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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 76]
Deplatforming Germaine Greer
Wednesday, 19 September 2018, 12:41 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The flexibility of English, and thriving sign that it is not a dead language, permits repeated atrocities to be committed in the name of new terms. We are told that what is new is supposedly good, a sign of evolution. More accurately, such terms simply ... More >>
Needled Strawberries: Food Terrorism Down Under
Tuesday, 18 September 2018, 11:08 am | Binoy Kampmark
There is something peculiar doing the rounds in Australian food circles. The land down under, considered something of a nirvana of fruit and vegetable production despite horrendous droughts and calamitous cyclones, is facing a new challenge: human agency, ... More >>
The Woes of Climate Change States
Monday, 17 September 2018, 11:27 am | Binoy Kampmark
As Australia’s tattered yet new government, led by the increasingly oafish and amateurish Scott Morrison trundled into its post-climate phase, states which see their existence as dependent on the cutting of carbon emissions have been more than ... More >>
A Traditional Right: Jimmie Åkesson and the Sweden Democrats
Saturday, 15 September 2018, 3:45 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Sweden’s elections are normally dull affairs. The same political arrangements have been in place for decades, featuring mild oscillations around the centre between the green-red bloc (Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party) and the conservative ... More >>
Doctrines of Impunity: John Bolton and the ICC
Thursday, 13 September 2018, 3:01 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Trump administration’s national security advisor John Bolton has never been a fan of international law, a concept he has found, at best, rubbery. Any institution supposedly guided by its spirit was bound to draw the ire of both his temper and ... More >>
The Natural Enemy: Serena Williams and the Sporting Umpire
Tuesday, 11 September 2018, 1:12 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Should it matter this much? A wealthy, successful individual expressed fury at the most popular object of vitriol in any sport. The umpire or referee is only ever neutral in the eyes of a falsely contrived standard: that someone must be objective, neutral ... More >>
Tory Kafuffles: Boris Johnson, Brexit and Suicide Vests
Monday, 10 September 2018, 1:18 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The next blow in Boris Johnson’s chapter of political suicide has been made: a piece in the Mail on Sunday which supplied him ample room to take yet another shot at the ghostly British prime minister, Theresa May. There was nothing new in it; ... More >>
Trump’s Mission of Distraction: Finding the Anonymous Author
Sunday, 9 September 2018, 2:07 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Trump presidency has proven to be a set of publicity driven punctuations and blows, riddled by distractions contrived and accidental. Controversy and accusation characterise the next revelation, the next announcement that might throw journalists ... More >>
Fraser Anning and the Smugness of Australian “Values”
Monday, 3 September 2018, 6:26 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Be wary of the self-satisfied and morally soothed. The complacent have a habit of giving the game away, glorifying themselves in satisfied satiation. Australia’s parliament seemed to be very self-congratulatory in their condemnation of the newly ... More >>
Battling Contamination: Erin Brockovich Down Under
Sunday, 2 September 2018, 3:02 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Australian press have been in a state of drooling ecstasy. Part of it is because Australia can be relevant, however negative it might be, to their monster cousin, defender and protector known as the United States. This time, its cultural - in the ... More >>
The Carnival of Homelessness: How the Filthy Rich React
Saturday, 1 September 2018, 5:07 pm | Binoy Kampmark
An aggressive sign of an affluent society can usually be gauged by its invidious misuse of its privilege. Poverty is deemed necessary, and the rich must try to understand it. To be privileged is to be guilty, a tickling of the conscience as the pennies ... More >>
Banning Chelsea Manning: The Dubious Tests of Character
Friday, 31 August 2018, 3:23 pm | Binoy Kampmark
National security advocates have been crotchety ever since the release of Chelsea Manning for a sentence they hoped would go the full, crushing 35 years. Her sins were intimately tied up with making WikiLeaks the publisher of fame, less than fortune: ... More >>
Repudiating the Global Commons: Trump’s Militarisation
Thursday, 30 August 2018, 4:55 pm | Binoy Kampmark
In international law, a category regarded by certain legal philosophers as non-existent (there being no overarching sovereign to police it), aspirations reign like obstinate fantasies. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty is one such example, decorated by such expressions ... More >>
John McCain’s Imperial Complex
Wednesday, 29 August 2018, 3:00 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Obituaries are not the best places to identify faults unless they assume the form of a hatchet job. The opposite is more often the case: worshipful and respectful to the point of being cloying. As the tears dry, and the sobs of reflection pass, ... More >>
Ambushing Pope Francis: The Accusations of Cardinal Viganò
Tuesday, 28 August 2018, 6:35 pm | Binoy Kampmark
“Now that the corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy, my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths.” Cardinal Carlo Maria Viganò, Aug 25, 2018 More >>
Modern Memories: The Invasion of Czechoslovakia 1968
Monday, 27 August 2018, 3:26 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It was a year of manic tumult. Students revolted in Paris and other global capitals; the Tet Offensive permanently impaired the US war effort in Vietnam, at least on the home front; Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both felled by ... More >>
Sodding the Australian Voter: Accidental Prime Ministers
Saturday, 25 August 2018, 3:23 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It is a continuation of Malcolm Turnbull by other means. The new Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison and his freshly appointed Deputy, Josh Frydenberg have ensured that the “insurgents”, as Turnbull deemed them, did not come through. ... More >>
Hijacked Democracy: Normalised Instability in Australia
Friday, 24 August 2018, 1:31 pm | Binoy Kampmark
You can sense Australian politicians – or at least a good number of them – fuming at being cobbled together with the counterparts of other states deemed less worthy of the tag of “stable”. Take, for instance, entertaining Italy, tenaciously temporary ... More >>
Cultures of Death: Pope Francis, Apology and Child Abuse
Thursday, 23 August 2018, 12:49 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It was long overdue, but Pope Francis’s letter of condemnation and apology regarding the abuse of children by Catholic priests did sent a few ripples of comfort and reckoning. He conceded that the Church “showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them”. ... More >>
Prime Ministerial Chaos: Turnbull’s Last Days
Wednesday, 22 August 2018, 4:24 pm | Binoy Kampmark
No one is in charge in Australia. Monday’s leadership challenge by Home Affairs minister, the potato-headed former police officer Peter Dutton, was cutting enough to leave Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull a wounded animal. The 48 to 35 margin of ... More >>
