Battlestar Galactica is a damn fine show, probably one of the best I’ve ever seen. Even if you’re not much of a fan of science fiction, I still recommend it as strongly as possible. I could go into all the details of why I feel this way, but they’re actually pretty irrelevant to this post, since it’s really just a jumping-off point for talking about the Writer’s Guild strikes.

Of twenty episodes slated for the fourth and final season, it’s unsure whether they’ll be able to finish the final seven due to the strikes. It would be a tragedy for a work of art of this magnitude to go unfinished, considering the work and effort of countless people that has gone into it so far. And it’s certainly not alone. Throughout Hollywood, production is shutting down. In solidarity with the writers, countless others like performers, directors and producers are refusing to resume working until the strike is resolved.

So what’s the problem? Obviously the writers must be demanding gold-plated boats filled to capacity with saffron or something for studios to refuse to negotiate for so long that things have gotten this bad. Right? I mean, it’s not like they’re simply demanding a fairer contract that’s better suited to changes in technology that have affected the market or anything. Right?

Well, no, actually, their demands are extraordinarily reasonable, and they do, in fact, want a fairer contract that’s better suited to changes in technology that have affected the market. Then why is this such a big deal?

Part of the reason is empowerment. If you give in to strikers’ demands, it concedes that striking is an effective method for workers to use to achieve the outcome they desire, or, in most cases, a compromise in the direction of that outcome. But isn’t that kind of the point? What other recourse do workers have? I guess they could file a class action lawsuit, but if their contract doesn’t grant them something, it’s hard to argue they’re legally entitled to it. Anything they could possibly do while continuing to work doesn’t really give the executives much of a reason to negotiate or even consider demands for fairer contracts and conditions, let alone give in to them. Reversing this “giving in” argument, continuing to work despite the fact that you’re being treated unfairly concedes that it’s okay for the people screwing you over to continue doing so.

In a more general philosophical sense, if employers are unwilling to meet reasonable demands of their workers, it’s good to have a strike once in a while as a reminder that there is a means of forcing a balance of power, as businesses inherently, under normal operations, have a power that vastly dwarfs that of the worker and the consumer. But that’s sort of beside the point.

I really don’t understand what the problem is, because the solution seems so incredibly clear-cut you could use it to slice diamonds. Writers want their contract to adapt to the technology and market trends that have taken place over the last, oh, two fucking decades. Studios are and have been making money from a booming home video and online marketplace, but writers aren’t seeing any of that because they’re still operating using contracts that were made back when VHS tapes sold for sixty dollars a pop and computers were bulky boxes with 128k of RAM and monochrome screens with pixels the size of pencil erasers that could no more play a full-motion video than they could perform a complete classical symphony using only lemon peels and pygmies. Considering that everything today is being released on DVD — and studios are profiting from it tremendously — shouldn’t the writers be able to see some of those profits as well? Especially when studios have been making such an enormous deal over piracy.

So, to sum up the positions of the two sides of this debate, which, discounting abject morons, frothy-mouthed corporatist jerkoffs, and the profoundly mentally challenged, are basically “Studio Executives” and “Rest of the World”:

Writers want to be paid fairly, and to receive a fair portion of the profits from DVD sales — which are astronomical compared to when the contracts were drawn up, considering DVDs did not at the time exist — and online media distribution, which certainly wouldn’t even have been mentioned or accounted for as a possibility in a contract so dated.

Studio executives are assholes of unprecedentedly unpleasant size and odor.

Yes, I know ad hominem doesn’t help my argument, but I’ve tried and there’s really no other way to put it. The position on the matter held by studio executives is entirely baseless other than “we are making money from your work; no, you can’t have any”. Only the hugest of assholes would behave like that.

It strikes me as odd that we as a society do not differentiate between sexual attraction to and activity with teenagers and sexual attraction to and activity with children. The two are indeed different — the former is hebephilia and the latter is pedophilia. Given the myriad differences between someone of age four and someone of age fourteen, it’s interesting that we tend to treat everyone up to age eighteen (or in some states, in special cases, fifteen or sixteen) as though they bore the intellectual capacity and responsibility-handling skills of a kindergartener.

I’m by no means broad-brush endorsing adult intercourse with teenagers, and I’m certainly strongly opposed to and pretty thoroughly disgusted by sex with children. But this is part of a much larger issue I have with age-based legislation in general. It misses the point, lacks any kind of “grey area” in nearly all cases, and actually leads to greater irresponsibility, and clearly prefers blind obedience to personal responsibility and moral understanding.

Before I get into the specifics, though, I’d like to first discuss why I feel Dateline’s To Catch a Predator is a horrific atrocity, because I’ve been meaning to for some time and anticipate it would become an obvious sidetrack in this.

The sense of cultural superiority exhibited is appalling, and the show reeks of it like it’s releasing pheromones in an attempt to mate with a white supremacy group. Something that disturbs me the most is that in the few episodes I’ve seen, at least 2/3 of the men on the show were obviously first-generation immigrants. Extremely rarely was anyone wealthy and/or white.

I understand but do not at all sympathize with the sentiment that it doesn’t matter where they’re from because they’re here now and have to follow our rules. Rules are derived from culture, not the other way around, and people are often products of the culture in which they’ve been surrounded the most. Given that there are countries with ages of consent as young as twelve, it’s not surprising that immigrants might have different standards for these things, and it’s self-aggrandizing nationalism/culturalism to treat them like monsters for it. If the same show were taking place in, say, Yemen, half the United States would qualify as criminal.

But then, if we’re going to examine differing cultural standards, we need look no further than the individual United States. Having been born and raised in Michigan where the age of consent is sixteen, I guess I’m just not all that shocked by the people they have on the show who are trying to have sex with a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old. If one can have sex with a sixteen-year-old in one state, it’s rather unreasonable to consider them sexual predators if they attempt it, say, four hundred miles east of their present location just because the law books are different.

Of course, all this is beside the point. The show itself uses models who are usually eighteen or over but simply look like they’re a few years younger. Everyone involved in baiting the intended target is over the age of consent. So what crime is really taking place, other than thought crime? Say the owner of a car lot tells me “hey, you’re the only person who picked up that trash I left on the sidewalk. You win the contest! You can take one car off the lot. Serious.” So I pick a car, shake hands, and drive it away, and a mile down the road there’s a roadblock where I’m arrested for car theft. Is that justice?

And from the other side of the coin, here, if it doesn’t matter that a person is led to believe that someone is over the age of consent and acts on that information, why does it matter if they believe that someone is under the age of consent and acts on that information?

Mainly, it’s entrapment. Guys who are perfectly satisfied just having little online fantasies with “underage girls” — who many of them might even suspect aren’t actually underage, or even girls for that matter — are urged and badgered into actually carrying something out in real life.

And that’s the biggest problem with this show: it actually interferes with catching real criminals. That’s right — nearly every case resulting from this show has been dropped because the courts have decided that these cases are obvious entrapment, or for the myriad other ways Dateline’s presence interferes with the case.

Not everyone on the show is culturally confused. There are a good number of profoundly sick people who have a real problem and are a very real threat. A properly-conducted investigation can lead to a satisfactory outcome. But what this show does is basically sacrifice that element of it — the really important part — for the sake of entertainment value. When you think of how many genuine sexual predators who could’ve actually been caught (instead of just humiliated briefly on television to boost NBC’s ratings) if the judges hadn’t thrown the cases out because of the Dateline situation, it’s pretty sickening.

Yeah, it can be amusing. It can be hilarious to see the guy realize that they totally fucked something up pretty bad and made some awful decisions with his life. But it encourages some of the worst elements of society and emboldens the pervasive fascism entrenched in our culture. Would you watch a hilarious stand-up comedian if he were genuinely raping someone on the stage each night just because he was really, really funny?

The truth is, it’s the people who matter, not our sensationalist entertainment. That child sexual abuse goes on is a serious crime that should receive serious consequences. But that we turn it into a form of entertainment is barbaric, especially when doing so interferes with the legal proceedings that really matter.

In Part 2, I address why age-based restrictions are bullshit, and address the effects on ‘minors’.