I’ve gone back and looked around on this thread, and haven’t seen the point I’m going to make, but if it’s been made before, my apologies…
I think it’s pretty telling of Adama and his “take” on the Chief, that he (Adama) realizes that he CAN"T threaten Tyrol with his own life, that he realizes that the Chief WILL give his own life for something he really believes in, and as such he (Adama) can’t do much with Tyrol, he’s got to take the really low down road and use Tyrol’s wife as the fulcrum…and I’m not sure Adama is very happy with himself in doing this at all, but he seems to think that he’s out of options…So in a weird way it’s almost a perverted type of respect for Tyrol that causes Adama to take the actions that he takes…
Having said this I still thing it’s totally bogus and I agree that a threat like that would have to be met with
the assassination of Adama somewhere down the road by Tyrol…which would completely frakk the fleet, let’s face it, but there it is…Tough call all around.
I thought for a long time before posting a comment on the whole geek thing. Having been a lifelong nerd/geek, I completely understand the allure of the ‘nouveau nerd’ and ‘geek chic’. Look at the Google billionaires and who wouldn’t want to be a nerd? I’m all for welcoming new members into the club, but I just can’t get behind the “in your face” superiority of it. Intellectual superiority is no better than popular superiority. It’s still “I’m better than you because…”
Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had stars on our bellies?
“I’m sure we all agree that we ought to love one another, and I know there are people in the world who do not love their fellow human beings, and I hate people like that!”
Well said, Melissa. Well said.
On Adama’s method of ‘dealing’ with his labor disputes…
Haven’t been reading it for a while, but last year I got quite heavily into the whole Napoleonic era Naval stuff - Master and Command ect…
Seem to remember from that, and also from picking up some non-fiction from that era, that there’s a point made which I think is relevant in the Adama-Tyrol interaction, which is that the career and reputation of a naval officer who ends up in a mutiny situation was pretty much hosed. The reasoning behind this being that whilst in theory, yes, you could and perhaps should be flogging your seamen (sigh) up and down every week for ‘discipline’, in actual fact that isn’t something which works - carrot + stick having been known to work overall much better than stick + stick.
Anywho, the general point is that the ‘received’ wisdom is/was that if Adama has his whole deck crew out on strike, ultimately he has to realise he has screwed up by creating the situation - after all its not as if they don’t know they could be run up against the wall and shot (whether or not that would be a legal command - see previous post 
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Personally I’d say it would show bigger cohones if Adama hadn’t played schoolyard bully first, and had in fact said ‘hmrrr hmmm… you may have had a point, not much use having a fleet if it gets vapourised by an exploding tillium ship, chief… hrrmmm hmmm’.
But that’s just me - I don’t think anyone wonders why I was never gonna be an officer
p.s. (The mode of operation in this episode does seem rather sadly consistent with the one I forget the name of with the Sagittairons + Helo, where Adama’s just too darn lazy to listen to Helo until civs have died at the hands of ole’ Doc Death)
Yeah, I’m REALLY hoping that this is all part of an intentional set-up, but I also have an incredible lack of faith in Hollywood to do anything smart.
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Chuck’s “must shut up” note – which struck me as odd, 'cuz I thought the whole idea of the podcast was to listen to the people talk – reminded me of one of the great bits from Night Shift, the somewhat obscure '80s comedy featuring Michael Keaton (in prime form), Henry Winkler, and Shelly Long, and directed by Ron “Opie Cunnigham” Howard*: Michael Keaton plays Bill, a hyperactive spazz who winds up yoked to Henry Winkler, who’s named Chuck in the movie. Keaton carries around a hand-held tape record that he uses to record his questionable ideas, like “Instead of having to put mayonnaise on tuna fish, just feed tuna fish mayonnaise!!” The Fonz eventuallly gets fed up, grabs the recorder, and says, “This is Chuck reminding Bill to SHUT UP.” Anyhow, keep talking, y’all.
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RE: random happenstance, Ender’s Game, and Armor… Again, the lattice of coincidence:
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Re: the Hong Kong caller. I know Hong Kong’s not Tokyo, and at the risk of stereotyping, aren’t Asian countries supposed to be an orgy of bootlegged media products, like little alley shops full of Miles Davis bootlegs from his junior high years and DVD sets of shows that haven’t even been filmed yet?
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Alan Moore primer from a recent Onion AV club, excellent overview of his work:
http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/primer_alan_moore/1
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- Opie Cunningham footnote from #1:
I’ve been reading more Japanese comics because my local library has a great collection. I enjoyed Death Note and I’ve been a fan of Lone Wolf and Cub for a long time. That being said, one of the most strangely engaging comics I’ve come across recently is the Project X series. It’s a comic series where each issue covers the history of a different product, such as Cup O’ Noodle. I know it sounds weird and dull, but it is so well done that it’s very engaging.
http://comicsworthreading.com/2006/07/15/project-x-cup-noodle/
for some more “fun” comics:
The Runaways is really good–it’s about a group of kids who discover that their parents are super-villians (written by new Lost writer Brian K. Vaughn).
Action Philosophers! covers the life and philosophies of various famous philosophers in cool ways–such as Plato as a Mexican wrestler.
A caller (sorry-forgot who) wanted to recommend Jerry Pournelle’s writing during the last podcast and after listening to the episode I listened to This Week in Tech episode 135 with guest- Jerry Pournelle!
Just thought it was a strange co-incidence or something.
We have a couple of Pournelle’s books (with Niven) being discussed in various threads in the book club selection forum.
I agree with the other posters about Adama’s actions. In the end, it worked. No one got hurt, a union was set up, the ships got their fuel. I think Adama really knew the Chief and knew what would work. Do I think he would have ordered Cally’s death? I think it’s a moot point because he knew the Chief wouldn’t let that happen. Would I have done the same thing? Well, no. I don’t know the Chief nearly that well and I’m not sitting there with Cylons breathing down my back. Adama did what worked, I have no idea if anything else would have. Roslin, however, totally screwed up. I wonder what Baltar would have done in the same situation? He claims he’s from a similar background to the workers, but he didn’t fix the situation when he was president.
As for the Chief getting back at Adama at some point. I don’t think so. For one thing I think the Chief knew he was in the wrong and understands the bad position he put Adama in. The other thing is that I think the Chief doesn’t really love Cally. I think he married her because he felt guilty about beating her up. He’s loyal and devoted to her, but I don’t think it’s love. I think he chose to have a normal family life to get over Boomer. He’s a nice guy who beat up someone who had a big case of puppy love for him. Probably the only way for him to move past that was to marry her.
Mind you, I totally hate Cally. This might have clouded my view. She whines (she’s in the military in a war situation, but complains about everything), she’s got terrible hair (fix those bangs!), and is very selfish. Also she got away with shooting Boomer, which she did solely out of jealousy. The episodes where her life is in danger get me hopeful she’ll be killed, but so far no luck. I’m guessing she has some sort of girl-next-door appeal, but I just don’t get it.
This got me thinking about the whole “Baltar become Jesus” thing going on. I can’t believe that the fleet would buy into his little toilet paper book that is floating around since his actions have proven the exact opposite of what he claims. Let’s forget for a little while all the crap he pulled with the Cylons. First he is a rich, famous, and socially connected scientists who everyone believes is from Caprica, so just because he all of a sudden tells everyone he is from Aerelon and they just buy it. Second, while he was on New Caprica, he allowed the laborers to get to the point where they were striking and miserable, so why would they think that he now all of a sudden a man of the people.
I guess it plays to the same mentality that allowed for Hilter to come to power in WWII. Hilter made all of his intolerance and hatred for Judaism completely known in Mein Kampf which he wrote while in serving time for hig treason. However, despite that, he was able to garner support from the impoverished people, and powerful elements of the catholic church.
I wonder if the writers are heading in a similar direction with Baltar, maybe even incorporating some elements of the French Revolution… we could see Roslyn crying out “Let them eat cake” and then having the tillium miners behead her… (and yes I know that Maire Antoinette never actually said that, but you get my point).
This made me laugh… a lot… My wife and I have the same conversation everytime she goes into one of her whine fests…
For the record, though, I like Cally (for other reasons) and think that she is good for Tyrol.
yeah, but she’s so cute, though 
no, seriously, I can see all of where you’re coming from and I agree with it, given the situation Adama was in, he did the right thing and all turned out well, nearly no harm done. But they could have avoided getting into such a situation in the first place and yeah, gosh, there’s a great Kennedy quote that would totally fit for this episode, I can’t remember… and I have his complete speeches here, but I can’t find it either, it was something about if the rich folks don’t take care of the poor people, then they’re not worthy of their position at the top of society or something along those lines.
Being German and a history major, I feel the need to comment on that. Where you are right is when you’re saying that Hitler had made all his intentions very clear a decade before he came to power. The problem with that was that nobody believed him or, more accurately, nobody cared about him. He was one fanatic among many and the whole idea of antisemitism and the Jewish world conspiracy dated way back into the 19th century, it’s not like Hitler invented these things, it’s more that he grew up in a society where these ideas were floating around anyway and he picked up a whole lot of things and turned them into his own ideology. And because so many people were writing antisemitic things, nobody really took him seriously when he was more radical about it, because he was just a little figure on the sidelines of the political spectrum.
Where your statement needs to be clarified, though, is when you’re saying that it was THE impoverished people who supported Hitler and I would like to add the following comments:
a) the greatest percentage of the actually poor people voted for the communists. Hitler got his votes mostly from lower middle class people who either shared a belief in a strong authoritarian leader (a mentality which was common all over Europe in the 1920s/early 1930s) or who lost out because of the 1929/1930 world economic crisis. Hitler was a great demagogue and his great talent was to simplify political problems and to twist people’s minds.
b) People did not vote for Hitler because of his antisemitism. That might have been a nice PR ploy, but people voted for Hitler because he promised to get them jobs and get the economy going again. And before 1933, nobody had read his book and before 1939, nobody would have believed that he would actually do the things written in his book, that was unconceivable for the common folks.
c) The Nazi government never received much support from the Catholic church. Both churches, Catholic and Protestant, were actually one of the few areas which Nazi administration never managed to reach out or to control. One could argue that the Pope should never have signed the treaty with the Nazi government and there wasn’t that much resistance from Catholic circles, but they never outright supported him either.
So, in my opinion, where all this relates to in the Galactica universe is that I don’t think that Baltar is being portrayed as a figure akin to Hitler, someone who is writing Mein Kampf while in prison (mind you that even though Hitler was imprisoned for an attempted coup d’état, his sentence was reduced considerably and his prison conditions were first class - right wing extremists were never punished very severly in the Weimar Republic, one of the reasons why it crumbled eventually) but I would rather liken Baltar to Karl Marx or maybe even Lenin who was also an outcast and exiled before the 1917 revolution. I think that what Baltar is doing is writing a second communist Manifesto, with class struggle ideology and everything.
Which is a VERY interesting idea, because we know for a fact that most communist states were eventually overthrown because they all came with a totalitarian government and a dictatorship is a dictatorship, no matter what lable to pin to it. But Marx/Engel’s original idea was to let capitalism collapse upon itself instead of forcing a revolution, that there would be a point when the capitalistic system would finally fall into pieces and maybe that is what happening in the Galactica universe?
There are a couple of things to look at here:
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As Sean has said, some things will happen in fiction purely because Plot Demands! or because the writers realize that if they can just get the characters into a certain situation, they can get some good stories out of it.
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The human population in the Galactica universe has to be in a pretty messed up state psychologically. Most everybody may have some form of PTSD because: the world ended, then they got chased around the universe by killer robots*, then they got thrown into a concentration camp run by the killer robots (who keep telling them that it’s okay because the killer robots really want to do what’s best for them), then they lost their new world, and then they were starving. and occasionally, one of the ships they live on gets lost or blown up.
*and some of the human guys are also messed up because half of the killer robots are hot babes. “She’s hot. She wants to kill me. She’s a robot. hmmm . . . wait, I’ve got to think about this one.”
hes right, noone really believed he would actually do what he said he would. Also Hitlar was a brilliant speaker, he could manipulate things to the point where even a modern audiance would gladly support him if they didnt know it was hitlar speaking
I can hear Sean saying, “Nooooo, nope, don’t gotta think about that one.”
For Sean, the “She wants to kill me” would come before the “She’s hot”
But not by a lot.
i dunoo, i think id be more “i hot robot wants to kill me”
killing 2 birds with 1 sentence, very sean
I am glad you did, since my knowledge is limited to hobby reading on the subject.
Of course you are correct. I was alluding to the fact that Hilter’s rise to power came during a time of World depression and economic collapse as well as a time in German history when the people felt neutered by the treaty that was signed after the first world war. So Hitler played off both emotional situations, promising stability and power to a nation that had neither at the time.
I would have to disagree with this point as that catholic church not only did not oppose the Nazi governement, but several Bishops and Cardinals showed active support. Archbishop Konrad Gröber of Freiburg was known as the Brown Bishop because of his “enthusiastic support” of the Nazi’s.
Throughout, and up until the end of the war, the Catholic Church assisted the Nazi’s in locating Jews. For instance in the book Pope Benedict XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger:
After April 7, 1933, civil servants in Germany were required to prove that they were not Jews. Because births had been registered by the state only since 1874, the church was called upon to provide many records. The Catholic church cooperated right up to the end of the war. Likewise, after the 1935 Nüremberg laws that forbade marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans, most Catholic priests did not perform such ceremonies, even though the number of Jewish conversions to Catholicism was accelerating because of the persecution
Post War the Allies discovered that many Catholic Priests were actively helping Nazi officers to regain positions in society, and were actually lying to the Allied forces to the extent that they [the allies] stopped relying on the priests for information, since it couldn’t be trusted.
Of course, my point was not too debate religio-political history, but rather to point out that people in a bad situation will likely listen to any voice promising changes, regardless of where that voice comes from.
I think your Marx/Lenin analogy is probably more appropriate to how Baltar is being portrayed as well.
Yes, that does sum it up pretty well, there certainly is no monocausal explanation for why Hitler happened, there’s a number of factors that had to come together to produce his rise to power - of which the economic crisis and the Versailles treaty were definitely the most important, along with the inner instability of the Weimar Republic. The fact that the Nazi movement managed to completely penetrate all levels and all branches of government shows just how much of a mere facade the Weimar Republic really was - it’s an object lesson in how not do democracy. And this instability in turn had its roots during the reigns of emperors William I and especially William II. If it weren’t for the sad outcome, the concourse of historical coincidences would be fascinating - take any single factor out of the equation and what do you get? No Hitler, no WWII.
I would have to disagree with this point as that catholic church not only did not oppose the Nazi governement, but several Bishops and Cardinals showed active support. Archbishop Konrad Gröber of Freiburg was known as the Brown Bishop because of his “enthusiastic support” of the Nazi’s.
Throughout, and up until the end of the war, the Catholic Church assisted the Nazi’s in locating Jews. For instance in the book Pope Benedict XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger:
You are making a very strong argument here, which I cannot but follow here, since you seem to have a more detailed knowledge about the relations between the Third Reich and the church than me. I have no idea what results the latest scholarship on that topic has produced, but I would be cautious to generalize an institution that had literally thousands of priests on the lower levels who might not have been collaborators because of a few prominent examples of collaboration in the upper echelons. I’m not defending anything here, I’m just saying it’s difficult to pass judgment on an entire institution - there certainly were black sheep all over the place, everywhere.
Post War the Allies discovered that many Catholic Priests were actively helping Nazi officers to regain positions in society, and were actually lying to the Allied forces to the extent that they [the allies] stopped relying on the priests for information, since it couldn’t be trusted.
well, without further information, I would say that this is a matter of perception and how to define “a Nazi” - Golo Mann, son of famous German author Thomas Mann, stated in his huge book on German history that after the surrender, the Allies were surprised that they couldn’t find any Nazis at all in Germany, they had imagined to find a warmonging, backstabbing people, armed to the teeth, resisting the occupation with guerilla warfare and what have you - none of that happened, because the Germans had never been Nazis. The vast majority had just been along for the ride, they were happy to have found employment under the Nazi regime and when the war started and the Holocaust happened, the closed their eyes and looked the other way because they didn’t want to get into trouble - the same thing any populace did under any totalitarian regime. But nobody had actually believed in the Nazi ideology, except of course for a minority of lunatics on all levels of power who were actually crazy. Not even someone like Göring had bought into the whole sham, he was on board for the fame, the glory and the loot. It’s the saddest thing, but oh so obvious when you do comparative studies of totalitarian regimes: the Soviet Union, communist China, the Third Reich, fascist Italy - as long as the world’s not ending, there won’t be a mass uprising because people are lethargic. Speaking of fascist Italy, I would love to hear you comment on the role that the Catholic church was playing there.
Of course, my point was not too debate religio-political history, but rather to point out that people in a bad situation will likely listen to any voice promising changes, regardless of where that voice comes from.
We’ve had the debate now anyway, but that’s cool.
Yeah, you’re right and that’s why it’s so utterly important for democratically elected leaders to take the little people seriously and take precautions that things won’t ever get so ugly that people will feel like the democratic way of doing this may not be the best one anymore.
I think your Marx/Lenin analogy is probably more appropriate to how Baltar is being portrayed as well.
yeah, I don’t know if that’s specifically what the writers had in mind, but that’s what it seems like to me