The Law and Politics of Battlestar Galactica

privacyprof writes "Fans of the show Battlestar Galactica might be interested in our interview with writers and producers Ron Moore and David Eick. Three law professors at the blog Concurring Opinions have an hour-long interview with Moore and Eick about the legal, political, moral, and economic issues raised by the show. The interview is available in audio files; alternatively, people can read a transcript of the interview (Part I) and (Parts II and III). Part I examines the lawyers and trials in the show, how torture is depicted, as well as how the humans must balance civil liberties and security. Part II examines politics and commerce. It explores how the cylon attack affected the humans' political system, and it examines how commerce works in the fleet. Part III examines issues related to cylons, such as the humans' treatment of cylons, how robots should be treated by the law, how the cylons govern themselves politically."

Re:There's a great article

[armareum]

Most of you will be warely of a link from an AC, but definitely avoid this one!

Re:it's interesting to see

[peragrin]

You should ACTUALLY watch the show.

The workers's strike was eventually resolved by rotating jobs. The ore processor's got moved to other jobs in the fleet, and other people were brought in to fill in the gaps. Not idealistic but workable and it keeps people from getting bored and lazy in their work. It also makes the more stressful jobs easier to deal with.

It is how that episode finished up I do believe. Might have been the next.

Re:What I'd Like...

[downix]

In the original series, (where the Cylons broke free of their original reptilic masters) a man named Count Iblis corrupted the central control computer, now called the Supreme Cylon, which in turn directly reprogrammed the IL-series Commanders (who from then on had a voice identical to Iblis), which in turn reprogrammed the IL-series humanoids and IL-series Centurions. Now, how much of this will be taken into the new show I have no idea, but it was an interesting take.

Re:it's interesting to see

[LandDolphin]

Take it your not finished with the series. Else, you'd know that the humans sent a pilot over into the Cylons space that violated the treaty and provoked the attack.

Is BSG still relevant?

[lelitsch]

I know a number of fans, but quite frankly, I haven't really watched it since the end of season 2. Yes, the beginning of season 3 got more into the moral issues of occupation and resistance, but it did it at the expense of storyline, internal consistency, and even believability. I mean for crying out loud, who brought 20th century trucks from Old Caprica to New Caprica?

But the main reason I started to first TiVo instead of watching, then not watching the episodes on my TiVo, and finally not taping them at all, is that in my opinion, the quality of the writing went way down. Season 1 and 2 had terrific, well timed dialog, Season 3 and later descended to shouting, ranting, and screaming.

Re:it's interesting to see

[AJWM]

That turns out to have been a toaster^WCylon pretending to be human to provide an excuse for the attack (a time honored tradition in military history).

There's no way the Cylons had the time to build up the force they had, and to conduct the necessary infiltration of Colonial defense infrastructure, were that not the case.

Besides, even if that were a human, don't you think nuking twelve planets is a bit of overreaction to one lone pilot incursion? That's like USSR launching WW-III because of Francis Gary Powers' U-2 incident. A bit vicious, don't you think?

Re:it's interesting to see

[idontgno]

The Cyclons on the other hand are unswervingly devoted to their God.

That's a generalization, and still wrong when there are only 12 personality basetypes to compare.

Specifically, the "Brother Cavil" model seems to be persistently atheist in all incarnations shown.

I believe there's an intentional parallel with western secular 'Christians' and extremist Muslims.

That's an easy assumption, but there's a practical inconsistency there: the Cylons are a functional nation-state complete with a high-tech standing army which the Colonials are in active war with. Extremist Islam has no such state. At least, not one which is actively at war with any nation of the West. So the comparison to any current situation is seriously flawed. If you focus on just the differences in religion and want to see a connection to behavior and interactions between the factions, you can certainly see it, but it's not cut and dried.

Re:it's interesting to see

[Herschel Cohen]

Do not be so certain. A real case in Texas, that is different in that no names were called. I believe it was around Halloween, but years ago, when two Japanese students approached a house seeking directions. They were perceived as a threat and shot to death. From my memory, the individual did not even stand trial. Unsurprisingly, this remains a sore point in Japanese-American (U.S.) relations, to which most of the population of the latter remains blissfully unaware.

The nearest link I found was the second footnote (pasted below) in this article that pertains to a different topic: http://www.pcpages.com/salhq/lawreview.htm [pcpages.com]

2]. Japan Economic Newswire, U.S. Jury Clears Man Who Shot Japanese Student, KYODO NEWS SERVICE, May 24, 1993; Lori Sharn, Violence Shoots Holes in USA's Tourist Image, USA TODAY, Sept. 9, 1993, at 2A.

However, it differs from my memory, because it mentions a trial and I remember it as a pair.

Re:it's interesting to see

[Saxerman]

Here's the wikipedia article on the shooting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Hattori [wikipedia.org] It was in Louisiana back in 1992. There were two trials, one criminal and one civil.

The [criminal] trial lasted seven days. After the jurors deliberated for three and a quarter hours, Peairs was acquitted under Louisiana's "Kill the burglar" statute.

Re:preachy shows

[Grishnakh]

Galactica has been guilty of all of those. I gave up when they decided to do the whole Iraq occupation thing. For starters, settling on a planet makes no sense when your enemy is space-borne and can hunt you down. That violates sound military doctrine in the context of the show.

Oh, please. The humans weren't under military command, they had just elected a new civilian president, because he promised them he'd allow them to settle on this planet. They had been on the run for maybe 2 years at this point, and were weary of running. They thought this planet was undetectable by the Cylons (and they were correct, except for the radiation emitted by the nuclear blast).

In hindsight, it was a terrible decision, but it makes sense how people in that situation could have made it in the democratic system which they had. I think that was the show's point: giving people the power to elect their leaders doesn't always produce the smartest or most optimal results. In fact, it can produce disastrous results when the people elect politicians based on their pandering campaign promises which go against the advice of experts.

But for humans to suicide attack Cylons?

It's been a while since I saw the occupation episodes, but IIRC the idea wasn't really to blow up Cylons, since they obviously just resurrect in a couple of days. The idea was to 1) kill Baltar, who the humans saw as complicit with the Cylons, and 2) kill any other humans, seen as traitors, who were helping the Cylons (namely the New Caprica Police). Remember, at this point, the Cylons had decided not to continue with genocide, and were now trying to rule over the remaining humans for some reason instead of just killing them all. The insurgents were attempting to sabotage this effort.