The difference is that 9/11 was able to be channeled into xenophobia. The same can’t really happen with school shootings. The 40k mindset of hate being a valuable and limited resource hits way too close to home.
It might be a similar line of though as the Goa’uld weaponry from SG-1. They aren’t meant for accuracy or range. They use weapons of terror that create an absolute massacre when they do by chance hit.
The Ferengi, and especially of that particular group were Ferengi pirates of some sort, probably wouldn’t be above such tactics.
But also it was very clearly not a well thought out episode, so I’m absolutely applying meaning where there is none.
it’s possible that they only use that weird allegory reference pattern when speaking formally to strangers or whatever
It seems like an awfully bad idea to use a communication method that doesn’t transfer what you mean if you have a better option available.
It’s also possible that their language in the original version makes more sense and is more practical and it just gets mangled by the universal translator.
I doubt that’s the case. I don’t see how a non-metaphor based language would get turned into a metaphor based one through a software bug. Some big hand waving would need to happen for that.
IMO the Tamarians probably have brains that are structurally different such that their metaphors come far more naturally.
I think half of the episode is the Tamarians genuinely struggling with human language. If the federations translation software wasn’t up to the task, it isn’t surprising that the Tamarian’s software wasn’t up for it either.
Based on the episode, it was posibly the first time Tamarians ever had friendly and successful first contact. Because if they had it previously, they might have asked for help translating when meeting new races such as with the Federation. The episode would have went a lot different if they had an Adorian ambassador with them saying “Yeah these guys talk in metaphor and only metaphor”.
They’ve also run things like the pioneer plaques (or maybe it was arecibo) past other scientists, who often have difficulty discerning the meaning behind them. If human scientists have difficulty discerning the meaning, I can only imagine what kind of difficulty aliens who speak in metaphor would have, let alone if they weren’t linguists/scientists, which appear to be the case in the episode.
We evolved to hunt, and so it is suspected that as a result of that, we understand arrows to indicate direction. A species that hasn’t evolved in such a way might not understand the meaning of arrows. Apply that same principle to language and you potentially have your problem.
They may have tried that in the past to no avail. The episode specifically mentions there was several failed attempts at first contact.
A guide only works if you understand the guide. Think of it like this, if I sent you all 1679 ones and zeros from the arecibo message to you, but you didn’t understand the concept of zero, you’d have a hard time understanding what the message meant, even if the message itself was self explanatory.
Their language isn’t just grammatically different, it is uses a fundamentally different structure, and the Tamarian brain might be structurally different as well, able to easily account for language when young. So there may not be much of a “base language” that the metaphors are built on so to speak.
It’s only going to be a matter of time before they start requiring contracts, forcing you to stick with a service for long periods or face fees for dropping them.
They are capitalists, and so they must always profit more and more, never ending, for all of time. One of the things they will eventually do to hit that unsustainable proift motive is contracts. It’s what the cable companies did, and it’s only a matter of time.