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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 71]
Modern Merchants of Death: The NSO Group, Spyware and Rights
Wednesday, 15 May 2019, 3:13 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Arms manufacturers of old, and many of the current stable, did not care much where their products went. The profit incentive often came before the patriotic one, and led to such dark suspicions as those voiced by the Nye Committee in the 1930s. Known ... More >>
Maximum Pressure in the Strait of Hormuz
Tuesday, 14 May 2019, 3:29 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Hegemons are never going to sound too sensible when they lock horns or joust in spats of childish anger. Power corrupts, not merely in terms of perspective but language, and making sense about the next move, the next statement, is bound to be challenging. ... More >>
Cleaning out the Nutters
Monday, 13 May 2019, 2:44 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Inimitable to a fault, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating had been fairly quiet on his party’s policies till an impromptu press intervention last week. Catching two journalists of the ABC off-guard, Keating took little time to land a few blows ... More >>
A Great Flushing Out: Social Media Footprints
Sunday, 12 May 2019, 3:58 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It has been an uninspiring election, punctuated by occasional moments of madness on the part of various candidates. Their sin was to be incautious in their previous use of social media, a form of communication that reveals everything and nothing ... More >>
The Democrats and Muellerisation
Friday, 10 May 2019, 1:01 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The psychic problems facing the Democrats continue to bite, and with their foiled efforts to see the full, unredacted report of the Mueller Report, they look distracted, confused and bitter. In politics, the sense of vengeance and retribution has a place, ... More >>
The Shaman of Football: Jürgen Klopp and Liverpool FC
Thursday, 9 May 2019, 2:10 pm | Binoy Kampmark
You cannot bottle him, export him or use him as a precedent for anything. His calm, even tempered disposition is the stuff of bafflement and bemusement, and yet, after his tenure at one of Europe’s most known football clubs, Jürgen Klopp, football’s ... More >>
Lowering Standards and Student Cash Cows
Wednesday, 8 May 2019, 12:36 pm | Binoy Kampmark
There are no protests on the streets and no effigies of university officials being burned by protesting students today. There are no protests outside the officers of the over-remunerated Vice Chancellors and their various henchpersons. It is business ... More >>
Equinor and drilling the Great Australian Bight
Tuesday, 7 May 2019, 3:02 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Such companies advertise themselves as slick and professional, the best in the business, all things to men, women and everyone in between. They insist that we can all have that vast cake of wealth and eat it too. Equinor, a Norwegian multinational beast ... More >>
Disproportionate Sentences: Julian Assange
Saturday, 4 May 2019, 6:17 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Should journalism ever have a deity worth His, Her or Its salt, looking down upon the recent proceedings against Julian Assange will provide endless choking fits of confusion and dismay. The prosecution continues in the twisted logic that engaging ... More >>
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Witch Doctors of Terrorism
Thursday, 2 May 2019, 12:23 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Nothing turns on the charlatan class of terrorism expertise than a video from an elusive, unknown destination, adjusted, modified and giving all the speculative trimmings. In reading, E.B. White suggested the presence of two participants: the author as ... More >>
Doubts at the NSA: Shelving a Mass Surveillance Program
Tuesday, 30 April 2019, 3:22 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Earlier this year, Luke Murry, national security adviser for Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, revealed that the National Security Agency had been averse over the last six months to using the phone surveillance program that hoovers information ... More >>
Corporate Joe: Biden Enters the Presidential Race
Saturday, 27 April 2019, 3:42 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Values, values and more values. Another dreary dish added to the smorgasbord of Democratic hopefuls for the White House. This one is a bit cured and worn, smoked by history. Biden, having performed the role of Vice President for Barack Obama and senator for ... More >>
Continued Detentions: The Intended Role for Chelsea Manning
Thursday, 25 April 2019, 5:49 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The noose is tightening around the WikiLeaks world, yet another dedicated attempt to strangle the channels of information that might cast light over the dastardly deeds of state. Connections are being targeted; associates are being brought in. ... More >>
Volodymyr Zelenskiy as Actor President
Wednesday, 24 April 2019, 2:09 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The world is not so much a stage as a simulacrum for those who think it so. And if the stage goes bad, it is fitting that those who get thrown onto it change it in the most daring and provocative way. Politics is now as much a director’s production ... More >>
Lethal Bungling: Sri Lanka’s Easter Bombings
Tuesday, 23 April 2019, 12:53 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The number of dead is bound to rise, already standing at more than three hundred. The bombs, worn by seven suicide bombers, struck at three churches during the period of Easter Sunday worship, and three hotels. As the dead were counted and the wounded ... More >>
The General and Libya
Sunday, 21 April 2019, 7:31 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The richly disastrous mess that is Libya has been moving into another phase of inspired aggression at the hands of General Khalifa Haftar. As he does, UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez Al-Sarraj is anxious. For some three weeks, the General’s eastern forces, ... More >>
Julian Assange as Neuroses
Saturday, 20 April 2019, 12:23 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Julian Assange continues to ripple and roam as a cipher through the political and media scape of the world. Detained in Belmarsh maximum security prison, the sort of stately abode only reserved for the most dangerous of criminals, many with indeterminate ... More >>
Burning Gothic: Reflections on Notre-Dame de Paris
Thursday, 18 April 2019, 3:22 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The destruction of the sacred will engender moving responses. But the scope, and the particularity of that response varies. The conflagration affecting Notre-Dame de Paris, located on the Île de la Cité, has become a twenty-four-hour saturation ... More >>
Permissible Influences: Israel and the Australian Elections
Wednesday, 17 April 2019, 3:24 pm | Binoy Kampmark
So much hullabaloo; so much pent-up anger and, let’s face it, so much opportunity for the political classes of Australia. The theme since 2016 is electoral interference; the object: whichever power so happens to afford an opportunity to gather support ... More >>
The European Union and Refugees in the Mediterranean
Tuesday, 16 April 2019, 2:43 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The modern UN Refugee Convention is now so flea-bitten it’s been put out to the garbage tip of history. At least the enthusiastic fleas think so, given their conduct as political representatives across a range of parliaments keen on barbed wired borders ... More >>
