Juno News - May 27, 2021


Taiwan is a country

Topics
John Cena apologizing to China
Mentioned
John Cena Furious
Person of Interest Bill C-10 Explained

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

179.63

Word count

638

Sentence count

50

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Former WWE wrestler John Cena apologizes for saying that Taiwan is a country. China is upset that Taiwan will be the first country to see the new Fast and Furious movie that he is starring in, The Fate of the Furious franchise.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Taiwan is a country.
00:00:09.480 Pretty basic phrase I just said there, right?
00:00:11.780 That's kind of like saying, I don't know, orange juice is a beverage,
00:00:15.460 or socks are a garment, a form of attire.
00:00:18.920 Just kind of a basic phrase, right?
00:00:21.020 Taiwan is a country.
00:00:21.880 Certainly not a controversial thing to say,
00:00:24.820 but apparently it is so much so that former WWE wrestling star
00:00:29.980 and American film star John Cena is now apologizing
00:00:33.120 for having said, Taiwan is a country.
00:00:37.180 Yes, that's true.
00:00:37.880 Even though if you plug the phrase Taiwan into Google,
00:00:40.760 the very first result you will get is from Wikipedia,
00:00:43.580 and it reads, Taiwan is a country in East Asia.
00:00:48.100 And it'll show you a map.
00:00:49.240 It'll show you its flag.
00:00:50.240 It has its own flag.
00:00:51.620 It has a president.
00:00:53.000 It has all those things that countries typically have.
00:00:56.040 But John Cena in hot water for appearing,
00:00:57.760 actually on a Taiwanese television station earlier this month
00:01:01.740 and saying that Taiwan would be the latest country,
00:01:05.000 the first country, pardon me,
00:01:06.260 to see the new Fast and Furious movie that he is in.
00:01:10.560 Okay, so he's apologizing for just saying,
00:01:12.840 you're going to be the first country to see this movie.
00:01:14.580 Are other countries angry that for some reason,
00:01:16.500 you know, they want to get Fast and Furious before Taiwan, 0.74
00:01:18.740 but Taiwan is getting it first.
00:01:19.720 What on earth is going on here?
00:01:20.700 No, China is very upset because they actually do not believe Taiwan is a country.
00:01:27.580 China believes that Taiwan is a wayward province
00:01:30.340 that is going to be brought back into the fold,
00:01:32.840 that they're going to make it a part of China again,
00:01:34.860 that it's going to be absorbed into mainland China.
00:01:37.520 Now, there's an interesting history, of course, in Southeast Asia
00:01:40.720 and dealing with these various different countries
00:01:42.700 and different claims and so forth,
00:01:44.380 a lot of stuff about islands in the South China Sea and so forth.
00:01:47.260 But Taiwan asserts, no, we're a country.
00:01:50.260 We have our own president.
00:01:51.280 There's our flag and so forth.
00:01:52.360 Look at our Wikipedia page.
00:01:53.460 We are indeed a country.
00:01:55.060 But John Cena apologizing for all of this,
00:01:58.800 almost groveling, actually.
00:02:00.740 What he said was,
00:02:02.300 I made one mistake.
00:02:03.820 I am very, very sorry for this mistake.
00:02:06.880 John Cena said in Mandarin in a video posted on his account on Weibo,
00:02:11.780 which is a Twitter-like social media site in China.
00:02:15.440 What on earth is going on here?
00:02:17.600 John Cena caving to China,
00:02:21.180 probably at the behest of, I don't know,
00:02:24.360 some big business interest in a film studio or what have you.
00:02:27.320 What on earth is going on here?
00:02:29.340 You know, John Cena, when he was a wrestling icon,
00:02:31.760 and for a while he was the biggest hero in the wrestling world.
00:02:34.600 There's heroes and then there's heels.
00:02:36.020 Those are the villains.
00:02:36.700 He was the big hero,
00:02:37.940 and he actually would wave the American flag quite a lot.
00:02:41.280 He'd stand there and obviously a very muscular guy like most wrestlers.
00:02:44.020 He'd wave the American flag.
00:02:45.460 He made a big point of supporting the troops and so forth.
00:02:47.900 All-around great guy, an all-American hero.
00:02:51.160 And here he is, basically caving to China for, I don't know, business pressures.
00:02:57.380 Deeply sorry.
00:02:58.440 Very, very sorry for not towing the line for China on their perspective on foreign affairs.
00:03:06.000 And various diplomats from China, from the Chinese Communist Party,
00:03:10.640 trying to argue on social media and elsewhere,
00:03:12.060 Taiwan is not a country.
00:03:13.120 Taiwan is not a country.
00:03:14.600 Whatever.
00:03:15.320 If you want to believe that Taiwan is a country,
00:03:17.120 which the Taiwanese people themselves and their presidents certainly do,
00:03:20.160 you are welcome to say so,
00:03:21.940 and I would encourage you to say so.
00:03:23.800 But John Cena, apparently,
00:03:26.440 all-American hero, no more.
00:03:29.140 Apologizing for saying,
00:03:31.220 Taiwan is a country.
00:03:32.100 Wow.