That is why the way the whole thing ended was so irrtating.

It is like someone making you a cake – and you are eating it and thinking some aspects of what they have created are quite good, and then you find at the centre of the cake, a piece of shit.

It rather ruins the whole thing.

If you think you can not watch the series without watching the last episode – then do not watch the last episode.

Remember this is an NBC series – no matter how much serious thought is allowed at various points of the series, leftist politics must always win out in the end (that is the way of NBC – even more than with CBS or ABC).

It really is as brutal as that.

As for the situation.

If the elected President needs removing this case should be made to the Council (or the Congress – or whoever has the formal right to do so) perhaps by direct vote of the people.

A military commander should not remove the President – for then (as so often with the Romans and so many others) another military commander will try and remove him (convincing themselves that they will make better command judgements – and another commander will think…..).

That is the true path to civil war. Military commanders making themselves rulers.

It does not work – because they have no LEGITIMACY.

Mallozzi refuses to get this, and beyond merely needing a source of infantile schoolchild-level drama to attract non-SF-nerds to the show, he suffers from the same liberal idiot ignorance that pervades so much of Hollywood.

On the serious side: I have not watched the show, Samizdata Illuminatus does not give me enough information to judge intelligently, but here are some of the questions I have (with my opinion):

1) After the President screwed up tactically, what was her response? Did she (or would she) acknowledge that she is not a capable military commander, and delegate (perhaps temporarily) the conduct of military operations to the professionals? Or did she dig in, and double down on a bad bet? I realize, of course, that control over military operations in this case probably is de facto control over virtually any aspect of life, but that’s the essence of a crisis. I sense some despotic traits in the President…

2) Is the military commander the best man to lead a military effort, and if so, is he really also pathologically despotic? History seems to suggest that cruel, brutal tyrants were not generally good military leaders themselves. Hitler clearly was not; Stalin definitely was not; Mao was not; Lil Kim I in North Korea is not. One could maybe find examples from the not-so-recent past, but then warfare was quite a different animal. Also, modern military leaders who did take over as dictators – Franco, Batista, Somosa, Pinochet, etc. – while not always savory, committed most of their brutalities against no less unpleasant ultra-lefts, and quite a few of them were also (re)elected at some point. Yes, there are the likes of Pol Pot – but he was not military. Thus, I question – not deny – the “autarky (sic) for foreseeable future” premise. I know for a fact quite a few folks in Eastern Europe in the mid-40′s would have preferred a military junta to the communists.

3) What are the probabilities of the overall scenarios? This can make a huge difference. If supporting the President cuts the chances of survival of humanity by two-thirds, that sounds pretty bad. If those chances were already only 1%, however, then going from 1% to 0.33%, is a small price to pay for potential liberty in the unlikely case your side wins. In a game of Russian roulette, with some rounding, that’s like having to take six extra shots, but after surviving the first 25(!). Going from 50% to 16.6%, on the other hand… well, that’s like taking six extra shots after you survived the first four. Some food for thought for Bayesians

In the first place, there is no way, in that situation, that any commander with a teaspoon full of brains is going to allow any kind of civilian government to exist. He would immediately declare the government null or suspended and any agitators would be summarily executed. A military junta would be put in place and any kind of civilian representative would be kept very strictly in line.

Put simply, in a fleet of a few thousand survivors in a tiny fleet, there’s no room for dissent. One leader over all. “Lifeboat rules” as Heinlein sometimes called them.

Of course, I understand that the show allowed things to progress as they did for dramatic reasons and to provide an allegory to current events. Unfortunately, while the writer seemed quite adept at putting in the right-looking things for a gritty sci-fi show, he couldn’t plot worth a damn. Never even mind the Espenson dreck

Democracy is only stable and gives good governance when there is no imminent existential threat and the entire body politic is educated in the ways of honor, chivalry, good sportsmanship, ethics, civic duty, and parliamentary procedure and the typical political unit is small enough in size that all the voters know each other well enough to judge their true character accurately. When a democracy stops functioning thusly, it is death by a thousand papercuts.