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Binoy Kampmark
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Binoy Kampmark - Latest News [Page 119]
The Kiss of Death: Being Morbid on the Party Strip
Tuesday, 29 January 2013, 11:29 am | Binoy Kampmark
Death for dinner and death for afters. Nightclubs and venues of evening entertainment with poor safety policies, aided by authorities indifferent to the welfare of pleasure seekers are the weeds of entertainment. The body count from such negligence keeps ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: Extending The Hobbit
Friday, 25 January 2013, 8:58 am | Binoy Kampmark
No film should be longer than 90 minutes unless it has Papal dispensation. Roger Corman More >>
Must be Indian: Human Settlement in Australia
Friday, 18 January 2013, 9:21 am | Binoy Kampmark
Race, ethnicity and origins are always up for political grabs. No one really wants to know that they were preceded by someone else, that they were not the first ones there. This is the Adam complex, and no culture is immune from it. More >>
Off the Stage: Depardieu, Putin and the Tax Man
Wednesday, 16 January 2013, 11:20 am | Binoy Kampmark
What will a man do to avoid tax? Become Russian for one, or the cultural ambassador for Montenegro, the prelude to obtaining another means of escaping the homeland’s rapacious tax regime. France’s Gérard Depardieu, having failed to teleport himself ... More >>
The Climate Change Imbroglio
Monday, 14 January 2013, 9:12 am | Binoy Kampmark
Australia is burning, China is freezing, Pakistan received an unexpected flooding in September, and Britain witnessed a see-saw weather pattern for 2012 that had drought and flood rolled into one mean package. That assortment of weather patterns is getting ... More >>
The Leveson Mandate: Regulating the Press
Monday, 3 December 2012, 9:16 am | Binoy Kampmark
The Leveson Mandate: Regulating the Press Too many stories in too many newspapers were the subject of complaints from too many people, with too little in the way of titles taking responsibility or considering the consequences for the individuals ... More >>
Weariness Foretold: The EU Budget Summit
Friday, 23 November 2012, 4:59 pm | Binoy Kampmark
There were always going to be disagreements about next year’s EU budget, which started in the evening instead of a sensible morning hour, and occupied officials into the early morning. Various MEPs pitched for an increase in spending for this ... More >>
The Wiener Directive: Banning Nudity in San Francisco
Wednesday, 21 November 2012, 4:48 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The law might be an ass, but its parents tend to be unwise law makers. A nice, even depressing example of this is the attempt by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors to make it illegal for anyone over five (why not six, seven or eight?) to “expose ... More >>
Operation Pillar of Defence: Death via Social Media
Tuesday, 20 November 2012, 5:13 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Social media has become a fixation for those dying the slow lonely life in suburbia to residents of frenetic inner metropolises. It galvanises political movements and enables groups to challenge mummified structures of power. But what is often forgotten ... More >>
Filtering the Net: Conroy’s Fantasy of Control
Tuesday, 20 November 2012, 11:52 am | Binoy Kampmark
Regulation is second nature to Australia’s paternal puritans, who feel that citizens are mere infants in swaddling clothes terrified of the world beyond. The arrival of the Internet must have suitably terrified many of them, and one such figure has ... More >>
In Bed with the CIA: The Resignation of Petraeus
Tuesday, 13 November 2012, 5:18 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Another affair, another moral paroxysm. Not that we should be concerned about extra renditions, torture, and subversive tactics – the CIA’s Director can resign, not because of a vicious policy, but because of a considerable lack of bed room judgment ... More >>
The Hollow Victory: Obama and the Triumph of Small Margins
Friday, 9 November 2012, 5:02 pm | Binoy Kampmark
‘No way Mittiepoo!’ ‘Mitt Romney is checking the math. That’s why its taking so long.’ The hubris, the excitement, and the ugliness of the cheering. The swear words on social media are being cast with a good dosage of bile. There have been ... More >>
Something to Cheer About: Bloomberg and the NY Marathon
Saturday, 3 November 2012, 1:25 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The show must go on – or so claimed Mayor Michael Bloomberg after scolding New Yorkers for not knowing the difference between 311 and 911 calls as the water levels were rising in the city. Reporting a fallen tree was not quite the same as reporting ... More >>
Reheating the Beans: The Gillard White Paper on Asia
Tuesday, 30 October 2012, 12:26 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It has a familiar ring to it. Australia, that White Tribe of Asia, is now sounding desperate, hoping for recognition in a region it has struggled to comprehend since the days of British colonisation. If human beings are seeking to find the common ... More >>
Catching Il Cavaliere: Berlusconi’s Conviction
Monday, 29 October 2012, 6:26 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The fundamental defect of Mr. Berlusconi’s governing style is that he often confuses private interests with public ones. The Economist , Jun 9, 2011 More >>
The Jimmy Savile Row at the Smutty Beeb
Thursday, 25 October 2012, 2:52 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Why the surprise, the sense of shock, the orchestrated gasps of revulsion? The late ghastly, self-indulgent radio and television presenter Jimmy Savile, who would effectively confess on live television that he would so anything to everything, is now sending ... More >>
Prelude to Election: The Third Presidential Debate
Wednesday, 24 October 2012, 11:52 am | Binoy Kampmark
There were no spectacular implosions, no remarkable points of stumbling. The third and last debate between President Barack Obama and contender Governor Mitt Romney was not the most exciting affair, though it showed Obama to be far more accomplished, ... More >>
Hate Crime Against the Elite: The Oxbridge Boat Race
Tuesday, 23 October 2012, 4:42 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It has been said before: the definition of a crime, at least in its English context, is determined by what the upper class feel the underclass should not be doing. Elite disapproval finds its way into the criminal statutes with astonishing regularity. More >>
Good Bile and Bad: Tolerating Alan Jones
Tuesday, 9 October 2012, 11:03 am | Binoy Kampmark
Oh what fun it is to be a maligned shock jock. The shoe, sitting now so well on the other foot, and the attack being waged on several fronts against the man whose voice has filled Australian airwaves for years. More >>
Paper King of the Gray Lady: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger
Monday, 1 October 2012, 3:30 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger has left us aged 86, though the old gray lady he was a steward to still remains, casting her lingering shadow over the publishing world, wrinkles and all. The shadow of the New York Times has not always been a consistently cast ... More >>
