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Binoy Kampmark - Latest News [Page 1]
Lethal Visits: Volcano Tourism and the White Island Eruption
Tuesday, 10 December 2019, 3:13 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It might have come across as written by a killjoy, but geographer Amy Donovan’s observations on “volcano tourism” in Geo , published by the Royal Geographical Society in 2018, remain timely. Be wary, her study suggests, of this particular brand ... More >>
Paranoias of Interference: Russia, Reddit & the UK Election
Monday, 9 December 2019, 4:39 pm | Binoy Kampmark
In some ways, it is a very British thing: fair play is expected; the reasonable person with all faculties intact, going about the business of living and voting. Little thought is given to the fact that these assumptions are as much constructions, façades ... More >>
A Troubled Family: NATO turns 70
Sunday, 8 December 2019, 10:52 am | Binoy Kampmark
Summit anniversaries are not usually this abysmally interesting. While those paying visits to Watford, England on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation are supposedly signatories to the same agreement, a ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: Myanmar, Genocide and Aung San Suu Kyi
Wednesday, 4 December 2019, 2:03 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Leaders currently in office rarely make an appearance before either the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court. International law remains affixed to the notion that heads-of-state are, at least for the duration of their time in ... More >>
Julian Assange in Videoconference
Monday, 2 December 2019, 4:55 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Judge José de la Mata of Spain’s High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, had been facing a good deal of stonewalling on the part of his British colleagues. He is overseeing an investigation into the surveillance activities of a Spanish security firm aimed ... More >>
Legitimised Surveillance: Kim Dotcom’s case against GCSB
Sunday, 1 December 2019, 3:16 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Surveillance activities and the law are often at loggerheads. The former specialises in destroying privacy; the latter, in so far as it might be adequate, sometimes furnishes a means of preserving it. When it comes to exposing overly-eager surveillance activity, ... More >>
The Liveris Formula: Dow’s Inclusive Capitalism
Friday, 29 November 2019, 3:53 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Parasites have a certain weight in history. Donors to a system, a state, a company, always claim to be giving back what they advertise as their hard earned cash. Andrew N. Liveris is one such character. Former CEO of the Dow Chemical corporation, he ... More >>
Borat versus Social Media
Wednesday, 27 November 2019, 2:59 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Having made a name for himself causing cringing controversy, forging alter egos with the ease of a spam producer, Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G, Borat, Bruno) has taken a plunge into waters swum by every indignant activist, commentator and show pony worth ... More >>
Popes Against Nuclear Weapons
Monday, 25 November 2019, 4:22 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Vatican comes with its ills, contradictions and blatant hypocrisies in the field of moral theology and human existence, but on the issue of atomic and nuclear weapons, the position has been fairly consistent, if marked by gradual evolution. On February ... More >>
Through the Yellow Looking Glass: Australia’s China Wars
Friday, 22 November 2019, 1:44 pm | Binoy Kampmark
This year, China as Intimidating Monster has become the popular motif in Canberra circles. Australian government members Andrew Hastie and Senator James Paterson have become vigorous moral, if hollow enthusiasts. Their criticism of China has led to ... More >>
Dropped Investigations: Julian Assange, Sex and Sweden
Wednesday, 20 November 2019, 3:38 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Sex, the late Gore Vidal astutely observed, is politics, and not merely from the vantage point of those who wish to police it. In the case of whistleblowers, claims of aberrant, unlawful sex serves the purpose of diminishing credibility, tarring ... More >>
Letting the Side Down: Prince Andrew
Monday, 18 November 2019, 6:52 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The choking cloud of Jeffrey Epstein’s paedophilic legacy has been floating over the Atlantic for some time. It does its best (or worst) in matters of US and British celebrity, warts and all. It has not, for instance, exempted the British Royal Family, ... More >>
The Foreign Interference Problem in Australian Universities
Monday, 18 November 2019, 9:09 am | Binoy Kampmark
Education has always been a political matter, whatever the apolitical advocates of it think it is. In Australia, it has proven sectarian, ideological, and skewed, often on the issue of funding. At the schooling level, private institutions receive ... More >>
Business as Usual: Evo Morales and the Coup Condition
Friday, 15 November 2019, 9:09 am | Binoy Kampmark
There is an inherent bestiality in the politics of the Americas that signals coup, assassination and disruption. No state is ever allowed to go through what is weakly called a transition, except over corpses, tortures and morgues. When a social experiment ... More >>
Incinerating Logic: Bush Fires and Climate Change
Tuesday, 12 November 2019, 7:20 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Despite the Internet, connectivity, and linking technologies, distance has not shrunk the Australian sense of self, an often provincial appraisal of the world seen in slow motion and stills. Whether it’s the “flower revolution” or Michel Foucault, ... More >>
Russian Connections in Albion: The ISC Report
Tuesday, 12 November 2019, 9:07 am | Binoy Kampmark
The UK election campaign has kicked off, and merrily confused are the major candidates. The chaotic scene was made a touch more interesting with the refusal on the part of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to clear the release of a report by the intelligence ... More >>
Walls in the Head: Ostalgia and the Berlin Wall
Sunday, 10 November 2019, 3:40 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Walls have always served a dual purpose: they keep people in, and others out. The mentality of the wall is one of imprisonment and exclusion. Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we see such infrastructure, both symbolically and in actuality, ... More >>
Charter for Conservatism: The ALP Campaign Review
Saturday, 9 November 2019, 3:51 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Reports on electoral strategies are often written in order to be avoided. They are scripted for the express purpose of gathering dust on shelves, or decaying in digital files rarely to be consulted except by historians. But the review of the reasons ... More >>
Corporate Mammon: Amazon and the Seattle Council Elections
Friday, 8 November 2019, 3:16 pm | Binoy Kampmark
An enduring US political tradition was in evidence in Seattle recently. Amazon had decided that the city council elections would be too important to leave alone. Seattle was their city after all. The aim of the company was much in keeping with the manor ... More >>
Curfew Panda
Thursday, 7 November 2019, 4:12 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It seems a tall, ambitious and very authoritarian order: imposing bans on persons under the age of 18 from playing online games between 22:00 and 08:00; rationing gaming on weekdays to 90 minutes and three hours on holidays and weekends. This is ... More >>
