I’m reaching that age when one’s body starts to fall apart. It could happen any day — that first stroke, that first cancer diagnosis. I can’t pretend that it’s not going to happen. I’m so blessed that it hasn’t happened yet.
As a result, I am savoring every moment of happiness. My family is a source of infinite joy in each moment. I want to squeeze the last drop of happiness out of the present.
But when that first death knell sounds, I will be ready. My goal will be the happiness of my family and others, and I will do whatever it takes for them. I’m not talking the big things; rather, it’s the small hugs, smiles, favors, etc. that count.
Even in my dying breath, I can still smile and say “I love you”, to bring that little bit of happiness into someone’s life.
As you know, I live in Cambodia, a thoroughly Buddhist country. Most of my life I have adhered to the Buddhist philosophy of detachment, of avoiding need and dependence, the causes of suffering. But you know, the Buddha abandoned his wife and baby son. I wouldn’t do that, nor would most Cambodians, who dearly love their families. On the contrary, my recent philosophy, and that of most Cambodians, is that of the old Barbara Streisand song: “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”
The future Buddha sneaks away from his wife and baby son: “The Great Escape”
I loved my daughter, who died of cancer at the age of 7. My feeling today is that “It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” To have lived a life without love is not to have lived at all.
So today, on my birthday, as I contemplate my demise, I am still happy in the moment, and I can continue to make my loved ones happy. It will be worth the effort.
For most of the history of mankind, and in many countries today, the leader has usually led a luxurious life of debauchery and corruption, oblivious to the needs of his people. Yes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. But for millennia, the People accepted that system as inevitable, so they accepted the status quo and even loved their king.
My many years of schooling purported to teach me that there was some kind of positive arrow of history, pointing in the direction of the betterment of mankind. Those courses in philosophy showed, first, a concern for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, as John Stuart Mill argued. Then, in the Age of Enlightenment, people were seen to have rights. In order to achieve these goals, education was deemed necessary, in order to form an enlightened populace and electorate. The United States was the beacon on the hill, shining democracy into the world, and declaring that “All men are created equal.” Even in the 20th century, the rights of women and minorities were enshrined in all sorts of laws, and improvements were made.
I was brought up to see this progress. Democracy, equality, and human rights have been almost my religion, as I believed so fervently in these principles. Having been nurtured in the same educational system and American culture, I believed that other Americans had this same belief in Democracy, in Progress towards more equal rights and opportunities.
Well, now I have been proven wrong. Americans have now voted to turn their backs on Democracy and Human Rights. That is my great disillusionment from the recent election, where bigotry, discrimination, denial of rights, and deification of the supreme leader have now taken center stage.
Did someone mention ‘divine right’? We now have ‘The Chosen One’ at the helm. His followers claim that everything he says and does is inspired by God, and therefore true and correct, despite fact-checkers from the Washington Post finding some 30,573 lies since he first took office in 2017. All fake news, I guess. I have avoided the word ‘criminal’, because a ‘Chosen One’ cannot commit a crime, especially since his own hand-picked Supreme Court has decreed that he is above the law.
Americans have decided that they want a supreme leader in the old style: corrupt, debauched, caring only for himself, seeking vengeance on anyone who opposes him, above the law, but projecting strength and manhood.
Is America’s grand experiment with Democracy at an end? Has it been shown to be ineffective, now that the People have rejected it?
One issue from the election that stands out in my mind is that of tariffs. Trump was able to completely misconstrue the notion of tariffs by saying, “I’ll put a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods. Think of how much money they will have to pay us.” The American electorate shouted “Yes! Yes! Let the Chinese pay us billions of dollars in tariffs.” If Trump or the American population had even a modicum of economic education, they would immediately see that tariffs are paid by the importer, not the Chinese, and the importer passes the 60% on to the customer. This amounts to a 60% tax, which will cause inflation for the already hard-pressed Americans. But they cannot or will not see this.
My point is that a lack of economic and civic education allows the demagogue to bamboozle the people, as in the H.L. Mencken quote at the top of this page. This is exactly the argument against Democracy put forth by Plato and Aristotle, over 2000 years ago. That is where America has failed; it has allowed its education system to deteriorate to the point where the population has become like sheep, vulnerable to cruel manipulation by despots. We have reached 1984, where Big Brother can say that something is black, when it is clearly white, and be believed.
This is why I am so disillusioned with the election. I have devoted my entire life to education, and it pains me so much to see the current anti-intellectualism and downright hatred of education in society, leaving the population susceptible to this demagoguery.
It looks as though we are going back, not just to the past century, but to the sybaritic despots of millennia ago.
Trump’s closing argument was made in Madison Square Garden, directed to a mostly male audience. It was vulgar; it was angry; it was politically incorrect. On CNN, David Axelrod claimed that Trump was closing his campaign poorly, that he should be focusing on the economy and solid issues.
I disagree. Trump’s closing message has been hate, hate, hate. This is exactly what appeals to that white, male audience, and will stir them up to go out and vote their hatred. Those guys feel that their manhood has been stolen from them. Their (often female) bosses, and probably their own wives, are constantly harping that they are lazy slobs who can’t do anything right. The message is, “what kind of man are you?” Those belittled males are finding their revenge through Trump.
Trump speaks their language, especially when he keeps calling Harris epithets like ‘dumb as a rock’, or ‘mentally deficient.’ He is the dirty old man that many men can identify with. Back in 2016, when the “Grab ‘em by the p***y” remark came out, many pundits opined that that would be the end of Trump’s chances. I claim the opposite: such ‘locker-room talk’ was exactly what American males wanted to hear, and may have even WON Trump the election. That may be what is happening this time, or at least, that’s what Trump is hoping for.
Just picture those rioters from Jan. 6. All decked out in some kind of Halloween costumes, pretending they are real tough guys. I almost want to laugh, but they are pathetic. A comment on TV by prostitutes sticks in my mind: they say that those bad-ass characters turn out to be their most pathetic clients. Listening to Trump not only makes them feel like real men, but also makes it sound that abuse of women, political violence, and racial discrimination are quite all right.
Contrast this with Kamala Harris. Axelrod and others are praising her for her disciplined closing arguments, for ‘staying on message.’ I watched her Town Hall on CNN, which some pundits described as a ‘home run’. I didn’t view it that way. To me, she came across as oh-so-politically correct. She had a ready and scripted answer (or rather, non-answer) to every anticipated question. She performed well, but I felt that there was no ’there’ there. Did she really mean any of it?
She lays out her plans, complete with numbers and statistics, about the economy, etc. How is it that most Americans claim that they don’t know her, that she hasn’t defined her policies? It’s that those plans go right over most people’s heads, because she is not really passionate about them (with the possible exception of the abortion issue), and people can see through her empty promises.
Harris’ supporters point at Trump, and say, quite rightly, that he has no plans or policies at all, other than vague and impossible ideas like rounding up millions of illegals and shipping them out, or putting high tariffs on imports. He is lambasted for stating that he has a ‘concept’ for a healthcare reform of Obamacare. He contradicts himself daily, so that if we just take his words verbatim, we have no idea what he is talking about.
But of course we do know exactly what he is talking about on all these issues, whether he actually states it or not, or even says the opposite (e.g. denying Project 2025, claiming that he will ‘protect women’, etc. ). This is because his hatred of immigrants, non-whites, women, LGBTQs, et al., is so palpable in every word he speaks, even when he is ‘weaving.’ Sending the military on vengeance missions against his ‘enemies within’ list strikes an emotional chord with the male hatred for the system that has so demeaned them and beaten them down.
For Trump’s supporters, resonance with his hateful messages produces a visceral response, untouched by rational arguments or facts. That’s why he may just win on Tuesday.
Noah’s Ark — the more you think about it, the more you realize how impossible it is.
Do religious scriptures have any meaning at all? More and more, I come to see the answer as negative.
Let’s start with the Bible, which is chock full of contradictions. Perhaps the most important one is also perhaps the most important moment in the whole Christian narrative: the empty tomb on Easter Sunday. The Gospels have very different versions of which woman or women were at the tomb, what they saw or didn’t see, and what they did or didn’t do afterwards. This is supposed to be the ‘word of God.’ Would God lie, or contradict Himself?
To most Christians, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether the Old Testament says ‘an eye for an eye’, while the New Testament says to ‘turn the other cheek.’ Did Jesus come as a peacemaker, or ‘with a sword’? Who cares?
I find it comical that 200 years ago the Bible was used to justify, according to Americans, slavery, racism, and denying women’s rights, but now, 200 years later, slavery, racism, and denying women’s rights, have now miraculously become bad, according to the very same Bible. You don’t hear much about the ‘curse of Ham’ anymore. I remember, from my youth, Ephesians 5:24: “wives should submit in everything to their husbands.” I’m not hearing that much these days.
The Bible is just a symbol; what it actually says is of little importance. You can justify anything you want with the various contradictory passages in the Bible.
I’m not singling out Christianity for its hypocrisy. Take Islam, where the Quran is written in Arabic. In most countries, the Arabic language is sacred and may not be translated, so most Muslims memorize verses and prayers in Arabic without the slightest idea what they are mouthing. In Africa, I saw young boys learning to recite the entire Quran, without knowing the meaning of one word they were chanting. The Quran is sacred, but most Muslims don’t know what’s in it and can’t even read it.
In fact, much of Islamic doctrine comes not from the Quran, but from the Hadith — sayings attributed by a wide variety of sources to have come from the Prophet Mohammed or his entourage. Just as in Christianity, the Hadith contains many contradictions, and Islam has various schools of thought and interpretations about which verses are more authentic or more important than others.
Here in Buddhist Cambodia, where I live, most people can’t even name the holy scriptures (the Tripitaka — bet you didn’t know that), much less quote from them. People follow the teachings of the monks, and of their family upbringing, oblivious to what the scriptures say.
Just as in other religions, Buddhism has various versions, interpretations, and contradictions among the Tripitaka. Cambodian Theravada Buddhism recognizes the Pali Canon, which differs from other branches of Buddhism.
So why do we have holy scriptures, anyway? Well, for one thing, they symbolize the ancient continuity of the religion. Simply the very existence of the Bible — whatever it says — shows that Christianity has been around for a long time. It gives Christians a sense of rootedness. Same goes for the Quran and the Tripitaka. They give the religious community a pivotal point of unity, even though the (some 45,000) Christian sects interpret the Bible in different ways, or emphasize different points of it.
Those 45,000 Christian sects, which all agree to accept the Bible as holy scripture, but which have 45,000 different interpretations of it, are to me the most convincing evidence that the Bible is an important focal point for Christianity, but that it doesn’t really matter what the Bible actually says.
What would JD Vance do if he were President (quite a likely possibility, I’d say, given Trump’s age and recent dementia)? No one knows, because no one knows what he thinks or believes. He is a total chameleon, who says whatever he thinks Trump wants him to say. He has no ideological core — neither liberal nor conservative. There is no ‘there’ there.
One thing you can say about him: he ain’t dumb. He graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University (I give that more credit than his gentleman’s Cs at Yale). That’s a lot more than you can say about senile Don Trump.
As President, he might just weigh every decision without an ideological bias and try to judge the most rational and practical solution. He might support Ukraine but not Israel, or maybe vice versa. He has made no real campaign promises that he might be held to keep. He could be like Kamala Harris and simply claim that his positions ‘evolve’ and may change from day to day, depending on changing circumstances.
On the other hand, his blind ambition and total lack of integrity means that he would do anything to stay in power. This is especially dangerous in light of the New Royal Presidency, that is, the fact that the President is now immune from prosecution and can do anything he wants, as long as he labels it ‘official’. The Emoluments clause of the Constitution says that he couldn’t use the office of the President to enrich himself, the way the Trump family has. But so what? He could order the Treasury to give him billions of dollars, or steal money any way he wants; he can’t be prosecuted.
Another thing that worries me: the culture wars, or rather, class warfare. To the extent that we can believe his poor-boy, rags-to-riches background, he has risen into the ranks of the elite, so that he might defend the interests of the nouveaux-riches. Tax cuts for the rich. More fossil fuels. De-regulation of banking and finance. Cuts to welfare programs.
He probably feels, “If I could rise through the ranks to become rich, why can’t all those lazy slobs on welfare?” A ‘let-them-eat-cake’ attitude. His rise to wealth may force him into a pro-wealth ideology.
Compare him to Mike Pence. All through Trump’s Presidency, Pence was the most obsequious, fawning jerk imaginable, but once Trump was out of office, Pence became more or less his own man. I could see that happening with Vance. Still, Vance’s version of ‘being his own man’ is worlds apart from Pence’s version. There’s no telling what he might do.
The United States boasts one of the strongest economies in the world, with a 2.4% inflation rate and a 4.2% unemployment rate. Yet most Americans think the US economy is doing poorly, and they point to the high price of groceries. What is going on here? I have my own scenario, which I’m not hearing in the mainstream media.
Suppose you have been the head of a family since Covid days. Back then, you were forced to stay home from work or school, without travelling either for work or for leisure, without going out for restaurants or other recreation, or without having to hire outside childcare for your family. You spent less money, and you were able to make ends meet and maybe even pay off some of your previous debt. These were days of financial contentment and stability. Because this was happening to millions of people, they weren’t going out and spending money, and so prices remained low on account of the low demand. These were the good-ol’ Covid days that you may remember with nostalgia.
Along came the end of Covid, and millions of people exercised their pent-up demand on a spending spree: going out to restaurants or travelling. They returned to their erstwhile lifestyles of living beyond their means. This caused a lot of financial stress, perhaps fostering a keep-up-with-the-Joneses mindset. With all this spending, prices naturally went up, bringing inflation to 9% at one point. But then the Fed started combating inflation, and the rate fell all the way back to the current 2.4%.
However, people are still comparing current prices to prices during Covid, and the inflation rate, while low, is still positive, meaning that prices haven’t come down at all. People look back to the Covid days positively, since prices were low.
How about unemployment? Politifact claims that for the first 30 months of Trump’s presidency, the US created 5.2 million new jobs, compared to 13.2 for the Biden administration during his first 30 months. Consider the people who lost their jobs during the Trump administration, let’s say 5% of the workforce, just for the sake of argument. That means that the other 95% of employed workers kept their jobs and were scarcely affected by the economic downturn. Even today, they don’t care what the unemployment rate is (a historically low 4.2%), as long as they keep their own job.
On the other hand, inflation affects everyone, so 100% of the population cares about high prices. In summary, 95% of the population compare today’s high prices (NOT the inflation rate), with prices under Trump, and they don’t care at all about the unemployment rate. They are stressed out at living beyond their means, and look back wistfully to the days when they stayed peacefully at home with their families, saving money. They conclude that the economy under Trump was wonderful and under Biden it has been awful.
I want to emphasize that the same phenomenon has happened all over the world. The inflation rate and the unemployment rate have fluctuated the same way in almost every country. In Europe, for example, the EU inflation rate was 7.4% over 2022, compared to 7% in the US. The EU rate is estimated to have fallen to between 2.5% and 3% in 2024, on the same order as that in the US.
Therefore, to blame Biden-Harris for the inflation is misplaced. The economic trends have been the same in most countries, mostly because the psychological reactions to Covid have been the same. People in many countries are blaming their post-Covid stress on their national leaders, but in most cases, those leaders have not had much influence on the global trends.
If truth is beauty, does truth lie in the eyes of the beholder?
Around 30 years ago, post-modernism was the darling of the intellectual set. I tried to read the main authors — Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Habermas — but found them impossibly pompous and dense. The best I could make out was that their message was roughly, “There are no grand narratives”, or more over-simplified, “There is no truth.” Arguments over post-modernism usually ended with something like, “If the statement ‘There is no truth’ is itself not true, then the post-modern argument contradicts itself. It seemed that the whole movement had died a natural death.
Or so it seemed. Surprisingly, in the past week, I have heard three new references to Post-modernism. Is this school of philosophy making a comeback?
Along came Donald Trump, with his acolyte Kellyanne Conway introducing the notion of ‘alternative facts.’ The whole idea of truth is once again under attack. In the past month, VP candidate JP Vance put the whole issue in a nutshell when he declared that he didn’t care whether the story of Haitians eating pets were true or not; what mattered was the impression it made on voters. Its ‘truth’ was its ability to make a point.
Let’s go back a couple of thousand years to Aristotle’s 0-1 concept of the truth value of a statement — the ‘law of the excluded middle’ . A proposition is either true (=1) or false (=0); there is no middle ground. Then, only a century ago, ‘fuzzy logic’ came along, claiming that a statement could have a truth value between 0 and 1, that is, it could be partly true and partly false. That more or less set the stage for post-modernism.
Now J.D, Vance’s new concept of truth value is that the truth value of a statement is a measure of the effect it produces, of the message it sends. The Haitians-eating-pets had a huge effect and sent the message: “We hate black immigrants.” To many white supremacists, this statement had a truth value of 1.
The problem with this approach to truth is that different groups will assign radically different truth values to the same statement. In this case, there can be no rational argument, since both groups will claim ‘truth’.
In addition, we now have the ‘Gish gallop’, defined by Wikipedia as
The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality.
When Trump spouts a new falsehood every sentence, it becomes impossible to fact-check it all immediately, and so he gets away with some amazing lies without ever being called out. He repeats the lie so often that it becomes ‘truth’ in the minds of most listeners.
An article by Mehdi Hasan (February, 2023) in The Atlantic discussed the phenomenon, and noted what he calls
“Brandolini’s law”: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” The Gish Galloper’s entire strategy rests on exploiting this advantage.
I’m reminded of Keat’s Grecian Urn poem, it which he offers the memorable line, “Truth is beauty; beauty truth.” If we couple this line with the commonly accepted truism going back to Plato: “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder,” it becomes “Truth lies in the eyes of the beholder.” So Keats was a post-modernist.
I fear that the rise of AI will make such post-modern ‘truth’ ubiquitous. We can no longer trust the ‘truth’ of any statement, video, recording, etc. And on the flip side, any real statement can be claimed to be an AI fake, just as the North Carolinian Mark Robinson claims that dozens of his recorded statements and emails are all AI fakes.
Recently, an AI-generated photo of a small girl and her puppy purported to show how Biden had neglected the survivors of hurricane Helene.
Even after people knew that it was an AI fake, many left it on their websites, with explanations such as, “I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter… I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.” More in keeping with the theme of my blog, was this: “Even though that image was AI, it spoke a truth about the disregard Harris and Biden have for ordinary Americans, as evidenced by their criminal non-response to Helene.”
“It spoke a truth.” It was totally fake but its ‘truth’ remained. Let that sink in.
The day may not be far off before we will be Gish-galloped with millions of fake AI images and recordings, so that no one will know what is true or false. We will hear Trump saying he hates Haitians on one channel, and an almost identical clip on another channel saying he loves Haitians. And everyone will believe whichever clip they prefer.
All this notwithstanding, scholar Hans Bertens offers the following:
If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic [sic], epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.
The famous historian Hannah Arendt (most famous quote: “The Banality of Evil”) painted the following frightening picture:
“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.
A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”
Trump speaks as though does he not understand tariffs. He claims that putting a tariff on Chinese goods means that the Chinese will pay the US billions of dollars in tariffs. That’s not how tariffs work:
An import tariff means that the American importer pays the tariff, not the Chinese producer.
2. If the importer pays the tariff, he will immediately pass the increase on to the consumer. That is INFLATION! Trump is proposing huge inflation.
3. Or maybe the importer decides not to pay the high tariff and not to import the product at all. That way, the American consumer must shop around for some other similar product, almost certainly at a higher price. Again, INFLATION!
4. Consumers will buy more American-made products, but at higher prices than they had previously been paying for the imported goods.
5. Other countries, especially China, will surely reciprocate with their own tariffs on American goods. That will result in fewer American exports and therefore fewer American jobs. Is that good for the American economy?
Trump’s previous tariffs had precisely the above effects. Of course, he blames his inflation on Biden, since it was only during the Biden administration that the inflation kicked in.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930
One of the most famous American tariffs was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. It was similar to Trump’s proposed tariffs, although with at least one important difference. It is useful to compare the two.
In the 1930s, other countries quickly retaliated with their own tariffs on American products. That had the effect of lowering American exports in a time of economic depression.
However, one aspect of the Depression was the lowering of prices, that is, DEflation. The tariffs may have even helped to keep prices up. Thus, inflation was not the issue.
When I was in school, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was thought to have caused or at least deepened the Great Depression, but today, most economists agree that its effect was only minimal.
All in all, I think we can say with some certainty that the proposed Trump tariffs will cause inflation. Trump’s talk of controlling inflation is idle talk; he is proposing a lot more inflation. His tariffs will reduce American exports as well as imports. It will, however, force America to become more self-sufficient, albeit with higher costs and prices.
Another difference between 2024 and 1930, which Trump apparently doesn’t understand, is the complexity of global supply chains. He wants voters to think that John Deere tractors are made entirely in the USA, when in fact, the company imports a lot of parts, and also exports its products around the globe. A trade war (“Easy to win” — Trump) would shut down the supply chain and perhaps force John Deere into bankruptcy, with the loss of many jobs. In general, economists agree that a trade war would cause a huge recession.
Therefore, Trump’s tariffs would cause both inflation and a recession. Economies usually experience one but not the other, but our ‘stable genius’ would somehow manage to kill the American economy in both ways.
I posted a joking spoof of Trump’s outrageous lie that illegal Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were eating (White) people’s pets. I was called out on this over Facebook, on grounds that I was escalating Trump’s lies into the public domain, that responding to lies only ‘perpetuates the myth’. After all, this plays right into J.D.Vance’s admitted strategy that it’s OK for Trump to invent any falsehood, as long as it emphasizes his point. By mocking those lies, you focus attention on the point about illegal, horrible, black Haitians invading America.
So what’s the alternative? The most obvious reply is no reply: ignore it and hope it goes away. I would argue that this tactic doesn’t work with Trump’s lies. He will continue to hammer them home on the assumption that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes truth. If the media ignore those everyday repetitions, it becomes an accepted truth that Haitians are eating pets. Trump made the statement to millions of viewers on the televised debate, and Vance has spread it virally to the Trump online echo-chamber. At some point someone is going to have to stand up and say “That’s a lie.”
So the second option is the fact-checking and logical rebuttal. Over the past 8 years, this has not worked with Trump’s 30,000 lies, or whatever the going number is. A logical discussion falls on deaf ears, and even gives the Trumpies the opportunity to raise counter-arguments — usually more and bigger lies. Think of his Covid lies, his anti-vaccine lies, his climate-change hoax lies, etc., going right back to his Obama ‘birther’ lies. You can’t just refute these with the facts.
No, the only way to shut him up or shut him down is to mock him. After a couple of weeks of Haitian cat jokes, you don’t hear him pushing that issue any more. The thing Trump hates most is to be laughed at. The Haitian cat joke takes the issue beyond the realm of rational argument or fact-checking. Rather, cat-eating becomes so ridiculously false that only the craziest Trump radicals can give it any credence.
Suppose that tomorrow, Trump claims to millions of Americans that Harris has hired green Martians to land on Earth to take away all guns. If you try to ignore this, he will keep repeating and amplifying it until people start to fear the green Martians. If you push back that he has no evidence, he will manufacture new evidence, such as saying that their spaceships have been sighted. The issue enters into the public debate as something that could conceivably be true. But if the public laughs at such a ridiculous and impossible lie with a host of internet jokes, Trump would shut up on the issue, as his ego would be under attack.
Trump has said that he will visit Springfield, Ohio, in the next couple of weeks. It will be interesting to see whether he sees this through, or whether he quietly lets the matter drop. I’m guessing the latter, since a visit to Springfield would only raise more derision and humiliation. But with Trump, you never know just how far he will push an obvious lie.
After more than eight years of Trump’s many lies, it appears that mocking him is the only way to shut him up.
I have already written about some of the evils of for-profit universities in Cambodia and elsewhere. Today I want to focus on the use (or lack thereof) of English in those universities.
First, a little background on Cambodia, and many similar countries. The only requirement for university admission is a pass on the public grade-12 examination. There is no English language requirement. Since money is the only criterion for admission, I wager that no high school graduate has ever been rejected by any Cambodian university.
What’s more, no student ever flunks out of a private Cambodian university, because that would represent a loss of tuition revenue. Therefore, students can get zero in all their courses, or not even attend class, and still be passed along, as long as they pay their tuition.
Now since there is no English language requirement, students are admitted with little or no knowledge of English. This has several consequences:
All instruction must be given in the local language, Khmer. Even English literature majors or TEFL majors are taught in Khmer, so that, with no accountability, students may graduate as ‘qualified’ English teachers with little or no knowledge of English.
2. There can be no international student exchanges, foreign students, or foreign teachers, because classes are held in Khmer.
3. When I was in university in America, most courses required the writing of a term paper, which entailed library research, footnotes, references, etc. Nowadays, most international universities subscribe to online libraries like JSTOR, with millions of online papers and articles.
A) The writing of term research papers is not an option for students who do not read English. They cannot do an internet search in English, so any library — online or not — is not an option in Cambodian universities, except just for show.
B) Many Cambodian universities have token libraries or subscribe to online libraries to promote their image, but in practice, libraries are not used.
4. Participation in international conferences or forums is not possible.
Speaking of image-building, I put some of the above ideas to the CEO of a Cambodian university. (Note: the fact that the head is called the CEO illustrates how universities are considered as for-profit companies, not educational institutions.) His disingenuous dodge was, “But we have an English placement exam.” Such a phony exam is just for show, since no one ever fails the exam, and students are admitted into even English courses even if they score 0%.
Another disingenuous dodge is the requirement for students to buy photocopies of 800-page university textbooks in English, even if they cannot read a word of them. In one instance that I have witnessed, the 800-page textbook required for an Art History course was not even about Art History!
All these problems will continue as long as for-profit universities admit and pass along any student willing to pay the tuition.
