Burma
Article
Burma is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 10, 2021 and August 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Orwell served for five years an an imperial policeman in Burma(now Myanmar)”; ""…along the India/Burma border declared themselves…""; “There is a bird from the jungles of Burma”. It most often appears alongside India, Twitter, United States.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: June 10, 2021
- Last seen: August 17, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- India (2 shared issues)
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
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- United States (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 1984 (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
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- Aella (1 shared issues)
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- AI Alignment (1 shared issues)
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- AI Safety (1 shared issues)
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- Alexander the Great (1 shared issues)
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- Amad (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Orwell served for five years an an imperial policeman in Burma(now Myanmar), and so isn’t speaking from some vague antipathy towards asian customs here. He saw such sights everyday for years on end, and it’s no suprise that he would question their essential usefulness. But as brutal as the practice sounds, I find myself questioning his conclusion. Parts of India are punishingly hot, and many of the cities are large and spread out. It makes perfect sense to me that in a time before the wide spread use of cars, another cheap means of transportation would arise to meet the needs of the upper and middle class(because the rides are so cheap, they are not just a privilege of rulers)who want to avoid trudging miles across a large city in the middle of summer. To imply that rickshaws should be banned or phased out because they afford only “a small amount of convenience” strikes me as overreaching at best, and outright authoritarian at worst. But I find Orwell’s basic argument much more compelling when applied to his own situation:
3: In the 19th century, a group of Tibeto-Burman-speaking former headhunters along the India/Burma border declared themselves the descendants of Manasseh (one of the Ten Lost Tribes) and converted en masse to Judaism. In 2005, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel accepted their claim and expedited immigration paperwork for several thousand of them.
Inline links: declared themselves the descendants of Manasseh
“There is a bird from the jungles of Burma. Cut off its beak and claws, then keep it in a dark iron cage for its entire life, and eventually it will produce a curious round white stone. Break the stone and fry the golden liquid inside. Garnish with a black spice from Sri Lanka, and a ground-up pinkish rock mined from a cave discovered by Alexander the Great just below the tallest mountain in the world.”