Scoop has an Ethical Paywall
Binoy Kampmark
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Binoy Kampmark - Latest News [Page 135]
Farewell the Netherlands: Leaving Afghanistan
Monday, 2 August 2010, 10:11 pm | Binoy Kampmark
One of the more accomplished forces in a rather unaccomplished conflict is leaving Afghanistan. The Taliban are gleeful and have even proven congratulatory – another force bites the dust in the graveyard of empires. ‘We would like to offer the citizens ... More >>
Blasting Pakistan: David Cameron in India
Friday, 30 July 2010, 4:25 pm | Binoy Kampmark
There was little doubt that the British Prime Minister David Cameron was playing to his audience. Pakistan was the convenient target of opprobrium before a gathering at the IT major Infosys campus in Bangalore. ‘We cannot tolerate in any sense the ... More >>
The Absurd in Action: Being Burnt by the Sun
Friday, 30 July 2010, 2:16 pm | Binoy Kampmark
In his second notebook, Albert Camus makes reference to the nature of love as a palliative to the absurd. In Burnt by The Sun 2: Exodus , Nikita Mikhalkov continues his epic story he began in Burnt by the Sun (1994) featuring the travails of General Kotov, ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: You’ve been Wikileaked
Wednesday, 28 July 2010, 11:50 am | Binoy Kampmark
Wikileaks is proving to be a gem of surveillance and discovery. Having exposed an assortment of brutalities, censorship farces, and government duplicity since its inception, the organisation has managed several information coups over the last few ... More >>
Russians, Babies and James Rabbitt’s The Clinic
Tuesday, 27 July 2010, 7:47 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The sea of drab grey and black sloshes back and forth before the cinema doors open. Another film event is promised at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which has already made it into the news because of the banning of Bruce LaBruce’s LA ... More >>
Shrill Busy-bodies and David Cameron’s Big Society
Tuesday, 27 July 2010, 7:28 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Could it be right? A Tory Prime Minister unveiling visions of a ‘Big Society’ that would redistribute power and initiative from ‘elites’ to the broader community or ‘the man and woman on the street’? Society had been the elephantine target ... More >>
Banning LA Zombie: The Aussie Way
Friday, 23 July 2010, 6:04 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Censors are paid to have dirty minds. The Film Classification Board of the office of Film and Literature Classification is being paid to have particularly filthy ones. A few little darlings, scant qualified to examine anything coming close to art or ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: The US Intelligence Colossus
Wednesday, 21 July 2010, 9:05 pm | Binoy Kampmark
‘The intelligence world,’ says claim the authors of a CIA document on collection and analysis of intelligence on Iraq, ‘is one of ambiguity, nuance and complexity’ (Jul 15, 2007). All the more dire then, that the US intelligence effort since the ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: The Case of William Jacques
Wednesday, 21 July 2010, 6:50 pm | Binoy Kampmark
People are imprisoned for an assortment of offences against the social order. These rarely involve infractions against reading books, or their acquisition, unless one so happens to be living in a state suspicious of the written word. But in Britain, ... More >>
The Moat ‘Execution’: The Reason of Force
Tuesday, 20 July 2010, 11:04 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It all seems grim. Some called it an execution by police forces. But the debate on Raoul Moat continues to rage. Britain’s most wanted man has become something of a poster boy of sickened violence, responsible for having shot his former girlfriend ... More >>
Spectral Duties: Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer
Wednesday, 14 July 2010, 5:36 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Roman Polanski might have been having his legal troubles of late, but that has not put him off his stroke with the screen adaptation of Robert Harris’s The Ghost Writer . It is impressive to see that Polanski, even under house arrest, can feed ... More >>
Matters of Opinion: The Sacking of Octavia Nasr
Tuesday, 13 July 2010, 1:21 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Where does opinion start and objectivity stop in the labours of a journalist? If we want investigative scribblers who are incapable of meshing value judgments with the material they come across, they might as well give the game up. There is, quite ... More >>
Matters of Opinion: The Sacking of Octavia Nasr
Tuesday, 13 July 2010, 12:11 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Where does opinion start and objectivity stop in the labours of a journalist? If we want investigative scribblers who are incapable of meshing value judgments with the material they come across, they might as well give the game up. There is, quite ... More >>
Vino & Vinyasa: An Orgasm of Life in San Francisco
Monday, 12 July 2010, 9:52 am | Binoy Kampmark
Yoga stretched bodies, taunt and in various shades of exercise, in a mocking show of entertainment, seeing how far their litheness would take them. Then, bottles of tart California Sauvignon Blanc gazing at their projected derrieres, ready to be ... More >>
Ways of Seeing: The Secret of Their Eyes
Friday, 9 July 2010, 4:42 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The truth of Michel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (originally À la recherché du temps perdu ) according to the critic Howard Moss is this: that reality exists within ourselves as much as it does, if not more so, than without, and that salvation ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: The Death of ‘Big Australia’
Friday, 9 July 2010, 2:55 pm | Binoy Kampmark
‘Big Australia’ has shrunk as a motif for both its population and its politicians. At the start of this year, Australians were pondering projected figures that the country would grow to 35 million by 2050, from its current figure of 22 million. ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: The failings of the G20
Friday, 2 July 2010, 1:40 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The positioning of the powers at the latest G20 conference made an odd spectacle. For one, a prominent supporter of the G20 conference Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia, was absent, ambushed by a party vote at home. But in the broader picture, ... More >>
The US Supreme Court and Gun Control
Friday, 2 July 2010, 12:50 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The amendment on bearing arms has always teased, tormented and thrilled the American psyche. On the one hand, it is revered with totemic intensity, the marker of a people free to adopt the necessary force to protect their welfare. The essentially antiquated ... More >>
The Israeli Lobby in San Francisco
Wednesday, 30 June 2010, 10:57 am | Binoy Kampmark
‘I was the child of the survivors of the Holocaust.’ With that, Roz Rothstein of the activist group Stand With Us that hopes to transform the image of Israel on US campuses sets the moral authority before a small audience at an office on Howard ... More >>
The Passing of Robert C. Byrd
Tuesday, 29 June 2010, 5:12 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Few in American politics can lay claim to long periods of durability, but Robert C. Byrd, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia, was one of them. He thrived in the soil (some might say the manure) of Congressional debate and won nine terms. ... More >>
