Jonah Goldberg thinks that Battlestar Galactica’s writers have fallen into the “why do they hate us” trap, in a completely absurd way (and one that continues to mislead the public about the nature of our real-life enemy):

Adama concludes it’s all his fault because he led the mission that proved the human race really were “war mongers” in the eyes of the Cylons.

I don’t want to use a lot of philosophical or literary lingo here, but this is really stooooooopid. Let’s say I’ve been feuding with my neighbor a lot. We’ve called a draw and built a tall fence to avoid each other. But I don’t trust him and I think he may be up to something. So, I peek over the fence. Maybe I even climb over it and look around his back yard for a minute. When my neighbor sees this his immediate response is to get a hatchet and slaughters my entire family, including my relatives in other homes far away. Clearly: It’s all my fault!

What is so depressing about this is that Ronald Moore and the other creators of BSG seem to think that “instigating” a conflict in any way assigns the moral responsibility to the instigator. If I step on a psychopath’s toe, it’s my fault when he buries a ballpoint pen in my forehead. Or, to be fair, they think this is a reasonable, morally serious view. And since they believe it’s their job to illuminate the issues in the war on terror, it cannot be denied that they think this is a serious position in the debate over that conflict.

Again: This is really stooooooopid. The idea that the human race had it coming from the Cylons is moral flapdoodle (and flatly unbelievable; the creators seem to think decent humans would be deeply conflicted about declaring total war on a bunch of artificial lifeforms who slaughtered 99% of humanity).