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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 29]
AUSMIN And Assange: The Great Vassal Smackdown
Tuesday, 1 August 2023, 6:23 am | Binoy Kampmark
It was there for all to see. Embarrassing, cloying, and bound to make you cough up the remnants of your summit lunch, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III stopped by one of the vassal states to make sure that ... More >>
Dotty Domains: The Pentagon’s Mali Typo Leak Affair
Wednesday, 26 July 2023, 1:57 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Fleet-footed agility and sharp thinking rarely characterise the plodding bureaucrat. An argument can be made that different attributes are prized: cherished incompetence, spells of inattentiveness, and dedication to keeping things secret with severity. ... More >>
Congressional Concerns: Stalling Nuclear Submarines For Australia
Sunday, 23 July 2023, 7:42 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Any security arrangement with too many variables and multiple contingencies, risks stuttering and keeling over. Critical delays might be suffered, attributable to a number of factors beyond the parties concerned. Disputes and disagreements may surface. ... More >>
The Afghanistan Lithium Great Game
Friday, 21 July 2023, 4:49 pm | Binoy Kampmark
While the United States, along with its allies, left Afghanistan in August 2021 in spectacularly humiliating circumstances, the departure was never entirely complete, nor bound to be permanent. Since then, Washington has led the charge in handicapping ... More >>
Deserved Cancellations: Victoria Rejects The Commonwealth Games
Wednesday, 19 July 2023, 3:49 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Hosting sporting events has always been a government’s formula to distract their seducible subjects. It’s the secular version of smells and bells, the warbling of the church choir turned into flesh and performance. If such occasions are of sufficient ... More >>
Hindutva Goes To Washington: Narendra Modi’s US Visit
Monday, 17 July 2023, 1:32 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Again, he was at it, that charming show on two legs, playful and coy. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been burning the charismatic fuel of late, making the necessary emissions in visiting friendly countries. Each time, he seems to be getting ... More >>
Loathsome Amiability: Why Watching Utopia Hurts
Saturday, 15 July 2023, 1:18 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Let’s be frank: watching Utopia hurts. It involves stinging your eyeballs, tearing your hair, and taking yourself to the ledge of a skyscraper to call the whole thing off. The fact that the characters are meant to be faux pleasing is no excuse not ... More >>
An Accident Waiting To Happen: NATO Looks To Asia
Monday, 10 July 2023, 1:59 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose. It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US power, while its burgeoning expansion eastwards has done wonders ... More >>
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 >>
