BSG Strategy

The following contains Battlestar Galactica spoilers.

There's been some chatter about the recent Zarek-Gaeta coup and the merits of a permanent human-Cylon alliance. I think Farley does an excellent job of showing just why the alliance is so difficult to live with, but ultimately I'm going to have to agree with Ackerman that the destruction of the Resurrection Hub was a game-changer (as he puts it, "the greatest act of unilateral disarmament in the history of the galaxy"): the rebel Cylon were willing to sacrifice their immortality in order to become our allies. That should be enough to buy our trust.

Also, I think Farley's worries about the fickleness of Cylon decision making are confused. Clearly, the Cylon have never been politically homogeneous--there have always been two factions jostling for supremacy. The razor-thin margins by which one faction controlled the agenda--combined with the perfectly democratic nature of their government--naturally resulted in abrupt shifts in policy. Farley appears to be making the logical mistake of presuming that a property of a group--its policy fickleness--necessarily applies to the members of the group, as well. But this is as absurd as thinking that Americans are fickle because America wanted to invade Iraq in 2001 but now wants to withdraw. Moreover, even if we take as Farley's point that the Cylon government's "attitudes and goals [were] fickle", it hardly matters now because that fractious government doesn't exist anymore. The faction that we are striking a deal with now is extremely stable and politically homogeneous, so we can be confident that we won't see the same kind of policy U-turns that we saw coming from the original Cylon government.