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Battlestar Galactica Hosted At the UN
TheDopp writes "The United Nations hosted the cast and crew of Battlestar Galactica Tuesday evening in New York. Clips of the show were shown as discussion points during the event, touching on the morality of Suicide Bombers in war, Abortion and the use of torture on enemies of the state. At one point during the event an attendee mentions 'the "Old Man" launched into a passionate speech about casting off the idea of race as a cultural determinant, and said we were one race, the human race. His voice echoed throughout the chamber growing louder until — I kid you not — he was yelling, "So Say We All," and the crowd answered right back. Hell, even I yelled it, I was in the fraking United Nations with Adama, the gods themselves could not have stopped this moment.' The full video of the event is located on the UN website."
RealMedia? People still use RealMedia?
Someone send in some Cylons!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That the whole story is essentially one 4 season long dissertation on the "wages of sin" and even "generational sin?" The recurring sins of sloth and bigotry finally keep coming back to haunt the human race. Sloth lead to two of the colonies being treated horribly until the Cylons could be created as a worker class. The Cylons eventually realized that they were slaves and revolted, and that pattern has repeated itself at least once already.
In a dark, twisted way, the series is more religious and conservative than the original one. A lot of fans of the original hate that because it's more like a Hobbesian/Calvinist take on human nature, sin, God's judgment, etc. with the human race not being portrayed as noble, but having its own sins come back to haunt it. As a Christian, I find it a very refreshing show in that it has a brutally realistic take on human nature, sin and other factors that are usually ignored by people looking to create a simplistic "good guys in white, bad guys in black" kind of moral dichotomy.
Yeah, they took some time out of their busy schedule of meetings with Bono to host BSG. At least it's a step up.
Thankfully youtube saves us all: BSG at UN
Seriously. Why do actors and actresses who pretend to be politicans and soldiers for tv and movies get more influence over "real world" politics like the UN than I do? Does the US constitution even have a sovereignty clause that forbids allowing foreign sovereignty (for instance, by the UN), or is that just an interpretation? I can't find one, but I'm at work (and posting on /., yeah I know)
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Jason Nesmith: Mathesar, there's no such person as Captain Taggart. My name is Jason Nesmith. I'm an actor. We're all actors.
Sarris: He doesn't understand. Explain as you would a child.
Jason Nesmith: We, uh, we pretended.
[On Malthesar's blank look]
Jason Nesmith: We lied.
Jason Nesmith: I'm not a commander. There's no "National Space Exploration Administration." We don't have a ship.
Mathesar: [looking at TV screen] But there it is...
Jason Nesmith: [gesturing with his fingers] The ship is that big.
Mathesar: But inside, I see many rooms.
Jason Nesmith: You've seen plywood sets that look like the inside. Our beryllium sphere is... is wire with plaster around it. And our digital conveyor is... it's Christmas tree lights. It's a decoration. It's all fake. Just like me.
Mathesar: But why...?
Jason Nesmith: It's difficult to explain. On our planet, we, uh... we pretend to... to entertain. Mathesar, I am so sorry. God, I am so sorry.
Wow, I didn't know Christian Bale visited Slashdot. Can I have your autograph?
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
can pass a resolution to stop SciFi from becoming Syfy.
People are too quick to cast off the idea that race doesn't mean anything biologically through ideological lens. It's true that people all deserve the same political treatment, but people are so scared of racial bigotry and eugenics and social darwinism that they sometimes can't see straight. For example, the authors of The Bell Curve were blasted for supposedly being racial bigots, however wrong or right they were, and E. O. Wilson of Sociobiology fame had water thrown on him because the the nuturist bias of many on the left makes them view any innatist viewpoint as being "right-wing" apologetics for racial mistreatment or whatever, which is completely wrongminded. Nature doesn't care about how you think the world is supposed to work.
You argue, however rightly or wrongly, that blacks may have a genetic TENDENCY towards lower IQs (I am not saying this is true, bear with me here) and people blast you, however, you say a minority group (Ashkenazi Jews) may have a heritable tendency towards higher IQs (apparently some study supported this hypothesis) and you don't see people rioting over it. People want "smile science", they want only nice things to be reported and they view publishing any negative or socially inconvenient data to be, well, socially irresponsible, no matter how true it even is. Remember, brain and body are one, as every physical change in the body is heritable so too are any structural changes in the brain which result in expressions of mental capacity and behavioral output.
I am not saying race does play a significant role in intellectual qualities. Clearly, it does play some of a role in some qualities (why all the tall black men in the NBA? Because they're physically built for the sport!) but it is not at all impossible that a race may have a tendency towards lower or higher IQs. And, as I've been sure to mention, this is all genetic tendency; variation among individuals still exists and even in a population with a mean IQ lower than the mean IQ of the average population you can still have IQs above the mean of the overall population.
It's also worth nothing that nature often cares little about the categories we've assigned to things for our human way of thinking. Evolution shows us that "species" is not at all easy to define as we think. A good video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb5OEw_q-II (made by rather intelligent shanek guy who laboriously fights idiots online. If you're reading this Shane, "Hi!"). The point of this is to show that yes, race is largely a human construct, much like species itself is, but that does not mean it is entirely meaningless. We know some racial groups are more at risk for certain types of disease, for example.
The overall fallacy here is thinking that behavior/mental processes are somehow different from physical one, when behavior itself is a resultant of the physical workings of the brain, and thus some races really could be different from others in a particular way.
That said, Battlestar Galactica is a great show because they don't shove a particular moral conclusion down your throat (insofar that the Cylon vs. Human dynamic is obviously a racial conflict in large part caused by human arrogance and inability to forgive) a lot of the time by making the issues difficult with no clear convenient solution, just as they are in real life, and also making none of the people on the show paragons of human virtue and morality. It doesn't seem to me like any character acts as a Lisa Simpson that serves as a mouthpiece for the writers to evangelize for their position.
As someone who is about 3/4 of the way though the 3rd season, all I can say is:
Fuck you, asshole
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
"Good guys in tan jackets"
No one with hair like that could have been called in any way "good."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
At least the spoiler he gave isn't that far off for you, only a few more episodes.
Now, you've got about 30 hours to watch 23 episodes + Razor + webisodes before the finale tomorrow night.
Better go get some energy drinks.
The UN never does anything useful anyway. They'd might as well entertain us a little.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You prick. Couldn't have at least had a spoiler warning on your title? I'm less bitter at Ron Moore and very bitter toward you.
That goes for the mod who bumped up your post to "interesting" as well. Frakking idiots.
Lorne Greene is dead, so there's no way Adama was just at the UN.
It's TV show, it is not how the real world works... oh, wait
It's the UN, it is not how the real world works.
Battlestar Galactica is a television show. It's a fine enough show I guess, but it is not worthy of wasting the time of a body that meets ostensibly to diplomatically resolve real world conflicts, forge various international agreements, and - at times - deploy troops for peacekeeping. That television show is fantasy. What's going on at Darfur is the real thing.
WTF?
If I understand him, the word "race" can't be used as a "cultural determinant" UNLESS you are blaming something on "the caucasian race", like he does at 1:42 in the video on youtube.
*spoiler alert*
Not true. Look at the problems caused by taking Valerri's daughter away from her, as one example. Hell, look at how both Cylon and Humans were planning on backstabbing each other when trying to find out the Final Five because they didn't trust one another. You must have also forgotten the fact that humans apparently were trying to provoke the Cylons into going to war with them. Neither Cylon nor Humans are necessarily the good guys, though some clearly are bad guys, or at least misguided. Not all humans are willing to forgive, either.
The whole point is that not all Cylons are bad Cylons, and yet the bad Cylons cause the humans to be paranoid of the good ones. You're looking at the show from a "go humans!" lens. Take a step back. Forgiveness on both sides is a pretty big element of the show, remember, the Cylons are still upset over enslavement, for example.
Simple. I don't watch commercial TV. I watch things on my own time. I'm watching BSG on DVD, just like I do with most other shows I want to watch because I can't stand commercials. And frankly, I was trying to have this mad rush to try and watch everything before the final episode, but whatever...
More to the point is that your post had nothing to do with the topic about BSG being at the UN. Hey, I have my beefs with the show too, but if there's a spoiler involved, I'll at least try to give someone a heads up.
why the UN is never taken seriously by anyone, anywhere, at anytime about anything.
Ave Molech Setting
Well, it wasn't quite that. Watch the video. It's 100 students and a few members of the UN listening to a couple members of the BSG cast.
They were simply using the building, which added the illusion of authority to the event. If it had happened in any other venue, it wouldn't have been news.
It does give the impression that they were addressing the UN General Assembly, which simply wasn't true.
The event was more of a photo op.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
huh, good thing that first kiss didn't turn out to be a blow job. THAT would have been awkward later on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Couldn't have at least had a spoiler warning on your title?
If you're that far behind, why are you *reading* anything bsg related this close to the finale? You're bound to hit spoilers.
... you say a minority group (Ashkenazi Jews) may have a heritable tendency towards higher IQs (apparently some study supported this hypothesis) and you don't see people rioting over it.
Apparently you've never heard of this little thing called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The question of whether Jewish people are genetically distinct from, and must therefore be segregated from, other people (e.g the Palestinians) is not entirely without controversy.
Clearly, it does play some of a role in some qualities (why all the tall black men in the NBA? Because they're physically built for the sport!)
Certainly height is an advantage in basket ball but height is hardly the exclusive province of black people. It's not totally impossible that being black correlates with skill in basketball (in the same way that it's not totally impossible that Elvis was abducted by aliens). It's much more likely, though, that it's not genetics, per se - for example, that both black people and basketball courts are correlated with the inner city.
It's interesting to consider what would have happened if Einstein had been born black in the Southern USA (say, the state of Mississippi) - rather than Jewish in Germany. Would a black American Einstein have still been able to become a great theoretical physicist? For one thing, Einstein was born in 1879 so, given that the US civil war ended 14 years earlier (1865), Einstein's parents would have been born into slavery. More fundamentally, it's not clear that a black American Einstein would have had much access to education. The USA didn't achieve full racial equality until the 1960's. MIT, for example did graduate it's first black student in 1892 (the Jewish German Einstein graduated in 1900) so it's not impossible that a black American Einstein could have accomplished what a Jewish German Einstein accomplished - but it sure seems like it would have been a lot harder.
So, you say that Einstein was Jewish rather than black and that therefore Jewish people are smarter than black people - but that ignores the very different circumstances that the average Jewish person and the average black person have faced throughout history.
It's only 8 minutes long in any other player.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
huh, good thing that first kiss didn't turn out to be a blow job. THAT would have been awkward later
I just fell out of my chair laughing my ass off. That's the funniest damned thing I've read in weeks...
This is my sig.
Why are you carrying on about this? Sure, different 'races' have ever-so-slightly different characteristics, but do you think that actually matters?
Many individuals don't fit in the middle of the bell curve, as you pointed out. So what is the point of having these profiles if they cannot be used to judge an individual? The only purpose they serve is to support bias and intellectual racism.
THAT is why so many find the ideas that you are peddling repugnant. It doesn't matter how statically correct you are, you are either: A) unsocially rational, or B) a closet racist. Either way it can be very distressing and/or destructive to the people that have to listen to you.
The white race started racism 600 years ago? That little pearl of wisdom pretty much invalidated the whole clip for me. I may have been a geeky Trek fanboy years ago, but just because I really enjoy BSG doesn't mean I'm going to swallow THAT.
I had a sucky sig.