We have a practical case of #Unicode encoding of country flags causing problems.
To recap, flags are encoded as sequences of codepoints corresponding to letters in the country's ISO code (so, Polish flag is <flag-p> <flag-l>). There is no heed paid to their mutability over time.
The Syrian flag will at some point start being rendered differently. Then, all the previous statements about Assad's government that used the flag will start rendering as if they were about the rebels.
I'm sad at Unicode's failures to fully and immutably encode the meaning of whoever wrote the text (see Han unification for counterexample to "fully").
@robryk Well, the meaning of regional indicator sequences is “the entity that corresponds to this region code”. Little flag images are just the most common visual presentation for that, and flags are inherently not stable. Nothing much the text encoding can do about that.
Also, thanks for making me look at https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Flags, which contains the following statement, which IMO is self-ridiculing:
> Although a pair of REGIONAL INDICATOR symbols is referred to as an emoji_flag_sequence, it really represents a specific region, not a specific flag for that region.
