And a series of other posts on BSG here and here.

Horrible, yes, but if you were a warrior about to unleash radiation hell on your enemies, and you had the chance to humanely kill one child, rather than let it go through what the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki went through – would that be an act of cruelty, or kindness?

There are a lot of consistency/plausibility/characterization problems that have developed in the show, but that was not one of them.

This last episode does come close to allegory, but so far BSG has (mostly) avoided lecturing its audience when dealing with moral dilemas. It is the difference between illuminating current issues in a different setting and making a contemporary morality play in disguise. The former is Middle Earth, the latter Narnia, so to speak.

Reviewise, I generally liked the episode, but I found both the ‘resistence’ and the ‘occupation’ a bit too generic. Except for the Kara part and the Cylons-in-love angle, I would like to see more of a BSG flavour in both.

Is this a culture blog now? Look like it is indeed. Damn.

Hmm.

…sports writers have historically been the best writers in the daily press…

No, sports writers have historically had the easiest job in the daily press. They describe the workings of a machine for generating dramatic confrontation. Baseball is a series of tableaux in which men carrying weapons stare one another down; football is synchronized gang violence; basketball is thuggish ballet, and each sport is measured in a vast array of statistics which generate frameworks for drama so simple that a 5-year-old can understand them.

Additionally, since what they’re describing is essentially meaningless, sports writers are given license to write entirely in metaphor and allegory. The sports section is a long advertisement for itself, a trailer for continuing highly-structured nostalgia-generating experience; how can it not be interesting?

The hard work is for the obit writers, no question.

But still, maybe you should read Baudelaire on “philosophic” art; maybe you should read Anthony Grafton on what it was the renaissance left behind; maybe you should wonder at the persistent taste for systematic oversimplification in times of crisis: at the diminution of methodology over time into decadent formalism, internally consistent but describing nothing outside its own consistency; pure brittle logic ill fitted to a vulgar world.

Political Science is to Political life what “Law and Economics” is to economic life, what Literary Theory is to literature, and what Analytic Philosophy is thought. Should I add: what sociology is to careful observation? What documentary is to film? What the myth of objectivity is to newspaper reporting?
What’s missing from all these things?

Knowledge is not wisdom, erudition is not judgment, and self-awareness is necessary for emotional and intellectual maturity. Can someone tell me how Tyler Cowen could be so stupid? So arrogant and unaware? So Rumsfeldian?

I’ve run into shitloads of such stupidity over the years. I had a little fun hear at the expense of Donald Davidson, and Richard Dawkins and the “Dims.” At DeLong and Leiter and Posner. Do you think Rumsfeld or Cheney would be any less oblivious to their failure if they proclaimed atheism? I’m not going to go into the brittleness of Weimar.
Troll, at this point, maybe.
Stupid, no.

My stockbroker/doctor wants to start giving me blood pressure medicine. I have to give up on this shit.

Truth is, we’ll never know… It’s never explained and we only know her from her actions in the moment.

My point is simply this: whatever he cause/reason for the baby’s death, it wasn’t “for no good reason,” nor because the writer’s thought, “She’s really bad, so let’s have her kill a baby for fun… That’ll be entertaining.”

There’s a reason, and because it’s BSG, it’ll be an interesting one—one that is not clear, moralistically simple, and depends on turning a cliche over onto its head.