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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 123]
The Labor Wipe Out: The Queensland Elections
Sunday, 25 March 2012, 8:26 pm | Binoy Kampmark
When the tide goes out in Queensland, it goes out more quickly and more deeply than anywhere else. Senior Labor figure, The Punch , Mar 24, 2012 More >>
Nicolas Sarkozy and Criminal Visitations
Saturday, 24 March 2012, 4:31 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Collaring readers for ‘visiting’ internet sets? Jailing them for perusing matter accessible through the all pervasive world wide web, where curiosity abounds and internet sites are stumbled across and sampled like novelty gift items? This is the ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: The Legacy of Rowan Williams
Friday, 23 March 2012, 2:59 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The legacy of Dr Rowan Williams, who has announced his resignation of the post of Archbishop of Canterbury effective later this year, will be a long debated one. The range of reactions was nothing short of astonishing, suggesting the enormity of the ... More >>
The Curse of Statistics: Tendulkar’s Hundredth Hundred
Monday, 19 March 2012, 1:38 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Cricket is a game of aesthetics, tactics and mind numbing statistics. The devil is always dominant in the game, given that the detail is everything and everywhere. While there is no reason why these need compete, they often do – issues of style ... More >>
Tax and Football: The Hollande Proposition
Monday, 19 March 2012, 1:35 pm | Binoy Kampmark
All presidential campaigns are bound to have moments of populist enthusiasm, but each is marked by a certain local twist. The French presidential elections, unlike those of the Americans, is being characterised less in the promises on what taxes ... More >>
Censoring the Netizen: The Enemies of the Internet
Monday, 19 March 2012, 1:03 pm | Binoy Kampmark
What a fabulous world we live in. Reporters without Borders has been busy putting together a list of international outcasts who have violated the sanctity of internet freedom, and come up with a decent gaggle. 2011, the organisation claims, was the ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark - Farewell to Print: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Friday, 16 March 2012, 12:44 pm | Binoy Kampmark
A word of caution: this is not a funeral notice, though it might read as one. That venerable 244-year old knowledge business known as Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print – paper print, at least. That fabulous, 32-volume monster of knowledge ... More >>
The Dead Sixteen: Managing False Expectations
Thursday, 15 March 2012, 9:53 am | Binoy Kampmark
‘Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. … It is [not] the wish of [our] government to impose upon you alien institutions’. Such were the words of General F.S. Maude, broadly directed at the ... More >>
Acting the Duck: Netanyahu and Attacking Iran
Wednesday, 14 March 2012, 1:16 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Doom, gloom and imminent demise – this is the language of Israel’s latest posturing on Iran. With such belligerent talk, the Israelis are qualifying for the tag of ‘threat to international security’ that entitles the UN Security Council to get excited ... More >>
Holding Governments to Account: The trial of Geir Haarde
Monday, 12 March 2012, 1:19 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It is fitting, and yet unfortunate, that only one former head of state is having to stand trial in a special court of impeachment for his financial misdemeanours and horrors. The former Icelandic Prime Minister Geir Haarde faces charges of gross ... More >>
Missing the Wall: The Legacy of Rahul Dravid
Monday, 12 March 2012, 1:16 pm | Binoy Kampmark
He is barely gone, but his announcement triggered a deluge of fan mail and tributes. Cricket will miss India’s Rahul Dravid. Indian cricket will miss him the most. He was the back of solidity in the Indian innings, the wall around which the graceful ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: Social Media and Kony 2012
Monday, 12 March 2012, 12:26 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It bears reminding in the age of Twitter that Marshall McLuhan was on to something when he remarked in 1964 that, ‘The medium is the message.’ The medium itself tampers with content, having its own distinct qualities. Message and medium are involved ... More >>
Fluke Wars: The Limbaugh Slur
Wednesday, 7 March 2012, 11:40 am | Binoy Kampmark
The Rush Limbaugh Radio Show is taking something of a battering – at least in the sponsorship stakes. The sparkling Oscar Wilde was one to know the nature not to mention the effects of negative publicity, though he ventured that the only thing ... More >>
Wayne Swan’s Trick: Attacking the Mining Magnates
Wednesday, 7 March 2012, 11:06 am | Binoy Kampmark
Earbashing the rich is regarded as a dangerously populist activity, especially in a country where money is not visibly hard to come by, and there is no conspicuous poverty. Thieving is, after all, purely relative. Bertolt Brecht summed it up rather ... More >>
Living the Mad Square: German Modernism Visits Australia
Monday, 5 March 2012, 12:25 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Mad Square – where there is an eclectic gathering: the dull, monochrome establishment marked by men in silver beards, dressed in black, all approaching the Art Academy; and the challenging rearguard of artistic freedom – Germany’s modernist artists, ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark - That Old Story: Selling Arms to Iran
Friday, 2 March 2012, 2:33 pm | Binoy Kampmark
What goes around in the arms business comes around with vengeful force. A state’s effort to indict individuals who sell arms to another state because it so happens to be the convenient enemy of the moment is a punitive, not to mention futile gesture. ... More >>
The Santorum Brief: Conservatism and Extremist Comedy
Wednesday, 29 February 2012, 12:03 pm | Binoy Kampmark
God bless Rick Santorum. For no one else will be – certainly not Dan Savage, who proposed a definition for the presidential contender’s last name: ‘lubricant mixed with faecal matter, as a byproduct of anal sex’. More >>
The Pettiness of Politics: Attacking Kevin Rudd
Monday, 27 February 2012, 3:20 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The stumbling of the Australian Labor Party into a realm of dark psychosis is being affirmed on an hourly basis. With the party being torn apart in true civil war fashion (the enemy, in such wars, is always within the household), the blood is flowing onto ... More >>
Dingos and Babies: The Azaria Chamberlain Case, Again
Monday, 27 February 2012, 3:18 pm | Binoy Kampmark
They can’t get enough of it. Since August 1980, Australia has remained in a fixated state over the fate of Azaria Chamberlain who was, so her mother Lindy claimed, dragged out of her tent by an opportunistic dingo. More >>
Quacks & Witchdoctors: The Attack on Complementary Medicine
Friday, 24 February 2012, 2:36 pm | Binoy Kampmark
G. Wilhelm Leibnitz had a penchant for the odd aphorism and observation, and when it came to doctors, he noted that the greatest ones were better killers than the greatest generals. Murder was their metier, even if perpetuated in the second degree. More >>
