I don't see why you insist that these things are inevitable outside the pool.

But they're two different sentences, with two different restrictive phrase and two different subjects -- and her rhetoric pretends that one sentence leads naturally to the next, which is not true.

Sometimes terrible things have to be done.

"Sometimes" -- limits the circumstances. Who does these terrible things? Vague somebodies not named.

Move on to "cake atrocity or body bags!" from here, and I got no argument with her rhetoric. (Although I disagree in some ways with her argument, it's a legitimate argument to make.)

Inevitably, each and every o­ne of us will have to face a moment where we have to commit that horrible sin.

If "sometimes" restricts the pool of cake/death situations, then "inevitably, each and every one of us" opens it right back up. "Inevitably" is the word that talks about circumstances -- and there is no contextual cue to assume that it's inevitably only within pre-stated circumstances, because the word isn't that ambiguous -- but it's made even more egregious with the emphatic "each and every one of us."

Who made the hard choices in the first sentence? We don't know -- it was intentionally in the passive voice, with a vague referent. Who makes the hard choices in this sentence? Everybody.

Everybody + inevitably != vague somebody + sometimes. To argue from the first sentence is rhetorically fair (though a vague subject is nobody's friend); to argue from the second (alone or in conjunction with the first) is a rhetorical fallacy, and crappy or underhanded rhetoric.

Um, Daniel?

One of the things that happened when S9 was shot was that Claudia Black gave birth to her actual baby -- last Fall. The pregnancy is being written into the show, because the scenes writing it in have already been shot.

What she doesn't realize is that Adama, who has a first and a last name, and is in the opening credits, will nearly always be given a third choice. She, being a character with no first name and destined to die after only three episodes, has far more limited options.

She was probably thinking, "Well, that other Cain on that other Battlestar Galactia TV show probably survived...."

Everybody.

Everybody != every one of us

There's no reason at all to assume that her "us" includes all of humanity. She's talking to Kara about military decisions in a time of war, which severely limits the pool of people said decisions are allowed to be made by.

What Jessica said. It's not two speeches in two places by two different people. I'm not sure why you're forcing a reset just because it's a different sentence.

What's wrong with the assumption that she's talking about hard, binary (to her) choices made by people in power for the whole speech?

My parsing of her rhetoric does not assume that one implies the other, but that one sets the stage for the other.

"What do you i mean I'm not Captain Kirk??"

There's no reason at all to assume that her "us" includes all of humanity.

I'll concede that. But even so -- everybody in a position to lead faces a cake/death situation? That's a pretty drastic exaggeration, and the exaggeration is what makes the fallacy. Even in wartime, there are more than two possible outcomes for the vast majority of decisions to be made. Sometimes leaders do face cake/death situations (although, I'll continue to state, it's a pretty bad sign of leadership, if the leader is backed into such a corner), but much more often it's cake, or chocolate, or pickled pork knuckles, or lamb roast, or death.

Slight change of pace: a very fun Aliens Made Us Have a Threesome. SG-1, Jack/Sam/Daniel, very much NSFW. [link]

Betsy, I seem to remember that, but I am talking about the S10 plot points/spoilers being a bit ahead of the curve.

I mean, the spoilers could be legit, but they could be false for the actual storylines, not for the events that you mentioned that affect S9.

All I'm saying is those specific storylines for S10 are the thing I'm wondering about.

Does she have some particular horrible thing that she expects Kara to have to do in mind, though?

Yes, she's going to have to decide whether or not to support Cain. Again, the lead-in to that speech is Cain confirming that Starbuck & Adama are close (and that Starbuck does not get along with Tigh, for that matter). For Cain, the meaning is "Sometimes we have to do awful things. F'rinstance, I intend to execute two of your friends, and because he's getting in the way of that, I'm going to have your father-figure killed in a couple of hours. Don't let your personal feelings keep you from seeing that I'm doing What Must Be Done."

FWIW, Daniel, Gateworld is normally extremely reliable when it comes to spoilers. Chances are high that plot description came straight from the Stargate PTB.