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Remove Taiwan flag – Taiwan is not a country
- matthewfelgate 3y agoI think it's more usual to use the PRC Chinse flag next to both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. I guess in this case the contributors were Taiwanese and decide to use that flag.
- WhatDFHere 3y agoIt's sad when politics enters the community in git. Ugh.
- flir 3y agoEverything's politics, as this shows. You can't avoid it.
- ghusto 3y agoI don't agree. If I create a repo where a country list and their corresponding flags are needed for the application, I'll grab that from somewhere (maybe Wikipedia, or another repo?). If someone else comes in and says "hey that's not a country", that's where the politics is, not in my need for a country list.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoWhere are you getting your list of countries from?
- krick 3y agoI was annoyed when composer (PHP package manager) output, along with a lot of other stuff got clogged by colorful "Stand with Ukraine" messages (which, ironically, turns out to be orange in my terminal, instead of yellow). Now all this seems pretty mundane, though. Software is written by humans, after all, so all worst human behaviors will be projected onto it as well.
- glogla 3y agoWhat kind of person do you have to be, to think "I stand with Ukraine" message is "worst human behavior"?
- cassianoleal 3y agoCountry flags are inherently political. They are a symbol of a political entity. If you don't want politics in "git" (or in code in general), then don't put it in. That said, this particular issue should not have been turned into a state-politics issue. The element in question seems to be a language selection rather than a country selection, so the very first argument ("TaiWan flag should not be placed along with other REAL country flags") is a bad one regardless of how you think of Taiwan's political status. I also agree with another commenter that said the maintainer dealt with this really well. Kudos to them!
- krick 3y agoNot really. I mean, this obviously depends on what you consider political, but as the maintainer correctly noted a flag doesn't have to represent a country. I can have my own flag. Depending on my prominence, my flag can be showcased in Wikipedia and you can even include it into your CSS library. People may even recognize it. If it makes me a "political entity" is an open question, however. But filing tickets demanding to remove something from a CSS library because it "isn't a real country" definitely is a political statement. Which, for me, is always very unwelcome, but quite mundane at this point.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ghusto 3y ago> Country flags are inherently political Not people focused on the purpose of the repo.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoClearly was for the person submitting the PR?
- stby 3y agoAs someone who has worked a lot with geo data and delivered them to end users, this here is just the tip of the iceberg. Languages are already quite political, but maps and all their borders and city names are much worse. Some borders are disputed and both sides have made the distribution of maps with the "wrong" borders illegal, the Catalans hate to see the Spanish names of their towns used in the Spanish version of the website, sometimes borders are moving fast and the inhabitants of newly founded countries usually feel really strong about the correct representation on every single map in the world, and even if you use maps without borders or labels at all, it could be illegal to plot some kind of harmless data on it, like wind speeds that have not been published by the country's authorities. Stuff like this inevitably floods the inboxes of a lot of companies, so I'm not surprised at all to see it happen on GitHub.
- fmajid 3y agoChina regularly uses the Great Cannon (the offensive DDoS capabilities of the Great Firewall) against GitHub because it hosts free VPN software mainland Chinese can use to work around censorship. So whether they want it or not, they are involved already.
- _han 3y agoI think the maintainer handled this really well. Hats off!
- blkhawk 3y agoI find it amazing how cool and collected the response was.
- WinstonSmith84 3y agoI'm also amazed that the Github profile of the OP was not newly created just for this purpose. Instead he looks like a legit developer... just obv a hardcore nationalist ...
- fmajid 3y agoThose Social Credit Scores don't just earn themselves, you know...
- RalfWausE 3y agoOk, respect for his friendly and professional answer. But... "Fuck off" would also have been very reasonable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- damsta 3y agoImagine wasting time on cloning the repo, making a change, pushing it, creating a PR, all that time wasted because of hate. He could use that time to fix one of the 38 issues reported by other users...
- the_third_wave 3y ago> all that time wasted because of hate Disagreement is not hate. I do not agree with the person who wants to get rid of the Taiwanese flag since as far as I'm concerned Taiwan is a country but I do not hate him for his request. Please don't use the word hate for these purposes as all that does is downplay cases of real hate.
- damsta 3y agoIf you are taking a slice of your free time just to go through this whole process to create a PR, and you know you will never get that time back, and your only message is: Taiwan is not a country, then either you are a troll or hate-fueled person. There is no middle ground, just read this part of their comment: > TaiWan is not a country, is essentially a province of China. currently it's a district because of some history reasons. > So, TaiWan flag should not be placed along with other REAL country flags, It's a big misleading to website visitors. This is not just a disagreement.
- H8crilA 3y agoTaiwan is indeed not a country under international law, this was approved by ~everyone including the US. Not long ago we had a very interesting post here with a transcript of the famous Mao/Kissinger meeting. But, yes the flags are just visual indicators, they do not confirm that something is or isn't a country.
- sfmike 3y agoGreat response that flags correlate to regions too and not 1:1 country usage, so this would be an exception to the standard. Also that the iso standard is that for zh_tw, so using that standard is within spec. Also the comment that no flag is visually not aligned with other lines having flags. All logical and rational reasons not to omit unrelated to politics.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoI'm not sure the ISO standard specifies a flag though.
- uranusjr 3y agoCode zh-tw means the Chinese variant used in Taiwan. The technically correct code for Traditional Chinese is zh-hant. It’s an entirely separate issue from the flag, but the developer technically should label the languages “Chinese (China)” and “Chinese (Taiwan)” in the dropdown instead, to better correspond to the flags.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoNo. The dropdowns reflect Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese languages, not countries.
- uranusjr 3y agoIt depends on how you view it. If you want to show flags, use the region to annotate the language. If you want to show the script variant (Traditional vs Simplified), don’t use flags. I don’t see how you can naively come to the conclusion only one of these is acceptable.
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y agoThere are also plenty of non-country entities that have flags. I live in Buffalo, New York, USA. There's a flag for the USA, a flag for the state of New York, and even the city has its own flag[1]. So even if we accept that Taiwan isn't a country there's no reason an island can't have a flag! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Buffalo,_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Buffalo,_New_York
- gattis 3y agoWell, politicking is mostly a waste of time, but here we have a rare chance to dialog with someone brainwashed by a truly corrupt and malignant ruling party with absolute power, and show them what free-thinking is all about. Personally, I would have taken the shot. The whole point of opening up to trade with China was the hope that the exposure would have influence on their people and that democratic ideas would win out in the end. I don't think we should shy away from this kind of confrontation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mcphage 3y ago> The whole point of opening up to trade with China was the hope that the exposure would have influence on their people and that democratic ideas would win out in the end. That was one of the many really terrible ideas that we've had. In the US we say "It's the Economy, Stupid" to represent the idea that, when the economy is doing well, people are happy with the government. And then we helped give China decades of incredible economic growth, but somehow expected that the result would be Chinese citizens being unhappy with their government?!
- matthewfelgate 3y agoImagine putting the Russian flag for the Ukrainian language for an idea of how Chinese people feel about Taiwan being a country. Whilst I understand you didn't mean to start a political debate, you have made a political choice by using the Taiwan so it's unfair to blame others for "bringing politics into it" just because you don't have understanding on the subject. > "No one can deny that it [Taiwan] owns a flag." 1 Billion Chinese people would like a word with you.
- ghusto 3y ago> Imagine putting the Russian flag for the Ukrainian language for an idea of how Chinese people feel about this topic. Or rather, how Ukraine's would feel, doesn't it make more sense that way around? > You've made a political choice by using the Taiwan flag in the first place so don't blame others for "bringing politics into it" just because you don't have understanding on the subject. There's a country called Taiwan, it has a flag, it's flag was put next to the name of the country. Where's the politics?
- matthewfelgate 3y ago>Or rather, how Ukraine's would feel, doesn't it make more sense that way around? That's my point. You think there is no politics between China and Taiwan?
- ghusto 3y agoSure, I'm vaguely aware of it. I just don't think the developer should be forced to care in a PR.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoImagine the repo had the Nazi flag for USA; Would it be political to want to correct that?
- skyzyx 3y ago
- jfernandezr 3y agoNot talking about politics, here, but a flag usually denotes a country or region, not a language. You should use a flag when you're referring to a country or region, for example when you have an e-commerce website and are just distributing in certain areas. But languages do not have flags associated and then should not be used in language selectors. Check that the example in the GH thread has Spanish as one of their choices and has the Spanish flag. Spanish is talked in a lot of countries including Spain, but also Spain has 4 different official languages in its own state territory. So, there exists es_ES, es_MX, es_PE but also es_ES and ca_ES. What flag should we paint in each case? I've seen this mistake soo many times...
- _nalply 3y agoI agree. As a Swiss speaking German I find to see the flag of Germany a bit jarring, especially Germans tend act as if the language belongs to Germany. So just use the language code for languages?
- stby 3y agoIt's just a service for the Swiss to warn them about the occasional use of "ß".
- _nalply 3y agoHuch? The Swiss don't care. Really. My son sees the sharp s everyday in school and nobody has explained to him what it is and nobody is asking him to replicate that letter. No need to warn the Swiss.
- Takennickname 3y agoI mean the language is called German. Seems appropriate to use the German flag.
- rodface 3y ago> use the language code for languages This is the practice that I followed when I needed to add a regional-language pack for one of our SCCM packages. I put a "DEU" in the icon, not a German flag.
- lampington 3y agoIt's an old one, but this alleged Steam screenshot handles the problem quite well, as well as fixing the use of the UK flag for English: https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/english-traditional-simplified.jpg https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/english-t...
- davidguetta 3y agoLol how to put water on boiling oil.
- dsjkvf 3y agoI wonder, if Steam still has Russian localization, btw...
- cebert 3y agoWhy did this get flagged?