Practically every place in the world where it's disputed whether it's part of another country or independent creates a flag issue. Do you include a Quebec flag? Northern Ireland? Somaliland? Palestine?
Huh. Including England/Scotland/Wales but not Northern Ireland feels extremely arbitrary, to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if it ran afoul of some kind of discrimination law in the UK.
It's much simpler than that - Northern Ireland doesn't have an official flag.
In principle, Unicode 5.0+ emoji scheme allows encoding any subregion that has an ISO 3166-2 code, so just as Scotland is GBSCT(), Northern Ireland would be GBNIR(). But England, Scotland, and Wales are the only ones included in the "recommended for general interchange" list. I don't know why they haven't added any more subregions to that list, though.
what I asked was to convince me that this is not about China.
you have failed to convince me that this is about quebec, somalililand or palestine, those are absurd notions, so you have failed to convince me that this is not about china.
I find it entirely plausible that it's about Palestine (in the sense that that would be sufficient cause for MS to want to avoid shipping a list of countries even if there wasn't a China/Taiwan issue) given that e.g. several US states have laws that make companies ineligible for public contracts if they participate in boycotting Israel. To say nothing of wanting to make sales in Israel itself.
(Of course it won't really be about any one thing, it will be about all of these things - and China is probably the biggest and most relevant case. But it's by no means the only one)
using "reddit terminology" (not that there's anything good about reddit anymore but they do have the terminology), this post is about microsoft and the flag emojis, and up and down the thread are a zillion comments all about "it's generic territorial disputes".
I try to start a subthread about perhaps an alternative idea, and I get responses that are all about the same blather that's already everywhere else. People here have no intellectual subtlety: I wouldn't bother commenting to elicit responses that are all the same thing that's already here. Try to say something different. Make a case.
(and if you know anything about the history of Microsoft and Israel, no, it's not about Palestine. Ask any Israeli on here, did Microsoft drop flag emojis because of Israeli sensitivities?)
> I try to start a subthread about perhaps an alternative idea, and I get responses that are all about the same blather that's already everywhere else. People here have no intellectual subtlety: I wouldn't bother commenting to elicit responses that are all the same thing that's already here. Try to say something different. Make a case.
The "reddit terminology" for this is /r/iamverysmart . If everyone else understands your comment a different way from the way you intended it, maybe it's not that they're all stupid, maybe you didn't express yourself very well.
fact: 99% of people are dumber than the top 1%: so, "If everyone else understands your comment a different way" it precisely matches the case that they're all stupid-er than the 1%.
