Quotulatiousness

January 6, 2021

The Use and Abuse of the US Postal System (feat. Mr. Beat)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Cynical Historian
Published 10 Oct 2020

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We’ve been seeing a lot of coverage about the post office here in the United States. A lot of folks talk about the history of it, but generally in a piecemeal fashion. The fact most of this commentary lacks is that the post office has always been a political tool, from its beginnings even before the US Constitution. Interestingly enough, what it has been used for over the years has changed substantially, but it is always a harbinger of the up and coming dominant ideology. The post office is a cornerstone of our democracy. The postal system in the United States is uniquely important.

Check out Mr. Beat’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=favVdKa6cRQ
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references:
The United States Postal Service: An American History (Washington, DC: United States Postal Service, 2020). https://about.usps.com/publications/p… [PDF]

USPS’s website has a trove of information on their history: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/pos…
The national postal museum is run by the Smithsonian and includes numerous research articles available to anyone on their website: https://postalmuseum.si.edu/research-…

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/hi…

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Wiki: The United States Postal Service (USPS; also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or Postal Service) is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the United States, including its insular areas and associated states. It is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution.

The USPS traces its roots to 1775 during the Second Continental Congress, when Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general. The Post Office Department was created in 1792 with the passage of the Postal Service Act. It was elevated to a cabinet-level department in 1872, and was transformed by the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 into the United States Postal Service as an independent agency. Since the early 1980s, many direct tax subsidies to the USPS (with the exception of subsidies for costs associated with disabled and overseas voters) have been reduced or eliminated.
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Hashtags: #history #USPS #USMail

QotD: George Bernard Shaw’s views on eugenics

Filed under: Britain, Education, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the most articulate eugenicists of the era was a man who survived until 1950, and remains one of the world’s most famous and respected dramatists. George Bernard Shaw, literary giant, author of more than sixty plays, and winner of the Nobel Prize.

The Irishman’s opinions are, however, coming back to mangle and even smash his reputation. A group of students at RADA have called for Shaw’s name to be removed from the drama school’s theatre as part of an anti-racism action plan. This matters, because Shaw provided for the school in his will, and last year the royalties from his work contributed more than £78,000 to RADA. Yet the accusation that the renowned theatre college “celebrates historical figures who embraced racist ideologies” does have a certain merit. Problem is, as has been debated myriad times: do, can, and should we separate an artist’s work from their period, character and ideas? If the ghosts of anachronism and historical assumptions are never to be exorcised, there are an awful lot of people who will fail and fall to the wide-awake litmus test.

Shaw did indeed write, that, “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man” and, chillingly, “A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.” He lectured for the Eugenic Education Society, praised Stalin (naturally) the early Mussolini, and even Hitler as late as 1935. He abandoned most of all this in his old age but never made any formal apology.

He was also an incisive critic of imperialism, mercilessly exposed establishment hypocrisy, opposed war and oppression throughout his career, and cared passionately about actors and writers – the very people at RADA trying to expunge his name from their place of learning. And here’s another challenge and even embarrassment for those who would remove the social engineers from the litany of the great and the good: many of their harshest opponents were not others on the left but, in Edwardian Britain and in the 20s and 30s, conservative Roman Catholic writers led by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

Michael Coren, “Eugenics and the intellectual left”, The Critic, 2020-09-16.

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