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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 125]
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 >>
Binoy Kampmark: Watching the Republicans
Friday, 24 February 2012, 9:47 am | Binoy Kampmark
It’s painful. It’s horrendous. It’s grotesque. It’s another Republican presidential debate. Gazing at the behaviour of the candidates at the last Republican primary debate in Arizona, and the shop of horrors is bursting. Newt Gingrich tried to show ... More >>
The Rudd Challenge: Where to Now?
Thursday, 23 February 2012, 12:13 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Another instalment in the phoney war between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard has now taken place. The Australian foreign minister has resigned his post and is coming home. Over the weekend, he will consult friends and relations before mounting what ... More >>
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Jags and Consciences
Thursday, 23 February 2012, 9:34 am | Binoy Kampmark
Oh what an atmospherically pent up effort – permanent stuffy darkness; grimy, dirty London immune to light, a world of grubby morals and even grubbier characters. But John le Carré was always rather good at charting pathways into dimly lit corridors, ... More >>
The Syrian Dilemma: Whither Intervention?
Tuesday, 21 February 2012, 5:34 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Albert Camus posed a Kirkegaard-like dilemma of madness in his notebooks: the absolute helplessness one feels in doing nothing, and the dangers of doing something. The escalating, blood-drenched violence in Syria is such a case – the sense of helplessness ... More >>
The Lemming Syndrome: Kev, Jules and Labour
Tuesday, 21 February 2012, 10:37 am | Binoy Kampmark
Australia’s Labour party does not want to win the next federal election. It is genetic. The left find incumbency tiring, troublesome, limiting, problematic. Suicidal policies hell bent in wiping their presence off the electoral map is, however, something ... More >>
Airline Madness: The Fall of Air Australia
Tuesday, 21 February 2012, 10:32 am | Binoy Kampmark
The Australian airlines market has always resembled something of a corpse with just a hint of life. Stratified, uninventive, and controlled, it has never been cheap, whatever the dished, dull rhetoric is, to fly across this red dust land. More >>
