Usually, but sometimes the culinary influence is felt even in parts of the world that Rome never even knew existed, much less tried to conquer.
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They have a chance! There are pupusa places all over Denver now!
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Would you care for a nice djinnan tonikk?
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A Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster would seem to be the only proper accompaniment to a bowl of fresh [or aged] Spoo, since we are dredging up different sci-fi scenarios… can’t think of any foods/libations from the ST/SW universes.*
*Except maybe for Tranya{sp?}, from an early episode of ST:TOS…
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Technically, though not literally…
(But only because the British said so and they are… historically unreliable, to put it mildly.)
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Usually, navigators care about having large numbers of reliable charts-- if the preponderance use the greenwich meridian, the matter settles itself.
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At no point in Europe has English sailors EVER represented the preponderance of navigators. This is yet another example of European empire imposing imperial structures on the world. Full stop.
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Only after wrapping it in sausage.
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SANDFORD FLEMING, 1879
Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that he is arguing on the basis of tonnage, which reflects a imperialistic conception of trade, or he is arguing from a period in which imperialism had already distorted the proportion of vessels reliant on precision maps produced by observatories.
The “fact” that only 78 ships are asian, suggests a minimum tonnage for ships. (500 tons?)
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That doesn’t mean that centering the UK in international navigationg isn’t an act of imperialism… both things can be true.
So did mass murder. 
I would very much like to stop glossing over just how violent European imperialism was and how it reshaped the world to privilege certain people over others. But clearly, so many people are unwilling to let go of the idea that there is something inherently “superior” about Europeans that made their imperialism some how less brutal or different, and hence justifiable. It was not. There is a direct connection with white people’s inability to come to terms with the realities of imperialism and with the current rise of right wing authoritarianism plauging us right now. We never fully came to terms with how the west came to dominate the world, which was less about us being “smarter” and more about us being willing to use whatever violent brutal means at hand to ensure our conquests. Until we deal with that, we’re going to keep having to deal with fascism in our midst.
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Just to be clear, MY point was that the technology is besides the point… the point is imperialism in shaping our modern world, including things that seem to be neutral, such as where the prime meridian is… That point almost always gets push back in the form of “well, but they developed the technology” kind of response, which misses the larger point of how this stuff became understood as “universal” and self-evidently “good” for all of humanity. But none of it is disconnected from the imperial project.
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It’s not about the honour of being the first. It’s about having an exceptionally precise instrument located on a particular meridian, (the meridian is defined as passing through a crosshair in a telescope, lined up just so and not merely as “somewhere near London”) and the publishing lots of precise maps that are based off that very precise benchmark. One could argue that, for reasons of tidy symbolism, the prime meridian should be a meridian that travels through some location on the equator, but then you would have to build an observatory there and employ a lot of experts who might complain incessantly about the flies, or the desert, and the inability to keep the instruments in good working order, rather than about the constant rain, the damp, the english winters, and the inability to keep the instruments in good working order. In other words, it’s not about the symbolism, it’s about the infrastructure.
Now, of course, our gps receivers keep track of so many complicated calculations and offsets, that it would be simple to define the prime meridian as passing through any arbitrary point with appropriate symbolism, and convert between Paris and British and Chinese standards with ease. But when one has to calculate by hand, by sliderule, and by table, the offsets become an annoyance that surpasses their symbolism.
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Don’t touch that, it’s still too hot.
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Romulan ale? Gagh!?!
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Damn, you’re right!
Thanks for replenishing my feeble memory… can’t believe I forgot about gagh!
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Raktajino? Blood wine? Prune juice?
Earl grey tea?
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Blue milk?
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