You’re hypothetical is a good one. But why go hypothetical when you have a real world example? How about multiple examples?
The Donnor party?
Not recent enough? How about The Argentinian soccer team?
The bottom line is, making emphatic statements about what you would or wouldn’t do in a given situation when you’ve never even come close to experiencing it is at best arrogance, at worst willful delusion.
I agree that “part of learning to think critically is reading the intent behind a question or a statement.” I also think critical thinking entails reading the intent behind works of art, including fiction. I think the clear intent of the New Caprica plot line was to offer a justification for acts of terrorism against American forces the local citizens in Iraq . I know a lot of BSG fans would prefer to see the show in a vacuum but Moore has said in interviews that BSG provided an opportunity to address current events and I think that fact needs to be taken into account.
Goldberg’s piece is a work of criticism, so I think it’s odd of you to judge his critique by the same standards applicable to a work of fiction, namely that one shouldn’t tell people what to think. That’s what critics do, they tell people what they think. Critics do it in explicit terms. They can’t hide behind the excuse of “just asking questions”. If Moore had written a magazine article arguing that the Iraq war was unjust and that Al Queada was partly justified in murdering Iraqi “collaborators”, I would disagree, but Moore’s article wouldn’t be bad art, just a wrong opinion.
I guess the nub of our disagreement tho, is that I don’t think the NC plot line shed light on terrorism, so I don’t give them any credit for it.
How was the OC?
The criticism does not apply by the simple fact that the events portrayed in the storyline were written before the same type of events had happened in Iraq. Many of the thigns depicted happened in one form or another in many wars we’ve been a part of, including & actually ESPECIALLY Vietnam. He’s claiming cop-out on something that couldn’t have happened in the first place. It was eerily similar to events happening in Iraq at the time of airing, however they had already been written & filmed when they happened.
Works of fiction are also of their time. Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Niebelung operas (which were as big as Star Wars in the 19th century) are full of anti-semitic sentiments and dystopian visions of the world but there are few (though there are some) critics who would call these works invidious because, well, anti-semitism was RAMPANT in 19th century Europe (WWII did not happen accidentally). Nazi art, while ultimately embracing kitsch (which is another issue entirely) really embodies, as DP points out, propaganda more than anything else and is, therefore, in a different category. The New Caprica storyline (which, for the record, I disagree with you on. It’s one of my favorite storylines in all of BSG and I feel it could’ve been mined even further, possibly taking up all or at least half of season 3 instead of the mere 4 episodes it does) embodies the issues of its time. I don’t think the suicide bomber issue will age too well but most of the other questions it asks are universal to life in modern warfare in particular and the human condition of suffering in general. That, however, is a question that we won’t be able to fully answer for at least five more years, I would say.
Don’t call it that. 
Seriously, I don’t see the NC storyline as justifying acts of terrorism so much as the creators’ trying to wrap their mind around a situation and a mindset that would lead to the use of those tactics in war (which not everyone seems to be justifying. Chief Tyrol, after all, is given the internal voice of dissent: “Some things you just don’t do, Colonel; not even in war”–as is Laura Roslyn). It is, as others have pointed out, in the larger sense, an attempt to get the audience to see such a perspective and question those situations, something that was sorely needed in 2004 or so, when the episodes aired (and, hence, why I think that aspect of the storyline might not age so well in the coming years). It’s certainly not an Al-Qaeda training video, however and I just don’t see how one can see it even remotely justifying such activities, especially given the gray nature of morality in the BSG universe.
Actually after having thought some more, the Iraq allegory just does not fit into the major storylines that happened on NC.
Ellen Tigh’s story is clearly the women who collaborated in France during WWII.
Starbuck’s storline is not even relevant, it’s a kidnapped prisoner/psycho kidnapper story.
The suicide bombers started for the US with the marine barracks in Beirut, 1983. It would also be representative of the USS Cole. Both prior to Iraq.
The insurgency story arc happend by the US & to the US going as far back as the Revolutionary war. Many of the tactics shown were used in Korea as well as Vietnam by the local populace. Moore is indeed a child of the Vietnam era.
The disagreement between Roslin & Tigh about how to run the war was again, acted out quite viciously during the Vietnam war.
The only storyline that truly mimmicks the happenings in Iraq was Tigh’s torture in prison. That decision was decided on way before Abu Graib hit the news.
To say that NC is an allegory on Iraq is ignoring the details of the story & the history of the US involvement in previous wars. As well as the writing staff’s familiarity with them.
I’m curious then. In your view are there any objective criteria upon which to criticize art? Or does criticism merely consist in reporting one’s subjective experience of the work?
Only if it breaks laws. Other than that…not really. Hell I have or had a terrorist propaganda rap song that was AWESOME
Hang on there, fellas: professional artist and teacher of the arts here. I feel like I should step in and say that, indeed, there are objective criteria by which to judge a work of art. These, however, boil down primarily to technical questions related to the materials and procedures necessary for creating such an art work. In terms of determining the QUALITY or DURABILITY of a work of art as “capital ‘A’ Art” I think there are a number of subjective criteria that come into play (criteria which can, actually, be addressed objectively–I’m thinking of Edward T. Cone’s and Robert Hatten’s work in analysing intertextual networks in music, for instance) but these can get quite esoteric and, ironically, subjective.
So the answer is yes…and no. :eek:
I don’t agree that the show went off course due to a leftward political orientation; but I do agree with point regarding the arbitrary plotting of some later seasons.
‘Dirty Hands’ is a terrific episode and it’s one of the few works of contemporary television drama to take the implications of class for human life chances seriously. I’d love to see some TV sc-fi with an explicitly socialist slant: seriously working through the contradictions of left-utopianisms never got in the way of some of the thrilling work in Iain M Banks’ Culture series and Ian MacLeod’s Fall Revolution books.
As it happens, I’m not a great fan of the New Caprica episodes, but that’s because the scripts work too hard to signal their political subetext while (as the writer observes) the Cylons’ motivations for the occupation lack credibility. That said, I love the later Baltar on the Base Star S.3 episodes.
Most of the problems were nothing to do with politics and everything to do with a whimsical approach to plotting rather than well-thought-out SF extrapolation. On the plus side, the season 4 rapprochement between human and Cylon was logical and interesting. I’m sorry that Ron Moore had to use ‘God’ to patch up the plot holes and set BSG in the past rather the future (which would have allowed a far more satisfying resolution) but I still love the show dearly.
LOL:o
Interesting. I’d love to know when the eps were written. Do you have any sources you could point me to?
Much of the criticism in this thread of Goldberg’s article has disputed Goldberg’s assertion that the New Caprica plot line is a metaphor for the U.S. in Iraq. Contributors to this thread see the NC plot line as a broader metaphor for occupation and insurgency in general, and not specifically Iraq. Nazi occupied France, and the communist insurgency in South Vietnam, are also influences GWCers see in NC. We could probably add Palestine and French Algeria as well.
This defense of Ron Moore brought to mind a similar defense I read some years back of J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson from the accusation of racism in Lord of the Rings on the basis of the fact that the evil Orcs are portrayed as dark-skinned.
Sigh. Okay, yes, it’s true. Many of the Orcs (and the super-Orcs) are dark-skinned and have slant-eyes. They are also — how shall I put this? — Orcs! Ya frickin’ idjit!
One is tempted to ask who is the real racist here? On the one hand we have people — like me — who see horrific, flesh-eating, dull-witted creatures with jagged feral teeth, venomous mouths, pointed devilish ears, and reptilian skin, and say, “Cool, Orcs!” On the other hand we have people, like Mr. Yatt [the LoTR critic], who see the same repugnant creatures and righteously exclaim “black people!” Maybe he should spend less time vetting movies for signs of racism and more time vetting himself if, that is, he free-associates black people with these subhuman monsters.
I think that’s a fair point. Perhaps the same notion applies to BSG: Okay yes, it’s true. The Cylons, like the U.S. military, occupied foreign territory by force. They are also – how shall I put this? – Cylons! Ya frakin idjit!
The author goes on to make a similar defense of “Starship Troopers.”
But here’s the most-important point for this conversation: The giant bugs weren’t Jewish. Oh, I don’t simply mean the slithering giant maggots weren’t Kosher, or that they might have been Episcopalian. I mean, literally, they were huge bugs. Not Jews. Not blacks. Not Gypsies. Not human beings!
The author of this defense of “The Lord of the Rings” and “Starship Troopers” was (if you haven’t already figured it out or followed the link) Jonah Goldberg. I think Goldberg’s approaches to BSG and LoTR are under some tension.
First off I would like to explain that I was going off the top fo my head when I wrote the previous. However Iw as incorrect about the prisoner abuse timing. The episodes started airing in October of 2006 making their writing roughly the previous summer. Abu Ghraib hit the news in 2004. Lyndie England was setenced in 2005 & 2006.
However, the rest of my argument stands. I would also argue that, unlike the author of the article, I do not see the writers of these episodes taking an overt stance on the happenings. The only thing I am seeing them do is portray them as abhorrent & desperate acts. The only thing I see them really doing is presenting them from the point of view we don’t normally see. We normally see Hollywood portraying them as acts perpetrated by inherently evil beings with no moral conscience and are really quite 1 dimensional. That is in fact, not the case. That does not remove their horror. I was not aware that was a liberal or conservative stance, horrors of war are in fact horrible. Yet, they still happen. Portraying them in the greyness that is close to real life to me makes them even more horrific.
The awful truth is, niether the war mongers or the peace advocates see war as it truly is. It is niether great or evil. It is niether noble or dispicable. It is all of those things & none of them. It is rare that in Hollywood they actually have the fortitude to show that. New Caprica IMO did that, warts & all.
I think just about everyone would disagree with the first half of that, but you have to give props for the second half.
OK, I understand your point of view. Since you don’t believe in objective criticism of fiction in general, it follows that you wouldn’t agree with any particular objective criticism of BSG.
I do believe in criticism, so when we discuss BSG, we tend to just talk past each other.
One can criticize anything, but no criticism is ever objective.
If you’re interested, I can refer you to any number of philosophers and theorists on the subject 
That’s what you think!
the beauty of a good metaphor is that it is not specific to just one instance and one situation. That’s how a good story can remain relevant for hundreds of years.
if one say there are parallels between what’s went on in Iraq and the New Caprica plot, then yes there might be. But if one insists that is done just to drive a point of a political view on the situation in Iraq, I think those people must not know that much about what’s going on in Iraq.
As intellegent and as the writing is on BSG, and as much credits as i want to give to them, nothing they write about New Caprica even comes close to the complexity of what’s going on in Iraq. If people can view the events in Iraq without taking sides or feeling too close to home, that is a way better story than Battlestar Galactica.
Unfortunately it is way too close to home, and that’s the beauty of science fiction. We can make parallels of the story and the real world events, and scifi gives us another perspective so we are not trapped by one single point of view.
Jonah Goldberg is the Pauly Shore of conservativism. 
Due in part to his humble nepotal beginnings as a writer, he is a favorite target of Wonkette.
Read through some of the other stuff on his wiki. I have to say, Im not generally prone to accepting the opinions of people simply because of pedigree. That being said, picking a fight with Juan Cole, one of the foremost and most respected experts on middle east history and policy, is a bit… Oh I dont know what the word is. Foolhardy? Ridiculous?
Anyway, let me back out of this thread at warpspeed before it gets going again.