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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 67]
Permissible Deviance: Facebook’s FTC Fine
Monday, 29 July 2019, 2:00 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It was something of a shrug moment. One of the world’s largest digital platforms had been fined $5 billion for privacy violations by the Federal Trade Commission, claiming it had violated its 2012 order. The FTC order also requires the company ... More >>
Contractual Disputes: Replacing Monster Chefs on MasterChef
Saturday, 27 July 2019, 2:22 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The show is pompous, condescending and shallow. It was designed to mock the lowly non-cook, the ignorant, and, from high culinary summitry, grace the winner after munching, gratis, what was promoted. The winner would then be nurtured, cared for ... More >>
Mack Horton’s Anti-Drug Stance
Thursday, 25 July 2019, 2:02 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The first rush of enthusiasm on looking at this is clear: a high-achieving swimmer on the circuit - the Australian Mack Horton – decides to take a stance. More >>
Boris Johnson Becomes British PM
Wednesday, 24 July 2019, 3:03 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The BBC World Service took its listeners to the English cathedral town of Ely, set in picturesque Cambridgeshire, during the course of a hot July 23 in an effort to take the pulse of the country. Well, at least that particular, erratic pulse. It ... More >>
WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Decoding the Commentariat
Tuesday, 23 July 2019, 10:01 am | Binoy Kampmark
The Fourth Estate, that historical unelected grouping of society’s scrutineers, has become something of a rabble, and, as a confederacy of strewn dunces and the ongoing compromised, is ripe for analysis. An essential premise in the work of WikiLeaks ... More >>
Lunar Narratives
Sunday, 21 July 2019, 7:06 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Anniversaries are occasions to distort records. The intoxicated recounting of the past faces a record in need of correction. Couples long married hide their differences before guests. Creases are covered; the make-up is applied generously. Defects become ... More >>
Manus, Nauru and an Australian Detention Legacy
Friday, 19 July 2019, 2:32 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It could be called a gulag mentality, though it finds form in different ways. In the defunct Soviet Union, it was definitive of life: millions incarcerated, garrisons of forced labour, instruments of the proletarian paradise fouled. Gulag literature ... More >>
Donald Trump, the Democrat Squad and Failed Impeachment
Thursday, 18 July 2019, 2:25 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Twitter has become policy. It is platform, direction and determination. It has served one particular person well, a hazy mechanism to fog up the lenses of law makers. When President Donald Trump needs an air-wave filling distraction, a bilious splurge ... More >>
UC Global, CNN and Russian Couriers
Wednesday, 17 July 2019, 3:04 pm | Binoy Kampmark
History’s scope for the absurd and tragic is infinite. Like Sisyphus engaged in permanent labours pushing a boulder up a slope, the effort of making sense of such scope is likewise, absurdly infinite. To see images of an exhausted and world-weary ... More >>
Corporate Gangster: Adani’s Pursuit of Scientists
Tuesday, 16 July 2019, 3:18 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Adani conglomerate should be best described as a bloated gangster, promising the earth even as it mines it. Like other corporate thugs of such disposition, it will do things within, and if necessary outside, the regulatory framework it encounters. ... More >>
The UN’s Free Speech Problem
Monday, 15 July 2019, 2:05 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Anyone willing to consult the international law book on the subject of free speech will find it heavy with protections for free speech. The UN Declaration of Human Rights features , in its preamble, the ideal that “human beings shall enjoy freedom ... More >>
The Resigning Ambassador: Sir Kim Darroch on Donald Trump
Saturday, 13 July 2019, 3:18 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Rarely do ambassadors resign after an intense self-assessment of worth. Diplomatic immunity does not merely extend to protecting the official from the reach of local laws; it encourages a degree of freedom in engaging as a country’s representative. ... More >>
Donald Trump’s Diplomatic Copy Book
Friday, 12 July 2019, 7:21 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Cue the shots, take the snaps: US President Donald Trump was back entertaining his fetish with firm handshakes proclaiming the making of history in the last round of discussions with Kim Jong-un. The press were, despite periodic attacks of bafflement, ... More >>
Out of Kilter: National Security and Press Freedoms
Wednesday, 10 July 2019, 2:12 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Australian society relishes secrecy and surveillance. Forget the laid-back, relaxed demeanour that remains the great fiction of a confected identity; like all such creations, the trace should not be mistaken as the tendency. The political culture of Australia ... More >>
Dressed for the Fourth of July: The US Imperium Comes Out
Sunday, 7 July 2019, 4:57 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The United States of Amnesia has occasionally found expression amongst those despairing at the state of historical consciousness in Freedom’s Land. Gore Vidal remains something of its high priest, his writings a pertinent scolding about what went wrong ... More >>
Going Nuclear in the Antipodes
Thursday, 4 July 2019, 3:18 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The antipodes has had a fraught relationship with the nuclear option. At the distant ends of the earth, New Zealand took a stand against the death complex, assuming the forefront of restricting the deployment of nuclear assets in its proximity. This ... More >>
Facebook, Funny Money and Libra
Tuesday, 2 July 2019, 3:17 pm | Binoy Kampmark
In this squalid era of compromised data and hollowed privacy, it would be fitting that the company largely responsible for such mishaps would steer another technological innovation. Distractions are needed, and while Mark Zuckerberg cannot launch missiles, ... More >>
G20 Gyrations: Donald, Ivanka and Hollow Diplomacy
Tuesday, 2 July 2019, 8:21 am | Binoy Kampmark
Traditional diplomacy is being given a makeover - at least where it is not being abolished altogether and being replaced by a replica of The Apprentice . US President Donald Trump’s seizure of the art has been violent and molesting. Had Roman emperors ... More >>
Raging Against the Algorithm
Saturday, 29 June 2019, 6:47 pm | Binoy Kampmark
“The founder of Netscape said software is going to eat the world.” Tristan Harris, Centre for Humane Technology , June 25, 2019 More >>
Tweets of Praise: Donald Trump, Australia and Refugees
Friday, 28 June 2019, 1:33 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Praise from US President Donald Trump has a tendency of tarnishing gold and ungilding matters, and there was something of the muck in his tweet praising Australia for its sadistic approach to refugee arrivals. Operation Sovereign Borders, which commenced ... More >>
