You can listen to the live Pop-Culture Radio show about BSG Razor.

Discussing how War Terrorism and Pop-culture converge from the Islamic view.

http://www.hotconflict.com/blog/2007/11/battlestar-gala.html

Barbarity can subdue entire populations and to suggest otherwise is missing the point of the 3rd (or was it 4th?) Punic War. Where is Carthage now?

I am so glad it has kept up.

Why do you think that it would be part of public record and available for public dissemination if someone, called BadGuy, has been succesfully tortured for info, what the info was, what actions were or were not taken as a result of the info, and finally who if anyone was killed, just so a Tranzi-Kosmo can look up said info, pass along to comrades of said BadGuy and allow for retaliation? Thats REALLY smart.

Heres how the post sounds:

Hey I want to feel warm and fuzzy about my Gubiment so I wanna know which one of our Citizens is keeping my lil ol butt free and safe at nite by hurting/maiming/killing BadGuys around the world thru torture and just to make me feel even better in my Warm N Fuzzy Bed let me (and ok I know I know, the BadGuys will also find out this info, and just in case they dont lets put it on overy PC/TV screen just so that they CANT miss it) know what plots were folied, how, when where and why, just so I feel OK. And no, the fact that intel can be inferred from said info being released to the Gen Pop, ie going back to BadGuys, doesnt make a lick o difference to me, Im Warm N Fuzzy in my Bed.

Oh and please provide said info in triplicate, along with DNA, Xray, Biometric and any/all forms to Identify Citizens of U.S.A. that carried out such atrocities against poor and helpless BadGuys, I want to send a care package to a friend named Mohamed in Iran. Carry on, nothing to see here.

Signed:

Tranzi Kosmo Guy in USA(land I kinda love, not sure, lets hand it over to the rest of the world and find out how they can do with it)

cc’d: International Court of Justice, The Hague, Brussels, Belgium (cause I can)

Why do you think that it would be part of public record and available for public dissemination if someone, called BadGuy, has been succesfully tortured for info, what the info was, what actions were or were not taken as a result of the info, and finally who if anyone was killed, just so a Tranzi-Kosmo can look up said info, pass along to comrades of said BadGuy and allow for retaliation? Thats REALLY smart.

Heres how the post sounds:

Hey I want to feel warm and fuzzy about my Gubiment so I wanna know which one of our Citizens is keeping my lil ol butt free and safe at nite by hurting/maiming/killing BadGuys around the world thru torture and just to make me feel even better in my Warm N Fuzzy Bed let me (and ok I know I know, the BadGuys will also find out this info, and just in case they dont lets put it on overy PC/TV screen just so that they CANT miss it) know what plots were folied, how, when where and why, just so I feel OK. And no, the fact that intel can be inferred from said info being released to the Gen Pop, ie going back to BadGuys, doesnt make a lick o difference to me, Im Warm N Fuzzy in my Bed.

Oh and please provide said info in triplicate, along with DNA, Xray, Biometric and any/all forms to Identify Citizens of U.S.A. that carried out such atrocities against poor and helpless BadGuys, I want to send a care package to a friend named Mohamed in Iran. Carry on, nothing to see here.

Signed:

Tranzi Kosmo Guy in USA(land I kinda love, not sure, lets hand it over to the rest of the world and find out how they can do with it)

cc’d: International Court of Justice, The Hague, Brussels, Belgium (cause I can)

Battlestar Galactica is on the opposite end of the spectrum of political correctness. Case-in-point. The doctor smokes! He walks around the infirmary, dispensing medical information to cancer patients with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

P.C. is Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Counselor Troi tells Mark Twain that the people of the future have become enlightened and given up smoking and upon seeing the wonders of the future, Mark Twain replies that some things would be worth giving up cigars for.

I think you are rather spectacularly missing the point. Yes there are certain assumptions about the BSG universe that are not hard SF, but the assumptions are mostly sufficiently dramatically logical that they invite a willing suspension of belief provided one is not wholly hung up on scientific veracity. Of course the idea that artificial gravity is so seamless that even Raptors have their own field is even more incredible than FTL drives. Seamless artificial gravity is accepted because the cost and logistics of attempting SF in a space setting without that assumption is prohibitive.

But the objection that there are FTL drives but not non fallout kinectic energy weapons seems to be a stupid one. What makes you think that the Cylons, to begin with, wanted to avoid their weapons having fallout ? I mean they were trying to wipe out humanity, fallout would have been a feature, not a bug. Obviously in space Fallout would not be a problem. The use of bullets and shells rather than some form of directed energy may make less sense, and was done for a grittier feel to the show.

The objection to the Non Networked computers is equally silly and misses the point. The point was to illustrate that Human technology took a big backwards hit after the departure of the Cylons, some of it legally mandated. As for an onboard network being as isolated as a single computer, how do you figure this ? The show even goes as far as expositing that a Cylon attack would be accomplished through either the Radio Coms system or through the Dradis (Radar). You should probably not be criticising the writers when your critcisms are so poorly thought through.

Jim Rockford:

I hate PC pieties warping my drama as much as the next man, but I really think you are off base with BSG. The idea that in extremis people and cultures only do the most ruthlessly necessary to survive is massively refuted by some 5,000 years of recorded history. People regularly behave in self destructive ways, assuming that holding to their culture and norms in extremis is sometimes self destructive, and history is littered with the corpses of cultures that when faced with a choice of extinction or abandonement of their traditions and ways chose extinction. But, as has been pointed out the show really does explore those choices, in fact it is one of the major themes and propels much of the story line. From rationing medicine, to banning abortion, to simply requisitioning by force, to declaring martial law, executions without trial, attempting genocide, employing suicide bombers, contemplating abject surrender, torture, fraudulent elections, collective punishment, shooting cicvialian transports, abandoning those who can’t keep up – it is not the PC world of Star Trek, and very often the writers make the strong case even for the immoral action. I mean, have you even watched the show?

To call it PC because in this world it has been the custom that Women serve in the front line and have long done so, and because the Society does not immediately transition to some sort of stepford wives arrangement is a failure of your imagination, not the writers. Leaving aside the problem that the survivors are desperately short of trained military personnel as it is and would find it very difficult to simply pull maybe half of those people off the line to make babies, it is not as if the show does not deal with the fertility issue, it deals with it all the time. Historically of course societies in extremis do not induce baby booms – WW2 was a baby bust – the boom occured in peacetime. This is based on the simple fact that at a minimum each new baby is a net drain on rescouces for a decade and a half, a society which is desperately fighting for survival will usually wait to settle that issue before weighing itself with so many extra burdens.

BSG does seem to attract a certain amount of critics who are as vociferous as they are ignorant.

I’m not sure you fully took the meaning of the story. Cain never made a hard call in her life. The extended DVD showed that, as a child, rather than take a minimal risk to double back a few feet and help her little sister up after she tripped while running to a shelter, she ran away and left her sister to die. Right after, I might add, her father said with his dying words that Cain had no other responsibility but see to the safety of her sister. Later, after the attack, rather than attempting to go along with an uncertain future, she decided the fate of her ship and crew would be suicide by cylon, because whether it took a week or a year, there is only one end her guerrilla war could’ve had. Her entire life had her make the morally costly decision regardless of whether it was right or not, because if she stopped equating the hard thing and the costly thing with the right thing and the necessary thing, she’d have to face the fact that she didn’t nobly sacrifice her sister so she herself could live to fight another day: she let her sister die because she was paralyzed by cowardice and couldn’t take the smallest of risks to herself. Hence she reason she rewarded Shaw for murdering an innocent women and then told her never to consider whether she made the right call or try to learn from the experience.

As for the lives she “saved,” she killed considerably more people that should’ve been her responsibility. Her decision to walk right into an obvious cylon trap killed 700 crew and scored a victory she herself deemed insignificant. Her decision to leave the civilian fleet they found to die killed about 10,000, assuming a similar population density to Galactica’s fleet. And her decision to torture and psychologically destroy Gina out of spite rather than interrogate her properly or execute her led to the deaths of 5,000 people when Gina committed suicide by nuclear weapon. So that’s about 15,700 needlessly killed versus 1,700 who were still alive when the Pegasus found Galactica. Cain killed an entire order of magnitude more people than she saved. And, as I said, they, too, would’ve died if Cain’s quest for vengeance hadn’t come to a premature end.

>>”Again, thanks for expending the energy to present RAZOR in more than the usual black & white simplistic morality nonsense we get from the entertainment industry these days.”

since you invoke the simplicity of Hollywood but then cite:

“Example: you either use torture to save 10 million innocent New Yorkers from being nuked, or keep your hands “clean” and let it happen, resulting in another 10 million innocents in Tehran being nuked in retaliation”

Give me an example in history here torture has EVER resulted in such a successful outcome.

While you’re at it I want three and references. Enough bullsh** about the ticking timebomb theory. We have had case after case of citizens tortured over suspicions that resulted in no useful information other than tp prove that people ill confess to anything under torture – poisoning the pool of information gleaned to the point of making it useless.

End result…only pain and misinformation. And more torture since all sides now take part in it.

Woo hoo…nice world. Next stop. Maybe your neighbor kills you to take over your wife and family because he wants to. Nature (Cain) only records that a family unit survived. Do you want to go there? I mean it’s only a simplistic thought experiment but perhaps as valid as the ticking timebomb.

JB

JB

Cane’s story is about self-sacrifice. Example: you either use torture to save 10 million innocent New Yorkers from being nuked, or keep your hands “clean” and let it happen, resulting in another 10 million innocents in Tehran being nuked in retaliation. Either choice will leave you waking from nightmares for the rest of your life.

Cane is not a monster. Someone has to make the hard calls so that others will survive. Sure, the “not responsible” crowd will denounce her… but these are the same people who take a “righteous” stand against waterboarding, with a wink/nod that if their city is ever at risk, someone (like Cane) will violate the law and save their butt. Its so easy to be moral when nothing is at risk.

Again, thanks for expending the energy to present RAZOR in more than the usual black & white simplistic morality nonsense we get from the entertainment industry these days. I’ll be buying the CD.

Semper Fi

However, although I still don’t agree with it, Ilya Somin’s version of this point over at Volokh Conspiracy strikes me as reasonable.