Speaking of genocidal dictators...

As the Apple Turns rightly debunks the notion that swastikas in Windows Asian fonts have anything to do with Nazism or anti-Semitism. (It's an old symbol used in a number of Eastern religions, as well as elsewhere; the Nazis were playing on that when they, following earlier anti-Semitic nationalist movements, appropriated it for their own foul uses.) But As the Apple Turns also uses the opportunity to get in a dig at Microsoft for being so careless as to let the fonts ship with swastikas in them (and also bring up the whole Wingdings incident again).

Come on, guys, do your homework; of course I immediately went digging through Mac OS X's Character Palette and found the swastikas. They're Unicode code points 534D and 5350: they spin both ways, just in case you subscribe to the myth that the swastika only ever went one way until the Nazis reversed it to make the evil version. The Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts supporting the unified Han ideographs all have them, as they should.

It's perfectly understandable that people would get upset about this; some people who marched under the swastika in the mid-20th century were pretty amazingly evil, and that history counts for something. But it would be a shame if everyone had to cripple their Asian fonts for a reason that doesn't really apply to them. It's interesting that Microsoft is going to put up a utility that removes the offending characters from the font; I wonder if they're going to ship it without the characters from now on, and if Apple is going to follow suit.

Update: Maybe they should replace them with the Comics Code Authority logo.