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."

Comments

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.

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.