DS9: Heart of Stone

[Yukaphile]

Others back him up. Others who don't even like Quark. Though it is interesting that Quark might be lying, or perhaps there's some historical revision going on. We do know the Ferengi were more evolved 10,000 years prior to the foundation of the Ferengi Alliance. Perhaps they had a brief dark age where that sort of thing was more common before they stabilized their society into what it was when they met the Federation. I still don't see them being warriors, though. Even if they have a somewhat competent navy. The only time they were a military threat was in Season 2. After that, never again.

[BlackoutCreature2]

Others back him up. Others who don't even like Quark. Though it is interesting that Quark might be lying, or perhaps there's some historical revision going on. We do know the Ferengi were more evolved 10,000 years prior to the foundation of the Ferengi Alliance. Perhaps they had a brief dark age where that sort of thing was more common before they stabilized their society into what it was when they met the Federation. I still don't see them being warriors, though. Even if they have a somewhat competent navy. The only time they were a military threat was in Season 2. After that, never again.

I think we've seen enough of Ferengi culture to know that even if Quark wasn't completely lying, he was still looking at things from a skewed point of view. Maybe Ferenginar never went to war in the traditional sense, but do you really think that prominent members of the Ferengi Alliance never bankrolled proxy wars to advance their own financial interests? Do you really believe that a culture obsessed with financial profit never employed slave labor for a cheap work force? Do you really believe they never hired some mercenaries to deal with a problematic local population? A culture like that definitely has some skeletons in its closet, ones that they probably have no problem covering up and denying.

[Yukaphile]

All that stuff you described? Awful, yes, but as I had indicated, it's still not as bad as us at our worst.

[PapaPalpatine]

I was honestly expecting Chuck to rate this one lower than he did. Guess I can't call them all. I do, however, agree the A plot on this one was a bit of a clunker and the B plot with Nog was more interesting.

[Madner Kami]

All that stuff you described? Awful, yes, but as I had indicated, it's still not as bad as us at our worst.

You are on a quest of self-punishment and self-deprecation and, by proxy, humanity as a whole, that much is clear from what you wrote here and elsewhere. Nothing can be worse than a human being or our collective history, can it?

[Yukaphile]

It's just the sheer frequency of huge populations of people descending on another and behaving like wild, inhuman animals, literal monsters that people want to treat as victims because "psychological conditions," and then turn around and treat their victims as monsters. I've seen this happen, and it's ugly and has to stop. Millions. Literally millions. Like ants invading another colony, spraying acid, tearing apart limbs, just... ugh.

[Fianna]

None of that's different from what we've seen Ferengi do, attempt to do, or be heavily implied as wanting to do, except that it's a bunch of people doing it simultaneously instead of individuals doing it one at a time. And given that we rarely see more than a handful of Ferengi in a given episode, and how even the most barbaric Star Trek civilizations don't get the Game of Thrones full-frontal-brutality depiction, that's to be expected.

[Yukaphile]

Hell, did the humans in Trek even descend that far? One can only wonder.

[clearspira]

Others back him up. Others who don't even like Quark. Though it is interesting that Quark might be lying, or perhaps there's some historical revision going on. We do know the Ferengi were more evolved 10,000 years prior to the foundation of the Ferengi Alliance. Perhaps they had a brief dark age where that sort of thing was more common before they stabilized their society into what it was when they met the Federation. I still don't see them being warriors, though. Even if they have a somewhat competent navy. The only time they were a military threat was in Season 2. After that, never again.

The victors write the history books. This is a universal truth. To name one very basic example: if the British had won then George Washington would have gone down in the archives as a terrorist and General William Howe a national hero.

[Yukaphile]

Um... that's at odds with earlier on, when the Ferengi were an aggressive naval power. Even if they lost, you don't go from being a semi-respectable navy to being losers so horrible you're a joke and can't ever win. Even the losers wouldn't rewrite their own history to make themselves look that bad.