Battlestar Galactica Hosted At the UN 252
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."
I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Galaxy Quest anyone? (Score:1, Interesting)
God, I am so sorry.
I applaud how you move effortlessly from one fiction to the next...
Re:Video (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Did they mention (Score:3, Interesting)
A common subplot is the cardboard character that has a surprising revelation and turns into a different cardboard character.
My take is that while the new series does have a little more moral depth to it than the old series does, it's not that impressive. Your talk about Hobbesian/Calvinist viewpoint on human nature and "sin" underscores that. This is obsolete morality. People aren't really like that and fundamentally it is a stereotype just as misdirected and limited as the white hat/black hat story you decry.
Re:I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV (Score:3, Interesting)
> Is that more a good thing or a bad thing?
If you have to ask.....
The idea that the Rule of Law had to prevail over the Rule of Men was probably the highest achievement of the Western system of thought. None of the rest is possible to keep without it. It is one of the central ideas encoded in the Arthur legends it goes back so far and is embedded so deep in our culture. It required generations of control over government schools to produce a population clueless enough to renounce that inheritance.
Re:How could you not know? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Hmmm.. Another Hollywood Republican comes out? (Score:2, Interesting)
... 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.