I'd imagine that from the point of view of a Unicode consortium member, the question as to whether to include a particular Bengali glyph some argued to be obsolete looks more like "should we lower the threshold for what characters in a language are considered deserving of a separate codepoint, potentially exposing ourselves to a deluge of O(#codepoints/#characters per language) requests for obscure variant characters until we actually run out of them", whereas the question as to whether to include a sign for poop in the end boils down to "can we spare O(1) codepoints to prove to the world that we are not humourless fascists". The particular decision in this case might well be ill-informed, but I think any judgement that the Unicode Consortium is engaging in cultural supremacism (as opposed to doing the usual thing of wanting anglo-american capitalist money) is somewhat far-fetched.
The right solution, I think, would be to replace Unicode with a truly intrinsically variable-length standard such as an unbounded UTF-8 - many of the arguments that were fielded in favour of having the option of fixed-width encodings seem to have melted away now that almost everything that interfaces with users has a layer of high-level glue code, naive implementations of strings have been deemed harmful to security and even ostensibly "embedded" platforms can get away with Java. Rather than having an overwhelmed committee of American industrialists decide over the faith of every single codepoint, then, they could simply allocate a prefix to every catalogued writing system and defer the rest to non-technical authorities whose suggested lists would only require basic rubber-stamp sanity-checking.
> "You can't write your name in your native language, but at least you can tweet your frustration with an emoji face that's the same shade of brown as yours!"
This seems fairly characteristic of the apparent belief of social justice activists - and I can't imagine that Unicode's inclusion of skin colours would be a result of anything other than pressure by the same - that they can improve the whole world with remedies conceived against the background of US American race/identity politics.
Had nothing to do with proving they were not humorless fascists. There was a legitimate need for a universal codepoint among Japanese cellphone operators. Keep in mind, Japanese is a language where frequently entire concepts are represented in a single character, so this isn't perhaps as odd as you think. "Poo" had a specific semantic in "cellphone Japanese" that the market demanded. To be used interoperably with other Unicode characters, various 'emoji' were added to Unicode. I, for one, retain the right to be called a humorless fascist.
The right solution, I think, would be to replace Unicode with a truly intrinsically variable-length standard such as an unbounded UTF-8 - many of the arguments that were fielded in favour of having the option of fixed-width encodings seem to have melted away now that almost everything that interfaces with users has a layer of high-level glue code, naive implementations of strings have been deemed harmful to security and even ostensibly "embedded" platforms can get away with Java. Rather than having an overwhelmed committee of American industrialists decide over the faith of every single codepoint, then, they could simply allocate a prefix to every catalogued writing system and defer the rest to non-technical authorities whose suggested lists would only require basic rubber-stamp sanity-checking.
> "You can't write your name in your native language, but at least you can tweet your frustration with an emoji face that's the same shade of brown as yours!"
This seems fairly characteristic of the apparent belief of social justice activists - and I can't imagine that Unicode's inclusion of skin colours would be a result of anything other than pressure by the same - that they can improve the whole world with remedies conceived against the background of US American race/identity politics.