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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]
Universities and the Casual Work Force
Wednesday, 10 October 2018, 12:49 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Universities have become bastions of sessional torment, feeding grounds for despair. The term “sessional” is merely a euphemised way of describing an academic employee who has no ongoing employment other than what is offered, a person ever at the mercy ... More >>
Orson Welles, Broadcasts and Fake News
Tuesday, 9 October 2018, 11:26 am | Binoy Kampmark
Orson Welles’ spectral return to the screen, ingeniously in posthumous mode, should have come as a comfort to the magicians skilled in the arts of trickery. Beyond the grave, he seems to be exerting a continuing influence, with his film, The Other Side ... More >>
Barely Breathing: May’s Gasping Premiership
Monday, 8 October 2018, 3:50 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Boris Johnson storm, beating away at the British Prime Minister’s doors with an ancient fury, has been stayed for the moment in the wake of the Conservative Party Conference held at Birmingham last week. While the potential usurper batters away ... More >>
Australian Complicity: Nauru and Silencing Journalism
Saturday, 6 October 2018, 6:35 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Journalism is getting something of a battering in Australia. At the parliamentary level, laws have passed that would be inimical to any tradition versed in the bill of rights. (Australia, not having such a restraining instrument on political zeal, ... More >>
Limiting Israel: Russia’s Deploys the S-300 to Syria
Tuesday, 2 October 2018, 12:33 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Relations between Russia and Israel have been those of an estranged couple punctuated by occasional breakouts of tense understanding. As with other such couples, a public row does not necessarily reflect the more placid, if stern discussion that might ... More >>
Tortured Solutions: Ecuador, UK and Julian Assange’s Fate
Saturday, 29 September 2018, 7:01 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The pulse of negotiations, a flurry of communications, and the person central to this is one who threatens to go nowhere – for the moment. But go somewhere these parties would wish Julian Assange to do. For six years, cramped within a space in ... More >>
Augmenting Brains: Google Turns Twenty
Thursday, 27 September 2018, 7:28 pm | Binoy Kampmark
“Eventually you’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you an answer.” Larry Page, co-founder of Google More >>
Feeding Militarism: The US Imperial Consensus
Monday, 24 September 2018, 1:56 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The US military industrial complex reigns like a ravenous ruler in search of new funding prospects. It has done well this year, with the Trump administration pushing the sale that the imperium needs more ruddy cash and indulgent expenditure to cope ... More >>
Parasitic and Irrelevant: The University Vice Chancellor
Sunday, 23 September 2018, 12:22 pm | Binoy Kampmark
They are some of the most remunerated officials of one of Australia’s most importantly lucrative sectors, drawing huge “packages”, as they are termed, for little more than ribbon cutting, attending meetings and overseeing policies that, if implemented, ... More >>
Casting Kavanaugh: The Trump Supreme Court Drama
Friday, 21 September 2018, 6:09 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Stage set Washington. Object: adulterating power. The arm of government: the judiciary. That particular group of high ranking paladins remains up in the air as US Supreme Court appointee Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh floats around in a stage of grinding limbo, ... More >>
The Pathology of Mass Surveillance
Thursday, 20 September 2018, 1:41 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Pathology of Mass Surveillance: The UK, Bulk Interception and the European Court of Human Rights More >>
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 >>
