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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 65]
Popes Against Nuclear Weapons
Monday, 25 November 2019, 4:22 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Vatican comes with its ills, contradictions and blatant hypocrisies in the field of moral theology and human existence, but on the issue of atomic and nuclear weapons, the position has been fairly consistent, if marked by gradual evolution. On February ... More >>
Through the Yellow Looking Glass: Australia’s China Wars
Friday, 22 November 2019, 1:44 pm | Binoy Kampmark
This year, China as Intimidating Monster has become the popular motif in Canberra circles. Australian government members Andrew Hastie and Senator James Paterson have become vigorous moral, if hollow enthusiasts. Their criticism of China has led to ... More >>
Dropped Investigations: Julian Assange, Sex and Sweden
Wednesday, 20 November 2019, 3:38 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Sex, the late Gore Vidal astutely observed, is politics, and not merely from the vantage point of those who wish to police it. In the case of whistleblowers, claims of aberrant, unlawful sex serves the purpose of diminishing credibility, tarring ... More >>
Letting the Side Down: Prince Andrew
Monday, 18 November 2019, 6:52 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The choking cloud of Jeffrey Epstein’s paedophilic legacy has been floating over the Atlantic for some time. It does its best (or worst) in matters of US and British celebrity, warts and all. It has not, for instance, exempted the British Royal Family, ... More >>
The Foreign Interference Problem in Australian Universities
Monday, 18 November 2019, 9:09 am | Binoy Kampmark
Education has always been a political matter, whatever the apolitical advocates of it think it is. In Australia, it has proven sectarian, ideological, and skewed, often on the issue of funding. At the schooling level, private institutions receive ... More >>
Business as Usual: Evo Morales and the Coup Condition
Friday, 15 November 2019, 9:09 am | Binoy Kampmark
There is an inherent bestiality in the politics of the Americas that signals coup, assassination and disruption. No state is ever allowed to go through what is weakly called a transition, except over corpses, tortures and morgues. When a social experiment ... More >>
Incinerating Logic: Bush Fires and Climate Change
Tuesday, 12 November 2019, 7:20 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Despite the Internet, connectivity, and linking technologies, distance has not shrunk the Australian sense of self, an often provincial appraisal of the world seen in slow motion and stills. Whether it’s the “flower revolution” or Michel Foucault, ... More >>
Russian Connections in Albion: The ISC Report
Tuesday, 12 November 2019, 9:07 am | Binoy Kampmark
The UK election campaign has kicked off, and merrily confused are the major candidates. The chaotic scene was made a touch more interesting with the refusal on the part of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to clear the release of a report by the intelligence ... More >>
Walls in the Head: Ostalgia and the Berlin Wall
Sunday, 10 November 2019, 3:40 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Walls have always served a dual purpose: they keep people in, and others out. The mentality of the wall is one of imprisonment and exclusion. Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we see such infrastructure, both symbolically and in actuality, ... More >>
Charter for Conservatism: The ALP Campaign Review
Saturday, 9 November 2019, 3:51 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Reports on electoral strategies are often written in order to be avoided. They are scripted for the express purpose of gathering dust on shelves, or decaying in digital files rarely to be consulted except by historians. But the review of the reasons ... More >>
Corporate Mammon: Amazon and the Seattle Council Elections
Friday, 8 November 2019, 3:16 pm | Binoy Kampmark
An enduring US political tradition was in evidence in Seattle recently. Amazon had decided that the city council elections would be too important to leave alone. Seattle was their city after all. The aim of the company was much in keeping with the manor ... More >>
Curfew Panda
Thursday, 7 November 2019, 4:12 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It seems a tall, ambitious and very authoritarian order: imposing bans on persons under the age of 18 from playing online games between 22:00 and 08:00; rationing gaming on weekdays to 90 minutes and three hours on holidays and weekends. This is ... More >>
The Hillary Clinton Resentment Machine
Monday, 4 November 2019, 4:24 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Only a sadomasochist would consider it a genuine prospect. A failed presidential candidate, the louse in the locks of the Democratic Party, keen to make yet another vain tilt at the White House. But in the rogues’ gallery of the defective and disturbed, ... More >>
Crushing Anti-Mining Protest in Australia
Saturday, 2 November 2019, 2:34 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Prime Minister of Australia is fuming. Having made his mark on Australian politics by being the mining sector’s most avid defender, Scott Morrison was disturbed by the week’s events in Melbourne that saw clashes between police and protesters outside ... More >>
Tethering Pegasus: WhatsApp takes NSO Group to Court
Friday, 1 November 2019, 2:51 pm | Binoy Kampmark
A lawsuit filed in a US federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday threw up a few interesting, and disturbing considerations. In it, the Facebook-owned platform WhatsApp advanced an allegation that now seems commonplace: that the Israeli spyware Pegasus ... More >>
Boris Johnson Against Parliament
Wednesday, 30 October 2019, 12:04 pm | Binoy Kampmark
A pretty odd thing, this. The prime minister of Britain, supposedly of the conservative creed, making an almost violent dash against both parliament and the courts of law. While his presence is barely a patch on Margaret Thatcher, there is something about ... More >>
A Touch of Plagiarism: The Nazari Precedent
Wednesday, 30 October 2019, 10:13 am | Binoy Kampmark
The academy is filled with wonder. There are professors who cannot teach. There are associate professors who cannot write. There are tenured academics who have been promoted on the basis of being able to be the fourth author on all their papers, ... More >>
Unlevelled Fields: Brexit, Workers’ Rights & the Environment
Sunday, 27 October 2019, 9:32 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The smorgasbord of Brexit terms has been further plated up with the latest acronym: the WAB or Withdrawal Agreement Bill . It comes in at 115 pages, with an added bonus of 126 pages of explanatory notes. For something seemingly so significant, not much ... More >>
Libra and Calibra: Mark Zuckerberg appears before Congress
Friday, 25 October 2019, 3:45 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It was never going to be pretty. The Facebook CEO knew in appearing before the House Financial Services Committee to answer questions on the company’s proposed cryptocurrency that a few sizeable bumps would appear. As it turned out, much of the questioning ... More >>
Julian Assange, Political Offences and Surveillance
Thursday, 24 October 2019, 3:19 pm | Binoy Kampmark
While Australian journalists bonded and broke break in condemning national security legislation that some of them had previously supported, one figure was barely mentioned. Julian Assange was making his first public appearance since April for a case management ... More >>
