Matt Yglesias

Farley: Human-Cylon Alliance is Impractical and Irresponsible

Robert Farley makes the case against the Cylon-Human alliance, arguing “that Vice President Zarek and Lieutenant Gaeta were correct to resist the Adama-Roslin military-political clique.”

I tend to agree on the policy merits. However, I think Farley is too quick to leap from policy agreement to endorsement of the Zarek/Gaeta coup. One could argue that, yes, since the very survival of the human race is called into question by this policy decision that one shouldn’t be bound by the law. However, the circumstances of post-genocide humanity are such that one could make that case regarding essentially every policy dispute. Nor am I by any means convinced that the anti-cylon faction had seriously exhausted the legal means available to them to try to fight this policy.

Second, I think Farley is too optimistic about the possibility of humans and cylons going their separate ways. The level of distrust and past bad acts is simply too high. If humanity rejects alliance with the rebel cylons, it seems likely to me that the cylon will conclude that humanity intends to destroy them. If so, they’ll try to destroy humanity. Meaning that humanity really may have no choice but to destroy the cylons. Nobody likes the security dilemma, but there it is, and it has been ever since the initial signing of the Armistice.

BSG Prediction Blogging

There be spoilers at this link so don’t click here if you haven’t seen Friday’s new episode of Battlestar Galactica. Suffice it to say that I endorse Julian’s predictions.

Bonus policy angle: Tricia Helfer’s off the grid sustainable house.

The BSG Era

Newsweek “asked its cultural critics to pick the one work in their field that they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.” Unfortunately, the very first one to answer is the television critic and he makes the right choice — Battlestar Galactica. I found this via Scott McLemee who also concurs in that judgment.

There have been better television shows than BSG, which I’ve tended to find uneven. But the show’s had some brilliant runs, and really nothing else has done nearly so much to capture the dystopian nature of the Bush years.

Question of the Day

Do people really say “frickin’”? I’ve always been a believer in the view that one should either curse, or else one should not curse. These gosh darn stand-in profanity terms are just silly. Battlestar Galactica gets a pass on “frack” because (a) their use is clever and (b) it’s clear that in the fiction “frack” is a full-bore profanity and not a substitute.