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Comment on NHS staff who visit patients at home say St George’s flags can mean ‘no-go zones’

Yes, but the thing is, people just don’t fly it here for no reason.

Unlike the USA, where it was so ridiculous that I played a game with myself called “Turn around and there’ll always be a flag somewhere in front of me” (it really is that insane, their level of nationalism/exceptionalism disguised as patriotism is wild),

…here the flag may be flown for patriotic events (e.g. World Cup), or flown by official institutions, but 99.99% of regular people would never consider flying it for any other reason, and it’s very rarely seen overall. This is normal.

National flags are generally meant to indicate nationality outside of one’s own borders to others around you (e.g. an embassy in a foreign land, or ships at sea). They’re not at all useful on home soil, so why bother flying one?

So, yes, it’s our flag (though not the version people fly that says ENGLAND in big letters in the middle - that’s just stupid). But the people that fly it are almost always bigots and weirdos that you want to stay away from, especially these days.

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Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I see our national flag 🇬🇧 all of the time. There are a few around the house, some on apparel, some in the form of actual flags such as behind the photograph of the King and the Queen. In some places the council or volunteers put them on the lampposts every summer and people often fly them from their houses. We also have a flag box filled with flags for special occasions. It’s also incorporated in our instance logo and the logos of several communities.

I remember during the royal wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, people put up UK flags and USA flags on lampposts in an alternating fashion.

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FishFace@piefed.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

National flags are generally meant to indicate nationality outside of one’s own borders to others around you (e.g. an embassy in a foreign land, or ships at sea). They’re not at all useful on home soil, so why bother flying one?

This is blinkered. National flags are a symbol of the nation so they are useful for that purpose. Why are they flown at sporting events? Because people want to display their support. Displaying your support, or pride, at other times, doesn’t automatically mean you have some other agenda going on.

I think you should be able to see the contradiction here with how the union jack and the scottish and welsh flags are seen. I bet you don’t see them in the same way, because they’re not used in the same way - so this has nothing to do with “they’re not useful, so when they are used, it’s for bad reasons”; it has everything to do with symbols as language, and the meaning they have for us. And those meanings are inherently ambiguous.

There’s a lot of people confidently declaring what other people think on the basis of one thing that they do. I am always suspicious of that, and think everyone should be, because it’s really easy to fall into thinking that, since I don’t feel the need to fly a flag, everyone who does so must be fundamentally different. They must subscribe to this belief that would cause flag-flying - and every person you see flying the flag at a far-right rally confirms your bias. Every person involved in flag-flying who is interviewed and says they aren’t racist is lying, because their reasoning sounds hollow to you because it doesn’t motivate you to follow suit and fly a flag yourself.

But besides that, why shouldn’t a flag serve as a unifying symbol, instead of a divisive one? Why shouldn’t the English flag be one that immigrants feel proud to fly alongside the flags of their own backgrounds? The left always seems to give up every symbol as soon as the (far) right start using it, which hands over the power in every single symbol to them without a fight.

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