COASTLINE JOURNAL

By Michael Cox

One of my favourite books of all time, which also happens to be one of my favourite movies of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, has been thoroughly downgraded, one might even say trashed, by an article in the New Yorker.  The novel, Malcolm Gladwell writes in the August 10 issue, teaches us that there is one law for blacks–and white trash–and another for good old folks, the decent white folks of Maycomb, Alabama.

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, Mary Badham as his daughter Jean Louis "Scout" Finch.

At the conclusion of the book, Bob  Ewell, who has been embarrassed by Atticus in court (and accused of attacking his daughter), attacks Scout and her brother. The reclusive next-door neighbour Boo Radley comes to their defence and accidentally kills Ewell. But the sheriff convinces Atticus that it is in everyone’s best interest to say Ewell fell on his knife, saving Boo a trial and possible jail time. “Can you possibly understand?” Atticus asks Scout, after explaining to her that she must tell everyone who asks, that Ewell fell on his knife, and not that Boo stabbed him when he came to the children’s rescue.

“His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites…and another for white trash,” Gladwell writes. “A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb Alabama.” (more…)

By Corey Sampson, Fort Hays State University

download this essay (pdf): Is the Republican Party.pdf

This paper examines the issue of human trafficking or modern day slavery in the United States and the role the Republican Party is playing to eradicate it.  After defining human trafficking and looking at the historical role of the Republican Party as the Antislavery Party the paper will examine the three supply side causes of human trafficking in this country.  The three supply side causes are immigration, labor rights, and the unequal status of women.  These three issues were chosen based on a report by the U.N.  After examining these three causes, this paper will look at the Republican Party Platform and policies to determine if they continue to stand for the values of the Antislavery Party.

Slavery Still Exists.

The grassroots campaign by The Polaris Project, has a goal to raise public awareness about the realities of modern day slavery or human trafficking that continues exist in this world.[1] The fact that this campaign is needed speaks to the problem of modern day slavery in society today. While legal slavery was prohibited in this country in 1865,[2] the existence of slavery has not ceased.  Similar to the end of legal slavery in the United States, there needs to be a political response to end illegal slavery in this country.  Since the Republican Party was instrumental in the process of making slavery illegal, the assumption would be that they are leading the current fight to eradicate slavery in this country today. This proves not to be the case. Despite the Republican Party’s historical origins, they can no longer be considered the Antislavery Party.  This paper will examine what human trafficking is and will briefly examine the historical origins of the Republican Party as the Antislavery Party. The paper will examine three major supply side causes of human trafficking, including immigration, labor rights, and the unequal status of women, as well as how Republican Party platforms and policies are ineffective in their effort to end slavery in the United States.

What is Human Trafficking?

According to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, human trafficking is:

1) Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion or in which the person induced to perform such an act is under 18, or

2) The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion, for the purpose of subjecting that person to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.[3]

This law defines human trafficking for purposes of prosecution of the crime.  It is important to note within this definition that it is not just the process of moving a person that makes it trafficking, but any action that can be defined as recruitment, harboring, transporting, obtaining etc., of a person against their will for the purpose of labor or services.  With the problem defined, the next exploration needs to be the scope of this pernicious issue.  According to reports by the U.S. State Department on the website Trafficking 101 on the page Human Trafficking in the U.S., “between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked annually into the U.S. and the National Runaway Switchboard assesses that thousands of American children are lured into trafficking situations every year.”  Given the scope of this human rights problem, a response is needed.  The government, as in 1865, is best positioned to rectify it. Why would the Republican Party be best equipped to answer this question?  The answer to that is history.

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Christopher Aceto, Wesleyan University

download this essay: what did Chesterton really see

“the only nation in the world founded on a creed”

“America is a nation guided by faith.  Someone once called us ‘a nation with the soul of a church.’  Ninety-five percent of Americans say they believe in God, and I’m one of them” (George W. Bush, Tsinghua speech).  To peel back the layers of the onion which compose a culture, it sometimes takes a foreigner to travel and experience that land first hand.  Likewise sometimes a man must travel to a foreign land to be at liberty to speak of his own homeland in a way that he would not otherwise.

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton, the 20th century’s Alexander de Tocqueville, was that foreigner looking to peel that onion while President Bush was the hombre that did not feel free enough to let it all out here, in “the home of the brave.”  President Bush’s only speech that quotes Chesterton’s “soul of a church” assertion (according to a search of the White House’s website) is the one he made to Tsinghua University in China during February of 2002.  In that speech, he referred to Chesterton as “someone” and not by name when he quoted him.  Could it be that people in the United States do not want to see or hear that “soul of a church” rhetoric?  Chesterton’s assertion is still fitting today but not for the reasons I originally thought.

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Elaine Brière, Simon Fraser University

download this essay: Briere_Fish weirs

“The management of fisheries is intended for the benefit of man, not fish.”
Canadian Economist H. Scott Gordon, 1950

photo by Elaine Brière

Introduction

Amongst my earliest memories are the sights, sounds and smells of fishing activity on the docks of Prince Rupert and Nanaimo. My father was a commercial fisherman of French-Canadian descent. His first boat was a double-ended troller; one of the hundreds seized from Japanese fishers during the war. Salmon was the main fishery, but there were also halibut. In Prince Rupert I remember seeing a mature halibut filling the hold of my father’s thirty-two foot boat. A fish of this size was rare as the once great north coast halibut fishing banks had been greatly depleted even by 1915. After my family moved to Nanaimo in 1958, my father fished salmon for some years in the Georgia Strait before the development of the purse-seine fleet depleted the gulf fishery. Commercial salmon fishers in the Gulf were then forced to travel to the west coast of Vancouver Island to earn a livelihood.

Herring came into Nanaimo harbour in great shoals in the 1950′s. As a 10 year-old I recall the excitement going out to rake herring at night in a dugout canoe with my Indian neighbours, who lived in stilt houses in Newcastle Channel. This was before herring, a vital food for the marine ecosystem, itself became a major commercial fishery. Between 1960 and 1967 when sharply declining stocks forced the closure of the reduction herring fishery, hundreds of tons were taken for fertilizer and feed. Herring stocks are again in serious decline since a market has been developed in Japan for the female roe. Federal fishery biologists estimate that about 170 locations where herring used to spawn in the Johnson and Georgia Straits are barren or near barren. The Indians and their stilt houses disappeared from Newcastle Channel along with the herring. They were removed to the reservation at the other end of town, near the mouth of Nanaimo River, whose marine life was destroyed when it became a booming ground for the logging industry.

Since the European West Coast fisheries began in the latter part of the 19th century, West Coast marine life has gone from awesome abundance to precipitous decline, to extirpation or near extirpation of many species that most British Columbians have never even heard of. (more…)

Vinit Khosla, Simon Fraser University

download this essay: The Ethics and Politics of Climate Change

Climate change is a global phenomenon in at least two senses.  First, it manifests itself across the planet, affecting the air, the ocean, land surfaces and all of life.  Second, it is global in human terms: people everywhere are involved in its production, and they collectively suffer its consequences.  The natural and human aspects of climate change are inseparable, and the issue of how we deal with changes to the climate inevitably becomes entwined with how we deal with one another. (more…)

Most of us have at one time or another used information or images from the internet without permission from the copyright holder (or even giving credit to the originating site). The concept of truly open-source education seems both desirable and threatening: use it for free, but how does someone who writes the article or book, or produces the film, video or musical recording, get paid for their work, if anyone can download it for free?

CBC Radio’s documentary Who Owns Ideas is a good place to get an overview of the controversy, and in a recent story blogger Michael Masnick talks about copyright in the 21st century.

MIT, for example, has made its courses available for free, online. As the controversy over bit torrent sites heats up again with the recent decision against Pirate Bay, it seems we need to invent a new model of information exchange with compensation, perhaps a creative commons.

With this blog, I’m trying to share the collective intellectual experience of liberal studies students across North America by offering downloadable (and full-length) essays contributed by students like you. If this grows over the coming year then it can be a valuable resource not only for graduate students but for undergrads and the general public. It will only be a success with a wide-ranging infusion of ideas–your ideas, your essays.

Michael Cox

Arista B. Dechant, Fort Hays State University, Kansas

download this essay: theories-of-criminal-behavior

Arista writes:

I have been involved in extensive research since undergraduate school surrounding criminals and how they operate. There are many ideas surrounding the cause of antisocial behavior and criminality. Through this independent study class for Fort Hays State University’s Justice Studies (Graduate) Program, I felt I would have the perfect opportunity to explore many of theories which have developed, over time, to explain criminal behavior.

It is my hope that this research paper will provide an extensive and educational look at how the psychology of a criminal impacts the activity which is produced. It seems that every year brings new ideas, but I feel that the following is a conclusive look of research compiled from the beginning of criminality to the present.

I have also provided a history of criminality and how it has developed into what we now understand as forensic psychology. This field will always remain fluid with discovery, and my greatest pleasure would come from being part of it in the future.

“Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves behind, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him.” Edmund Locard

The application of psychology in the criminal and civil justice system is known as forensic psychology. Hugo Munsterberg (1863 – 1916), a German-American psychologist was the first to pioneered the application of criminal psychology in research and theories. His research extended to witness memory, false confessions, and the role of hypnosis in court.

In 1889, psychology students were beginning to take courses related to law such as “Crime and Modern Theories of the Criminal,” but for the most part, American psychologists did not immediately embrace the study of legal issues (Bersoff, Ogloff, & Tomkins, 1996). For reasons unstated, the study of psychology and law began to wane after World War II. In the 1960’s, psychologists were beginning to “be called on” to make predictions of dangerousness, make clinical assessments relevant to insanity defense pleas, and make assessments and/or offer testimony about other mental health issues in the courts. In the early 1980’s law, criminal justice, and social science would become embraced in legal education. Interdisciplinary and specialized training was introduced at the doctoral, internship, post-doctoral, and continuing educational levels. Textbooks began devoting themselves to forensic testimony and assessment. “Nearly three quarters of a century, from the time that Munsterberg had called for an application of psychology to law, his call had been answered” (Bersoff). (more…)