When did Cardassia make first contact with the Federation?

[Captain Rob]

The Alpha Quadrant is still a really, really, really big place. I always figured that why we didn't hear of certain peoples in TOS was that they were just far out of the region the Enterprise was operating in. There was no point in mentioning them.

 

[Christopher]

Of course the dialogue in DS9 would have you believe that the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans are all in the AQ while the ST Star Charts have the Klingons and Romulans in the BQ.

Which is no different from calling Europe "the West" even though most of it is in the Eastern Hemisphere.

 

[Timo]

...Now that DSC is making in-your-face onscreen use of the Star Charts layout of the empires, but moving the "zero meridian" one sector to the right, both the Klingons and the Romulans in fact have some territory on the Alpha side!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[MAGolding]

You can't dwell too much on labels. Labels don't define things, they just describe them. And a short, simple label is an inadequate description for anything complex. It should be seen as the starting point for understanding something, not the end goal.




Except the Vulcans didn't install themselves as territorial governors, enslave, torture, and rape the Terrans, plunder Earth's wealth to pay their debts, ship thousands of humans to the Orion slave camps, forcibly convert them to Surakism, hunt and kill them for sport and feed their remains to their sehlats, or murder human protestors and parade their severed body parts through the streets. Nor did they bring diseases which eventually exterminated over 90% of the Earth's population. Nor did they mistakenly believe that Earth was actually a planet in the Tellar system.

http://www.history.com/topics/exploration/columbus-controversy
http://www.understandingprejudice.org/nativeiq/weather.htm

Although there is one similarity, which is that the official "first contact" in 2063 was not the first time Vulcans had met humans. Mestral and T'Mir in Carbon Creek were sort of like the Vinland settlers in this analogy.

Columbus day does not honor Columbus the man, who did good deeds and evil deeds like many other important persons.

Columbus day honors the discovery of a route between what would later be defined as the two hemispheres, eastern and western, the old world and the new world, that would be used by countless millions of persons in later centuries.

This lead to many hundreds of thousands and even millions of evil deeds by people of various ethnic groups.

But the sum total of all suffering and death caused by those evil deeds was very small and minor compared to the suffering and death caused by the spread of diseases from east to west and west to east that caused many millions of deaths.

And the sum total of all the horror and suffering and death caused by the spread of diseases to new lands and populations with no immunity to those diseases was very small and minor compared to the Columbian Exchange, the spread of domesticated animals and plants from one hemisphere to another. This enabled people to support themselves better and caused uncounted millions, perhaps billions, of persons to survive who otherwise would have starved and died of various disease they were too weakened by starvation to survive.

For example, some Navajos might oppose celebrating Columbus day because of the suffering of their ancestors in the last Navajo war. In 1863 General James Carleton decided to end the Navajo wars once and for all by sending troops under Colonel Christopher "Kit" Carson to devastate the Navajo lands until the Navajos had no choice but surrender and make the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo.

So many Navajos might wish that Columbus had never discovered the route to America when they remember how Carson's troops impoverished the Navajos of 1863-1864 by destroying the Navajo crops of corn, wheat, alfalfa, melons, pumpkins, and beans, and orchards of peach, apple, pear, plum, and apricot trees, and slaughtered or confiscated the Navajo livestock, cattle, horses, goats, and especially sheep.

Of these sources of food, clothing, etc., corn is a western hemisphere crop, wheat is an eastern hemisphere crop, alfalfa is eastern, melons eastern, pumpkins western, beans both western and eastern, peaches eastern, apples eastern, pears eastern, plums both western and eastern, apricots eastern, and cattle, horses, goats, and sheep are eastern. The Navajos would never have benefited from those eastern hemisphere crops and domestic animals without the Columbian Exchange.

So if a Navajo wishes that Columbus never reached San Salvador - whichever island that was - so that the Navajos of 1863-64 never lost their property, then they are wishing that many generations of Navajos before and after 1863 would be much poorer and have much less property for generations, and be more likely to die of malnutrition.

So I say that Columbus day should be celebrated.

http://historum.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=2843821

 

[Christopher]

Columbus day does not honor Columbus the man, who did good deeds and evil deeds like many other important persons.

I think hunting human beings for sport and feeding their remains to one's dogs kind of outweighs anything that might be in the "good deeds" category.

And if the day doesn't honor the man, then there's no reason it shouldn't be renamed. A lot of people and communities choose to celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day on that date instead.