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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 27]
A Bankrupt Calculus: Sending Cluster Munitions To Ukraine
Monday, 10 July 2023, 6:04 am | Binoy Kampmark
There is a certain desperation in the logic of those who argue that a depraved solution has merit because it’s only slightly less depraved than that of the opponent. Torture is bad but should still be used because your adversary feels free to resort to it. ... More >>
The Robodebt Rogues Gallery
Saturday, 8 July 2023, 6:24 pm | Binoy Kampmark
If ever there was an instance of such a hideous failing in government policy and its cowardly implementation by the public service, Australia’s cruel, inept and vicious Robodebt program would have to be one of them. Robodebt was a scheme developed ... More >>
Graceless At Lord’s: The Class Goons Strike Back
Thursday, 6 July 2023, 7:01 pm | Binoy Kampmark
What are the English other than their excruciatingly worn class, kitted out with a code of manners revocable at an instant? A streak of traditional Englishness, as A. A. Gill wrote, stresses bullying. It made them great in the hope of making others ... More >>
The Fossil Fuel Proliferation Threat
Thursday, 6 July 2023, 2:27 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Climate change negotiations and debates are characterised by some curious features. For one, there are interminable stretches of discussion that never seem to feature the agents of cause. Chatter about horrendous fires, toxic smoke, and environmental ... More >>
Costly Amalgamations: The University Merger Mania
Tuesday, 4 July 2023, 2:44 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Never trust the musings of university management, with their uplifting visions of sunlit glory, their honey-laced promises of healthy workplaces, staff and students. Being several steps removed from the trench, the field, the library, they are the ... More >>
The Ignorant Imperative: Hannah Gadsby On Pablo Picasso
Tuesday, 4 July 2023, 5:15 am | Binoy Kampmark
The humourless comedian Hannah Gadsby has much to thank one of the twentieth century’s titans of art. By placing him in the stockade of feminist disapproval, the Australian was picking the easiest target and avoiding the most profound questions of his oeuvre. ... More >>
Cruel Arrangements: The UK-Rwanda Refugee Deal Falters
Sunday, 2 July 2023, 2:35 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Since 2022, Rwanda has been very much on the mind of British policy makers, a dark option of retreat from the irritating intrusions of international refugee law. The English Channel has become something of a polemical resource, with those seeking ... More >>
The Saudi Football Seizure
Friday, 30 June 2023, 2:50 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Sports stars are making a heated rush for it, cresting on the money wave, and finding sanctuary in Mammon’s big breasted glory. And that wave is coming, oddly enough, from a desert country, alien to such matters till recent decades, when oil came with ... More >>
Nauru’s Refugee Stain: Australia’s Continued Offshore Processing Regime
Wednesday, 28 June 2023, 1:40 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The last refugee, for now, has left the small, guano-producing state of Nauru. For a decade, the Pacific Island state served as one of Australia’s offshore prisons for refugees and asylum seekers, a cruel deterrent to those daring to exercise their ... More >>
Babbling About Prigozhin
Tuesday, 27 June 2023, 2:18 pm | Binoy Kampmark
A lot of nonsense is being spouted by a bevy of spontaneous “Russian experts” in light of the Prigozhin spray, a mutiny (no one quite knows what to call it), stillborn in the Russian Federation. It all fell to the theatrical sponsor, promoter and rabble ... More >>
Deaths At Sea: From The Titan To The Mediterranean
Friday, 23 June 2023, 1:51 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Mortality at sea is becoming a theme of late. The nature of how that mortality has been represented, however, has varied. The death of a billionaire on a quest to see the sunken ruins of the Titanic is treated with saturating interest; the deaths of ... More >>
Daniel Ellsberg: The Establishment’s Whistleblower
Wednesday, 21 June 2023, 1:18 pm | Binoy Kampmark
In 1972 Stanley K. Sheinbaum, chairman of the Pentagon Papers Fund, wrote with a hot pertinence that remains striking (at this time Julian Assange is facing grave prospects of being extradited to the United States) that both Daniel Ellsberg and ... More >>
Forget The University: Gift Cards, Professionalism And The Australian Academy
Tuesday, 20 June 2023, 3:46 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Dear future students wishing to come to Australia and study: don’t. The gurgling, decaying system is, on a regular basis, being exposed for what it is. If it is not students being exploited, its academics being manipulated to the point of ruinous ... More >>
Dumpling Wars In Ukraine
Thursday, 15 June 2023, 6:47 am | Binoy Kampmark
The Ukrainian blonde had the smell of trouble. She had perched herself, along with her mute friend, in a restaurant across from the famed South Melbourne Market. On arriving at the modish, glorious bit of real estate known as Tipsy Village, a Polish ... More >>
Never More Relevant: Ted Kaczynski, Technology And Trauma
Wednesday, 14 June 2023, 1:07 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Henry A. Murray has much to answer for. Between 1959 and 1961, the Harvard psychology academic, as the leader of a team of equally unprincipled academics, was responsible for conducting an CIA-funded experiment most unethical on twenty-two undergraduates. ... More >>
Novak Djokovic: Always More Than Tennis
Monday, 12 June 2023, 2:47 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The victory of Novak Djokovic in the latest French Open had the usual mixed reception in Australia. While Australians pretend to like radicals, larrikins and the occasional deviant, the contrary is true. Tight buttoned, properly behaved and conformist to ... More >>
A Matter of Interest: The RBA, Inflation and Corporate Profits
Saturday, 10 June 2023, 2:57 pm | Binoy Kampmark
He is one of the least empathetic of beings, a cold fish, bothered and irritated. Captured by the cradle of numbers (he is an economist); obsessed by the spreadsheet of projections that may never result, there is not much to recommend the chief of ... More >>
Convenient Villains: Kathleen Folbigg’s Miscarriage Of Justice
Thursday, 8 June 2023, 5:05 pm | Binoy Kampmark
They – being the howling press, the screeching vox populi, and anybody else wishing to weigh in – were very clear about it. Kathleen Folbigg was guilty as hell and deserved her special place in it. For two decades, she spent her time behind bars ... More >>
Deserving Each Other: The PGA Tour-LIV Golf Merger
Wednesday, 7 June 2023, 1:53 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Described as acrimonious, divisive and disruptive to golf, the LIV Golf Tournament, launched with the aid of former world number one Greg Norman and an enormous well of capital fronted by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), will now unite ... More >>
Diluted Sovereignty: A Very Australian Example
Tuesday, 6 June 2023, 1:03 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Australian concepts of sovereignty have always been qualified. First came the British settlers and invaders in 1788. They are pregnant with the sovereignty of the British Crown, bringing convicts, the sadistic screws, and forced labour to a garrison of ... More >>
