On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, issued with authoritarian glee legal notices to X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to remove material within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”. The relevant material featured a livestreamed video of a stabbing attack by a 16-year-old youth at Sydney’s Assyrian Orthodox Christ the Good Shepherd Church the previous day. Two churchmen, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and Rev. Isaac Royel, were injured. Those at X, and its executive, Elon Musk, begged to differ,…
Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark
The attitudes down under towards social media have turned barmy. While there is much to take Elon Musk to task for his wrecking ball antics at the platform formerly known as Twitter, not to mention his highly developed sense of sociopathy, the hysteria regarding the refusal to remove images of a man in holy orders being attacked by his assailant in Sydney suggests a lengthy couch session is in order. But more than that, it suggests that the censoring types are trying, more than ever, to tell users what to see and under what conditions for fear that we will…
“Can we still see universities as places to learn and produce knowledge that, at the risk of sounding naïve, is for the greater good of humanity, independently transient of geopolitical skirmishes?” Wanning Sun from the University of Technology, Sydney, asks in hope. “The history of universities during the Cold War era tells us that it is precisely at such times that our government and our universities need to fight tooth and nail to preserve the precarious civil society that has taken millennia to construct.” History can be a useful, if imperfect guide, but as its teary muse, Clio, will tell…
The skin toasted Australian Minister of Defence, Richard Marles, who resembles, with each day, the product of an overly worked solarium, was adamant. Not only will Australians be paying a bill up to and above A$368 billion for nuclear powered submarines it does not need; it will also be throwing A$100 billion into the coffers of the military industrial complex over the next decade to combat a needlessly inflated enemy. Forget diplomacy and funding the cause (and course) of peace – it’s all about the weapons and the Yellow Peril, baby. On April 18, Marles and Defence Industry Pat Conroy…
Only this month, the near comatose US President, Joe Biden, made a casual, castaway remark that his administration was “considering” the request by Australia that the case against Julian Assange be concluded. The WikiLeaks founder has already spent five gruelling years in London’s Belmarsh prison, where he continues a remarkable, if draining campaign against the US extradition request on 18 charges, 17 incongruously and outrageously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917. Like readings of coffee grinds, his defenders took the remark as a sign of progress. Jennifer Robinson, a longtime member of Assange’s legal team, told Sky News…
The Middle East has, for some time, been a powder keg where degrees of violence are tolerated with ceremonial mania and a calculus of restraint. Assassinations can take place at a moment’s notice. Revenge killings follow with dashing speed. Suicide bombings of immolating power are carried out. Drone strikes of devastating, collective punishment are ordered, all padded by the retarded notion that such killings are morally justified and confined. In all this viciousness, the conventional armed forces have been held in check, the arsenals contained, the generals busied by plans of contingency rather than reality. The rhetoric may be vengeful…
While the Australian government continues to pirouette with shallow constancy on the issue of Israel’s war in Gaza, making vacuous utterances on Palestinian statehood even as it denies supplying the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) with weapons (spare parts, it would seem, are a different, footnoted matter), efforts made to unearth details of the defence relationship between the countries have so far come to naught. The brief on Australian-Israel relations published by the Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs is deplorably skimpy, noting that both countries have, since 2017, “expanded cooperation on national security, defence and cyber security.” Since 2018, we…
Walking stiffly, largely distracted, and struggling to focus on the bare essentials, US President Joe Biden was keeping company with his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, when asked the question. It concerned what he was doing regarding Australia’s request that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be returned to Australia. Assange, who has spent five tormenting years in Belmarsh Prison in London, is battling extradition to the US on 18 charges, 17 tenuously and dangerously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917. The words that followed from the near mummified defender of the Free World were short, yet bright…
Remorseless killing at the initiation of artificial intelligence has been the subject of nail-biting concern for various members of computer-digital cosmos. Be wary of such machines in war and their displacing potential regarding human will and agency. For all that, the advent of AI-driven, automated systems in war has already become a cold-blooded reality, deployed conventionally, and with utmost lethality by human operators. The teasing illusion here is the idea that autonomous systems will become so algorithmically attuned and trained as to render human agency redundant in a functional sense. Provided the targeting is trained, informed, and surgical, a utopia…
Can it get any busier? The World Court, otherwise known as the International Court of Justice, has been swamped by applications on the subject of alleged genocide. The site of interest remains the Gaza Strip, the subject of unremitting slaughter since the October 7, 2023 cross-border attacks by Hamas against Israel. The retaliation by Israel has been of such brute savagery as to draw the attention of numerous states, including those not directly connected to the conflict. Given that genocide is a crime of universal jurisdiction abominated by international law, and given the broad application of the UN Genocide Convention…
The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was distraught and testy. It seemed that, on this occasion, Israel had gone too far. Not too far in killing over 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a staggering percentage of them being children. Not too far in terms of using starvation as a weapon of war. Not too far in bringing attention to the International Court of Justice that its actions are potentially genocidal. Israel had overstepped in doing something it has done previously to other nationals: kill humanitarian workers in targeted strikes. The difference for Albanese on this occasion was that one of the…
Eulogies should rarely be taken at face value. Plaster saints take the place of complex individuals; faults transmute into golden virtues. But there was little in the way of fault regardingLalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom’s messianic purpose, whose tireless work for the charity, World Central Kitchen (WCK) in northern Gaza had not gone unnoticed. Sadly, the Australian national, along with six other members of WCK, were noticed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) around midnight of April 1 and 2 and targeted in a strike that killed all of them. Other members of the slain crew included Polish citizen Damian Sobol, three…
The human mind is often incapable of tolerating the limitless nature of a universe, the absence of a divine architect, or appreciate that intended designs may be absent when it comes to events awful, ghastly and catastrophic. A disaster with some human agency is bound to have arisen because of a constructed plan, a template to harm, a scheme to injure. The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was another event to befuddle those searching for the plan. The Singaporean-flagged MV Dali container ship lost power on March 26 and collided with the bridge in the early…
Cancer is a stomping bugger of a disease. It seeks the worm-ridden end, a thief finding its way into your body unasked and willingly helping itself. This cellular mass army will, in a most tribal way, make off with your remains chance permitting. So, it’s understandable that people speak about it. Blog, discuss, worry, grieve and gather in the digital house square. But not all grief and its content are ever the same. The recent obsession with Catherine, the Princess of Wales, who many still see as Kate Middleton, is a fitful reminder that no one’s business is seemingly everybody’s,…
Rarely has the International Court of Justice been so constantly exercised by one topic during a short span of time. On January 26, the World Court, considering a filing made the previous December by South Africa, accepted Pretoria’s argument that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was applicable to the conflict in so far as Israel was bound to observe it in its military operations against Hamas in Gaza. (The judges will determine, in due course, whether Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the genocidal threshold.) By 15-2, the judges noted that “the catastrophic humanitarian…
The curved course of the ubiquitous banana has often been the peel of empire, its sweetness masking a sharp, bitter legacy. Arab conquerors introduced it to the African continent as they cultivated a slave market. European imperialism did the same to the Americas via the Canary Islands, insinuating the luscious fruit into markets of solid exploitation and guaranteed returns. In time, demand for bananas grew. Cheap capital cushioned it. Corporation power and secondary colonisation, exercised through such ruthless entities as the United Fruit Company (now the jauntily labelled Chiquita), continued the legacy, collaborating with corrupt elites while exerting control over…
The UN Security Council presents one of the great contradictions of power in the international system. On the one hand vested with enormous latitude in order to preserve international peace and security, it remains checked, limited and, it can be argued, crippled by an all too regular use of the veto by members of the permanent five powers (US, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France). When it comes to the bleeding and crushing of human life in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces (32,300 dead Palestinians and rising), resolutions demanding a cease-fire of a conflict that began with the…
What is it about British justice that has a certain rankness to it, notably when it comes to dealing with political charges? The record is not good, and the ongoing sadistic carnival that is the prosecution (and persecution) of Julian Assange continues to provide meat for the table. Those supporting the WikiLeaks publisher, who faces extradition to the United States even as he remains scandalously confined andrefused bail in Belmarsh Prison, had hoped for a clear decision from the UK High Court on March 26. Either they would reject leave to appeal the totality of his case, thereby setting the…
Two British ministers, the UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron and Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, paid a recent visit to Australia recently as part of the AUKMIN (Australia-United Kingdom Ministerial Consultations) talks. It showed, yet again, that Australia’s government loves being mugged. Stomped on. Mowed over. Beaten. It was mugged, from the outset, in its unconditional surrender to the US military industrial complex with the AUKUS security agreement. It was mugged in throwing money (that of the Australian taxpayer) at the US submarine industry, which is lagging in its production schedule for both the Virginia-class boats and new designs such as…
Be wary of what Washington offers in negotiations at the best of times. The empire gives and takes when it can; the hegemon proffers and in equal measure and withdraws offers it deems fit. This is all well known to the legal team of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, who, the Wall Street Journal “exclusively” reveals, is in ongoing negotiations with US Justice Department officials on a possible plea deal. As things stand, the US Department of Justice is determined to get its mitts on Assange on the dubious strength of 18 charges, 17 confected from the brutal Espionage Act of…
The heralded arrival of the Internet caused flutters of enthusiasm, streaks of heartfelt hope. Unregulated, and supposedly all powerful, an information medium never before seen on such scale could be used to liberate mind and spirit. With almost disconcerting reliability, humankind would coddle and fawn over a technology which would, as Langdon Winner writes, “bring universal wealth, enhanced freedom, revitalized politics, satisfying community, and personal fulfilment.” Such high street techno-utopianism was bound to have its day. The sceptics grumbled, the critiques bubbled and flowed. Evgeny Morozov, in his relentlessly biting study. The Net Delusion,warned of the misguided nature of the…
On March 15, the next stage of an intriguing legal process seeking to hold the Biden administration accountable for its failure to prevent, as well as being complicit in, alleged acts of genocide taking place in Gaza, was taken. It all stems from a lawsuit filed last November in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing a number of Palestinian human rights organisations including Palestinians in Gaza and the United States. The lawsuit sought an order from the court “requiring that the President of the United States, the Secretary of…
It will come as little surprise that colossal Apple has been favouring its own music streaming service in snuffing and stuffing competitors. The company, it has been alleged, has prevented app developers from informing users of less expensive methods to purchase subscriptions outside the scope of Apple’s own services. Its cosmos was all. Central to these claims is the ongoing battle between Apple and the Swedish music streaming service, Spotify, a largely amoral gladiatorial encounter of drain, pinch and seizure that saw the latter draw customers away from Apple’s iTunes. Territorial skirmishes have ensued over the years, with gains and…
How delicious is political hypocrisy. Abundant and rich, it manifests in the corridors of power with regularity. Of late, there is much of it in the US Congress, evident over debates on whether the platform TikTok should be banned in the United States. Much of this seems based on an assumption that foreign companies are not entitled to hoover up, commodify and use the personal data of users, mocking, if not obliterating privacy altogether. US companies, however, are. While it is true that aspects of Silicon Valley have drawn the ire of those on The Hill in spouts of select…
It was praised to the heavens as a work of negotiated and practical genius when it was struck. The then Australian treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, had finally gotten those titans of Big Tech into line on how revenue would be shared with media outlets for using such platforms as supplied by Facebook and Google. Both companies initially baulked at the News Media Bargaining Code, which led to a very publicised spat between Facebook and the Morrison government. For a week in February 2021, users of Facebook in Australia were barred from sharing news. A number of government agencies, trade unions, media…
The town hall meeting is the last throbbing reminder of the authentic demos. People gather; debates held. Views converge; others diverge. Speakers are invited to stir the invitees, provoke the grey cells. Till artificial intelligence banishes such gatherings, and the digital cosmos swallows us whole, cherish these events. And there was much to cherish about Night Falls in the Evening Lands: The Assange Epic, part of a global movement to publicise the importance of freeing WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who remains in the forbidding confines of Belmarsh Prison in London. Held on March 9 in Melbourne’s Storey Hall, it was…
The history of such experiments is not promising. Why would those in the US like the game of rugby league, when an established code of superficial similarity already exists?Fundamental differences, for one thing, abound. The US NFL Superbowl tries to keep blood and violence off the pitch. Force, when exercised, is chivalric, the moves ceremonially packaged. Such contests are astonishingly contained, hemmed in by a distinct netting of protocol and protections. These US padded gladiators remain calm, composed and, when irate, kept within the confines of expected conduct. Rugby league extols speed, the violent tackle, the brutish push, the military…
It can take much bruising, much ridicule, and much castigation to eventually reach the plateau of wisdom. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who took office in November 2022, is one such character. Like a hero anointed by the gods for grand deeds and fine achievements, he was duly attacked and maligned, accused of virtually every heinous crime in the criminal code. Sodomy and corruption featured. Two prison spells were endured. His whole fall from grace as deputy-prime minister was all the more revealing for being instigated by his politically insatiable mentor, Mahathir bin Mohammed, Southeast Asia’s wiliest, and most ruthless…
Nuclear weapons are considered the strategic silverware of nation states. Occasionally, they are given a cleaning and polishing. From time to time, they go missing, fail to work, and suffer misplacement.Of late, the UK Royal Navy has not been doing so well in that department, given its seminal role in upholding the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. In January, an unarmed Trident II D5 nuclear missile fell into the Atlantic Ocean after a bungled launch from a Royal Navy submarine. The missile’s journey was a distinctly shorter than its originally plotted 6,000 km journey that would have ended in a location…
The starvation regime continues unabated as Israel continues its campaign in the Gaza Strip.One of the six provisional measures ordered by the International Court Justice entailed taking “immediate and effective measures” to protect the Palestinian populace in the Gaza Strip from risk of genocide by ensuring the supply of humanitarian assistance and basic services. In its case against Israel, South Africa argued, citing various grounds, that Israel’s purposeful denial of humanitarian aid to Palestinians could fall within the UN Genocide Convention as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or…
