Farewelling Dr No: The Sacking of John Bolton
Binoy Kampmark “Every time the president, or Pompeo, or anyone in the [Trump] administration came up with an idea, they had to face Dr No.” Cliff Kupchan, Chairman of...
Inevitable Withdrawal: The US-Taliban Deal
Binoy Kampmark It took gallons and flagons of blood, but it eventuated, a squeeze of history into a parchment of possibility: the Taliban eventually pushed the sole superpower on...
Unhinged before the Fall: Boris Johnson, Parliament and Brexit
Binoy Kampmark The Brexit no deal prospect is engendering an element of lunacy fast seeping into every pore of the British political establishment. As with all steeped in such...
Conspiracy, Death and Jeffrey Epstein
Binoy Kampmark Within minutes of news about his death in a Manhattan jail cell Saturday morning, theories spread with pestilential vigour. Was Jeffrey Epstein murdered? Accepting the premise without...
Publishing Stolen Material: WikiLeaks, the DNC and Freedom of Speech
It may well be a finding of some implication should Julian Assange find his way into the beastly glory that is the US justice system. In its efforts...
Lunar Narratives: Landing on the Moon, Politics and the Cold War
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...
Spying on Assange: UC Global, CNN and Russian Couriers
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...
Going Nuclear in the Antipodes: Australia’s Megadeath Complex
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,...
Raging Against the Algorithm: Google and Persuasive Technology
Binoy Kampmark “The founder of Netscape said software is going to eat the world.” Tristan Harris, Centre for Humane Technology, June 25 2019 Monsters and titans share the stage...
The Fragility of Democracy: Hong Kong, China and the Extradition Bill
Binoy Kampmark It has been a history of turns and the occasional betrayal, but Hong Kong’s experiment with democracy, incubated within the Special Administrative Region, was always going to...
Cleansing the Platforms: YouTube, Censorship and Grievance
Stripping the altars, burning the heretics and cleansing the stables are the usual fare of a morally crazed order. The engaged agents think they have found the reason for...
