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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 124]
The Le Pen Factor: France’s Presidential Elections
Monday, 23 April 2012, 1:51 pm | Binoy Kampmark
As with every election, the readers of the tea leaves often have a habit of misreading the signs. Illiteracy stumbles in. Confusion becomes its own most valued currency. The first round of the French presidential elections revealed that Marine Le Pen ... More >>
Softening the Metal: Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady
Tuesday, 10 April 2012, 10:11 am | Binoy Kampmark
Gore Vidal claimed that the second unfortunate thing to befall Abraham Lincoln was not merely his assassination but falling into the hands of biographer Carl Sandburg. With such hideous hagiography, the actual historical figure shrinks just as his myth ... More >>
The ACLU and Obama’s Assassination Program
Monday, 2 April 2012, 12:42 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The policies around the assassination program of the United States are surreal. Trafficking in murder while espousing noble things is a habit regimes fall into, though the more sinister ones tend to use weasel words to conceal that fact. More >>
Binoy Kampmark: George Galloway and the Bradford Spring
Monday, 2 April 2012, 11:34 am | Binoy Kampmark
A looney, inhabiting a distant planet. A bomb thrower. A parliamentary absentee. Many things have been directed at George Galloway of the Respect Party, a few deserved. But when it came to his astonishing success in the polls in the Bradford West by-election, ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: Civilian Policing: Killing Trayvon Martin
Wednesday, 28 March 2012, 1:29 pm | Binoy Kampmark
'Civilian Policing: Killing Trayvon Martin and Neighbourhood Watch' A hundred years of lynching, justifiable homicide. Same thing. Protester’s sign, Sanford, Mar 21, 2012 More >>
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 >>
