The Law and Politics of Battlestar Galactica 321
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."
And religion? (Score:5, Interesting)
about politics and law, why not religion too, right?
The image is slick...
Battlestar Galactica Last Supper [flickr.com]
What I'd Like... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:it's interesting to see (Score:5, Interesting)
Including, of course, the principle that "there are limits on everything"?
Re:it's interesting to see (Score:5, Interesting)
yes! exactly! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The best science fiction (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:it's interesting to see (Score:5, Interesting)
The humans on BSG are deeply religious and believe that humanity is defined by a Gods-given soul, which a man-made machine cannot have - it's a pretty major part of the show, if a little unsubtle. Goes along with the whole theme of the cylons having a more "evolved" religion than the humans (by our Western standards, of course, where monotheism > highly ritualistic polytheism).
Of course, the cylons did also exterminate the human race, some people would hold a grudge.
Re:what i found kinda interesting ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't that the classic tragic flaw? Uncompromising goodness usually ends badly for the hero.
(sidenote for non-classics geeks: his name is a nod to this too, agathos means "good" in Greek, often in the sense of "noble" or "virtuous")
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Briefly in the early part of the series, things started running out. Simple commodities like whiskey and playing cards. I was upset when that issue disappeared. A random assortment of military and civilian vessels might be well stocked, but they certainly would not have a full assortment of manufacturing capabilities. Especially for specialized good like pharmaceuticals. They eventually addressed a shortage of antibiotics, and the development of a black market. But realistically. They would be able to produce no antibiotics at all.
And really. Why would a passenger vessel capable of hopping between stars in the blink of an eye have manufacturing centers? Or fuel refineries? Or food production capabilities.
I was hoping to see Cloud Nine, the dome greenhouse like ship be converted into agricultural land.
I know these issues aren't nearly as exciting as -getting into bed with your imaginary genocidal robot-
Think about it though. The main goals following some sort of catastrophe like this would be.
1.Stability: Stop whatever killed everyone from still doing so. Stop the panic. Get people working together instead of looting from each other.
2.Preserving technology, infrastructure and supplies. If you've got something that works, you can't replace it. Do whatever you can to keep it working.
3.Rebuilding infrastructure. Need to grow food to live once the supplies run out. Can we built farming workers? No. Can we build tractors? No. Can we build shovels? Yes. Start from there, and learn what we need to make it work.
4.(optional) Preserving knowledge. After everyone's farming, hunting, gathering, or whatever is needed to stay alive. We realize that we still know how to make all sorts of advanced technology, even if we don't have a large enough society to make use of it. It would be valuable to archive all the knowledge so that it is accessible after the last battery runs out of juice.
just my thoughts...
Re:it's interesting to see (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, it's a good reflection on the series writers that they are able to evoke such complex and powerful quandries.
Re:it's interesting to see (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:it's interesting to see (Score:3, Interesting)
Killing the pilot (assuming it really was a human and not a Cylon ruse), maybe even bombing the base he (allegedly) launched from might have been considered provoked. Nuking billions of people on twelve planets was unprovoked.
If someone calls you an asshole and you whip out a gun and blow them away, no jury is going to be very sympathetic to the viewpoint that you were provoked, and the prosecutor will make a good case for first-degree murder and were just looking for an excuse to pull the trigger (why else were you carrying the gun in the first place?).
Of course, all this presupposes that it wasn't just a Cylon version of the Gleiwitz incident [wikipedia.org] that Nazi Germany used as an excuse to invade Poland.
Re:it's interesting to see (Score:3, Interesting)
Some do, but I got the impression that's not very indicative of their society as a whole.
Baltar is an atheist (at least at the start) as is Adama (he thinks Earth is a myth)
Baltar is The Scientist archetype, so of course he's an atheist, it's the setup for his whole "unlikely prophet" arc (not terribly original, but it's a thing). At least I got the impression that his atheism was somewhat uncommon by their standards. Adama doesn't believe in prophecy (or even just that particular prophecy), I don't believe he was ever actually presented as not believing the whole Lords of Kobol thing (I could be wrong, I can't recall anything specific one way or the other).
Rosalind is a believer but is not above using religious posturing for her own political ends.
So? Her actions are entirely informed by prophecy at this point, doesn't get any more religious than that.
My main point was that their society, as a whole, is shown to be far more religious than ours. For one thing, they clearly have a state-endorsed (or enforced?) religion that informs much of their politics. The educated elite might be pretty secularized, but aren't they always?
I believe there's an intentional parallel with western secular 'Christians' and extremist Muslims.
I think that's pretty tenuous (and kinda simplistic if that was the actual intention). For one thing, the cylons' devotion is constantly contrasted with the ritual (and superstition) of the human practices. If the intention is for "us" - predominantly Christian Westerners - to identify with the BSG humans, then why have them be "stuck" in polytheism (there's actually hints of "monolatry" to it, kinda akin to later Roman cultic worship), while the cylons develop theistically along lines very similar to our own culture? And it's not like large segments of Western society aren't every bit as religious as any Muslim - religious belief and fanatical "extremism" aren't exactly the same thing.
Basically what I mean is, is it just a coincidence that the cylons have a more developed, and nuanced, theosophy than the humans?
For that matter, the vast majority of the BSG humans wouldn't have a problem exterminating the cylons on religious grounds (according to their religion the cylons aren't sentient). While the cylons, ostensibly, are only hunting the humans because they perceive them as a threat. In fact, it's the overtly religious models that seem to come by some misgivings about exterminating the whole species.
Actually, I guess when I say "the cylons" I pretty much mean "the Sixes", I don't believe the others were shown to embrace those views quite as wholeheartedly. But still, while they are deeply religious, I wouldn't say their religion is shown as fundamentalist.
I guess I'm just hoping it's a little more complex than "fundamentalism == extremism == bad", cause, I mean, duh...
Re:it's interesting to see (Score:4, Interesting)
The majority practice hypocrisy (Score:5, Interesting)
True story: back during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I had lunch with a well educated, mild-mannered, drug and gun running mujehaddin working in India. When he found out I wasn't going to be a customer, he relaxed and we talked religion. He asserted that there were more Buddhists than any other religion. I scoffed and began quoting the other statistics in this thread, but he replied:
"Few christians are actually christian, and few muslims are actually muslim... but most buddhists are actually buddhist."
Re:it's interesting to see (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
Somebody brought up the fact that a Battlestar is the equivalent to an aircraft carrier. I would say this is a good start but above that, they need to be a first landing and beach head vessel. That means all the equipment and know how to land an assault on a planet and keep a beach head maintained possibly far enough into space to make resupply hard if not impossible. My friend's counter argument to this was that the Battle Star Galactica was being decommissioned and was probably stripped of most of its heavy arms before the first Cylon assault took place.
The biggest problem I had with this show was in season two when they were on the planet. They lived like shit and I thought the writers did a bad job of showing the progression of tech that would have been second nature by then. The majority of people live in little tents and bivouacked together like it was 1944. This was a great way to relate to a general audience because I think it made their world more tangible but lets be honest, If they can make Battle Stars and Cylons (even the first gen models) then they could manufacture almost on a personal level. It's easy to assume that they had the tech for "printing" cement structures down. We are dabbling in it now and we can't even make it to the moon yet reliably.
With the assumption that they have at least a semi-sophisticated manufacturing process you could think that they would have fabricators on all their ships with enough raw elements to process into basic needs like clothing, contact lenses/glasses, tables etc... The raw elements can be stripped from multiple places as demonstrated at the recycling boiling plants that can be installed at places like chicken farms to strip the organic waste and extra bits into light crude oil and pure carbon and graphene. It's pretty cool to see a bone carcass go through and come out as calcium dust, refined oil, and water. These are then drummed up and sold in bulk to places like tire plants that need the raw materials.
The counter argument was that why would you have a house manufacturing machine on a Battle Star? They never would need it because everyone lives on the ship. Which is why I brought up the whole beach head thing. Forget laying sand bags. Just have it lay down a 4 foot wall with holes built for gunnery posts. it would take half a day and could be cement strong. Not to mention barracks and bunkers. Basically fortification 101 would make it a necessity to carry a few of these machines on a carrier.
The biggest split in conversation happened over food and medicine. Obviously the Battle Star isn't equipped for food production but why not. MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) could be made on the ship with protein bars and so forth like they were doing at the end of the 3rd season from the Algae but it can be taken one step further and medicine can be done the same way. Why wouldn't a deep space city in the sky type of craft have at least the basic cultures for antibiotics and the like in cold storage? Lord knows a battle ship would never need more medicine than they shipped out with.
And the final nail in the coffin is that every Battle Star could have all the city planning and agricultural/ infrastructure information with them at all times. How many gigs of info would basic city and agriculture plans take up? 5-10 TB... Maybe! That would include things like processing machines and power generation. If they had the tech to make artificial intelligence I think they had big enough drives to put a few extra "just incases" on some free space. Not to mention the on-ship Library that a Aircraft carrier has that might have been beefed u
Re:it's interesting to see (Score:3, Interesting)
preachy shows (Score:3, Interesting)
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. Second, how do you apply terror tactics against an enemy who is effectively immortal? While somewhat cheesy and seemingly a wasted effort, suicide bomber Cylons make sense in that they are immortal and will come back after they die. It would still seem more sensible for them to conduct a larger sabotage given how far they've infiltrated into the Colonial military. But for humans to suicide attack Cylons? Again, it's one thing if you're talking about a Viper pilot pressing home an attack against a basestar. Losing a capital ship should hurt, they don't grow on trees, and such a move could provide the opening for the Galactica to escape a sticky situation. But strapping on a dynamite vest and walking into a Cylon bar? "Bugger, I got blown up. Well, let me crawl out of this tank, put on something slutty and we can resume at some other bar."
None of that made any context within the confines of the show, the writers just wanted to do something they saw in the headlines. Yawn. Might as well throw in stem cell research, teen pregnancy, female genital mutilation, and rants about Vista.
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
And really. Why would a passenger vessel capable of hopping between stars in the blink of an eye have manufacturing centers? Or fuel refineries? Or food production capabilities.
I was hoping to see Cloud Nine, the dome greenhouse like ship be converted into agricultural land.
I know these issues aren't nearly as exciting as -getting into bed with your imaginary genocidal robot
What probably would have been a smarter way to go with the series is to assume that the Cylons are like the Japanese in WWII, strong striking force but incapable of keeping up rapid production. Make up some sort of applied techno-babble that says they can crank out raiders and centurions but the AI's in their basestars take ages to nurture and grow. So they could not take the humans in a stand-up fight, thus requiring the decapitation strike. They knew they could not get all of the human colonies at once, they tried to get the biggest ones and take out the bulk of the fleet, then would mop up the rest at their leisure. Also, if they spread the main colonies among several star systems with further splinter settlements, then there's some real drama. Assume the colonies are spread between four major star systems. Ok, the Cylon fleet is divided into four task groups, they use the trickery to get through the defenses. Galactica manages an escape. Info trickling in later shows that it was not just the one system that was hit, all four are gone. The crew goes from thinking they're going to meet up with fleet elements for a counter-attack to realizing they're most of what's left of the fleet. They then realize that the Cylons are going to begin a systematic sweep of the outer colonies, the ones founded after the big 12. So the first season is then about trying to get there before the Cylons, building up the rag-tag fleet. From there they can have the wangst about whether the Cylons are still shitfire hot about genocide, if they have second thoughts, etc etc.
I have no idea where they're planning on ending the current series but I think making the Cylons human was a mistake. The whole feel of the original was fighting against an enemy so unfeeling, so remorseless that they may as well be a force of nature. Yeah, they forgot about that and went silly early on but that's still what I felt was the core of the show. You can get the soap opera relationship strife wangst anywhere. The emotional trauma I want to see is related to the premise of the show, how people are reacting and cracking under the pressure, not Melrose Space crap.
Re:Hippies Ruined This Show (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know whether they are hippies or not, but they did display something that could even be seen as borderline stupidity or naivety regarding such a strong theme of bare survival of the last remains of a human kind.
Nobody seems to notice a simple fact: there were 12bn people at the beginning of the show, and in couple of minutes after that they were down to mere 40+ thousand. It's about 0.0004 percent - it's not even a statistical error, it's a rounding error! And it's the second war with Cylons who very effectively showed to all that they are into exterminating the human species. You cannot make peace treaties with somebody who annihilated your entire species - you fight until one side does not exist anymore. Period.
The normal thing any government would do in situations far, far, far, far, far... better than that is to implement marshal law through and through. And here we have some idiots who are trying to still stick to the 'ole democracy principles' like it's some scholarly issue?! The workers' strike? At the only facility that produces fuel for all the ships, including fighters (in other words, the most important element in human survival there)? Facilities like this are part of the military in such conditions - the workers there are effectively soldiers under command in war - disobeying orders in wartime situations by the soldiers usually ends up by putting ringleaders against the wall in front of the firing squad, if not all of them. And soldier ('Halo' Agathon) who intentionally sabotages the activity that would bring the ultimate victory in this war of annihilation, even it could be seen as genocidal by some, is not a brave and moral individual - he is a traitor of his own species, and should be punished as any traitor in war was before him! Human rights and morals in situations like that are voluntarily resigned because they can (and usually do) prevent the system to function optimally! It's not about way of life, or this or that religion or political idea prevailing, it's about bare survival of an entire species!
After all, there's an old saying: if democracy works, why doesn't military implement it within its own ranks...
That's real life. BSG isn't even a good description of reality in fictional universe. I don't dispute that authors of the show wanted to raise some genuine questions, but they did it in a totally wrong setup, which only made these questions less genuine and more artificial, and whole show barely watchable.