes out of a particularly robust set of ideas, in fact I think most of it is pretty shit ideologically, as well as politically ineffective from a pragmatic standpoint. But as a criticism, "against intersectionalism" is about equivalent to saying "heretic."

Goodness, let's parse this.

'These people': hellooooo, we're here! Talking about 'these people' is generally thought v rude.
'They claim to be feminists': yep, we are. We just don't sign up to PoMo BS.
'seem borderline racist': You have no bloody idea of my background, relations, friends.
'I’m sure their grandkids would be proud of them if they discovered this' <looks around> <prods DD> Nope, none as yet.
'They seem to rejectors of intersectionality,': Oooh, you got that bit right (but you missed out a verb).
'small ‘c’ conservatives,': Oh noes! I mean, I can't speak for everyone on the thread, but I am about some things and not at all about others.
'not especially well educated,': <reviews academic record> Could you explain what counts as 'well educated' by your lights and I'll let you know if I measure up?
'not analytical thinkers': <reviews that academic record again> Nah, I have some pretty high-level analysis to my name.
'perhaps older.': Oh noes! Again.

This post of yours is very rude, very patronising and very arrogant. It's not often I address other posters in such terms and this will probably earn me a deletion as a personal attack, but I don't take kindly to being called a racist. A chunk of my family had the shit kicked out of them for being the wrong 'race' in the wrong place at the wrong time, up to and including being killed. The impact on my own life has been hard to measure, but it has hugely influenced how I think.

So, please, review your smug assumptions about other people and maybe consider being a trifle more open-minded in the future.

Sorry to disappoint you but it won’t be slave produced cotton at that date. The big cotton boom didn’t occur until after Whitney developed mechanical methods of removing cotton seeds in 1793 that cotton plantations took off. Prior to that slave labour was used to produce sugar and tobacco.
Normally I wouldn’t take the trouble to criticize like this but I don’t think your ill informed post could go unchallenged.

The desired effect is to leave people with an accurate understanding of the history of the house. Not all will read or care, of course, but for those that do they will have a more accurate picture.

Godess Do you think if owners or family members of these properties, such as Lord ‘Turnip’ Townshend or Coke of Holkham whose innovations and improvements did so much for agriculture, should have their achievements written up as part of the properties’ history?
Or should the NT concentrate on the undesirable methods of wealth creation?

You were the poster that first brought up slavery in this thread when the original poster asked a question on another topic entirely. You’ve beaten us all round the head and complained on another thread about what a bunch of racists we are. And yet for a self defined expert you’ve made some factually dodgy statements that call into question your credibility. Did you ever name the NT garden/greenhouse with the plants from the owners sugar plantation?

anyway, to the tapestry point. You’ve linked to an American auction listing of a single tapestry of unknown provenance from 1700 that claims the materials of that tapestry are wool and cotton. Maybe that is correct. However it does not prove your claim at all that tapestries in NT properties all have a provenance linked to slavery. If we’re playing website ping pong, I would recommend this page as an excellent example of describing the context of an object. https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/history-solebay-tapestry And one of the linked resources is at https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/what-is-a-tapestry which clearly states that the warp in 17th century European tapestries was wool, and the weft was wool, silk and occasionally precious metals. I think I will take the word of the Royal Museums Greenwich.

@Barbadossunset
you will find many slave traders were philanthropists. you will also find balance in how they are presented by the NT. The suggestion that the NT has inserted the bad and removed the good is purely invented.

You were the poster that first brought up slavery in this thread when the original poster asked a question on another topic entirely.

Yes.

Then the people who had decided the thread was about slavery moaned about the "distraction" of people talking about queer theory, when that was the topic of the OP!

*Ereshkigalangcleg · Today 21:04

Then the people who had decided the thread was about slavery moaned about the "distraction" of people talking about queer theory, when that was the topic of the OP!*

youve put distraction in quotation marks. Are you going to provide the actual quote where someone used that word? Scroll back and you will find that I was complaining of the continuous association of the pro NT argument with non-gc arguments