Astral Codex Ten

Myanmar

4 min read

Myanmar

Article

Myanmar is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between January 29, 2021 and April 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “the NGOs on the ground in Myanmar”; “Burma(now Myanmar)”; “relevant to other places, from East Timor to various Myanmar would-be independence movements”. It most often appears alongside England, India, Scott.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: January 29, 2021
  • Last seen: April 06, 2022

Appears In

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.

Contra Weyl On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
In short, we are very far from discovering formalisms capable of capturing and quantifying most of the critical inputs to policy and systems design for a decent society. So much of what we still need lives in e.g. the low-income housing developments, the lived experiences of workers facing powerful corporations, the NGOs on the ground in Myanmar, and the community educational justice groups. To the extent that technocracy is a practice of insulating policy makers and system designers from the need to justify themselves in the language of, clearly explain their designs to and maintain open lines of communication from these highly informative channels, it leads to large-scale failures, corruption, crises and justified political backlash and outrage.
Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
June 10, 2021 · Original source
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:
Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination
April 06, 2022 · Original source
You missed one obvious aspect of the 'right' to "declare yourself to be independent", namely some version of fairness. Otherwise as soon as oil gets discovered, the oil-rich province decides it would rather secede than share the loot. This was, of course, a large part of the background in Biafra and the Second Sudanese Civil War, and versions of this seem (as far as I can tell) to be relevant to other places, from East Timor to various Myanmar would-be independence movements.