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NYT's Elizabeth Bruenig in response to hypothetical question about US Intervention if China invaded Japan, says "Japan kind of has it coming"

excelsiorlef

excelsiorlef

Bad Praxis
Member
Oct 25, 2017
73,330


For context: Bruening is a supposed left wing socialist Christian journalist who regularly gets published by the New York Times, and is routinely afforded much credibility by her peers and her readers, despite having a total history of being a twitter troll.

You should also watch her abortion dance.

These are the kind of people the mainstream press employs and publishes, professional trolls.

For fairness here's her defense





Doesn't really justify the comment, and realistically doesn't even back up her supposed beliefs or rational.
 
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excelsiorlef

excelsiorlef

Bad Praxis
Member
Oct 25, 2017
73,330
I love that her defense was they were baiting me (on the podcast I willingly went on with Josh Barro and Ross Douthat) so I bit on a whole different bait instead
 
nonoriri

nonoriri

Member
Apr 30, 2020
4,244
Isn't she the one who wrote the weird article glossing over what Amy Chua and her husband did and how whistleblowers are over dramatic and then Fran Townsend RTed in the middle of the initial report on Blizzard Activision? Bc it seems in step honestly.
 
Blader

Blader

Member
Oct 27, 2017
26,623
I don't understand her phrasing of "the way we left it"? I'm not advocating for another China/Japan war but if you were going to argue that China had a historical justification for invading Japan, wouldn't you point to, like, the Japanese invasion of China and shit like the Rape of Nanjing?
 
medinaria

medinaria

Member
Oct 30, 2017
2,546
Blader said:
I don't understand her phrasing of "the way we left it"? I'm not advocating for another China/Japan war but if you were going to argue that China had a historical justification for invading Japan, wouldn't you point to, like, the Japanese invasion of China and shit like the Rape of Nanjing?
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I believe that is what is actually being pointed to, if we're being honest and not just like trying to piece together podcast arguments from a carefully curated set of tweets

like I think the point is that it's very possible to construct a situation where china goes to war with some allied country of the united states and we're obliged (in some sense) to go defend them and therefore enter war with china, and because of what happened in ww2, china has some legitimate grievances with japan that have never really been addressed (this is true of korea as well - there's a lot of very much still relevant tensions relating to comfort women etc.)

the point being made is that yeah, countries to go war for stupid reasons. we do it all the time. other countries might also go to war for stupid reasons, and if china wanted to construct a stupid reason, japan does kind of have it coming

 
sphagnum

sphagnum

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
16,058
This is a dumb joke that she made after being continually baited with anti-China questions. I see worse hot takes on Twitter every day.
 
Rosenkrantz

Rosenkrantz

Member
Jan 17, 2018
4,941
I mean, Sino-Japanese war was one of the most brutal and bloodiest fronts of WWII (if you consider it a part of it), so, no shit there's a huge historical animosity between China and Japan (especially since Japan never truly apologised for all the shit they did), but I don't see it being mentioned anywhere in the tweet.
 
Mivey

Mivey

Member
Oct 25, 2017
17,829
This is the same paper that had Bari Weiss in a fairly high position for years. I doubt this is even in the top 10 of dumbest hot takes from NYT journalists.
 
sphagnum

sphagnum

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
16,058
excelsiorlef said:
From her? Yeah absolutely she's a living bad take
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I actually agree, I'm not a fan of her due to her abortion views among other things. But this isn't actually calling for war, it's a dumb throwaway comment stemming from someone bugging her for an anti-China stance. It's a stupid thing to say but it's not actually...important? China's not actually going to invade Japan, and nobody actually wants it to.

There's a much better discussion to be had on Liz Bruening than this, which seems to have caused a Twitter freakout among liberals even though it has about 0% relevance to anything.
 
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excelsiorlef

excelsiorlef

Bad Praxis
Member
Oct 25, 2017
73,330
sphagnum said:
I actually agree, I'm not a fan of her due to her abortion views among other things. But this isn't actually calling for war, it's a dumb throwaway comment stemming from someone bugging her for an anti-China stance. It's a stupid thing to say but it's not actually...important? China's not actually going to invade Japan, and nobody actually wants it to.

There's a much better discussion to be had on Liz Bruening than this, which seems to have caused a Twitter freakout among liberals even though it has about 0% relevance to anything.
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I didn't say it was a call for war

Just a completely fucked up thing to say.
 
mbpm

mbpm

Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,650
There are ways to delicately address the imbalance of propaganda and nationalism in the historical relationship of these two countries.

This isn't really one of them.
 
Nox

Nox

Member
Dec 23, 2017
2,908
Bruenigs have always been thrash. Wasn't her a DOD contractor or something?

Do the both of them still autodelete their tweets like cowards?
 
JoJo'sDentCo

JoJo'sDentCo

Unshakable Resolve
Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,539
medinaria said:
I believe that is what is actually being pointed to, if we're being honest and not just like trying to piece together podcast arguments from a carefully curated set of tweets

like I think the point is that it's very possible to construct a situation where china goes to war with some allied country of the united states and we're obliged (in some sense) to go defend them and therefore enter war with china, and because of what happened in ww2, china has some legitimate grievances with japan that have never really been addressed (this is true of korea as well - there's a lot of very much still relevant tensions relating to comfort women etc.)

the point being made is that yeah, countries to go war for stupid reasons. we do it all the time. other countries might also go to war for stupid reasons, and if china wanted to construct a stupid reason, japan does kind of have it coming

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The people that currently live in Japan have it coming? That's fucked up.
 
kmfdmpig

kmfdmpig

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
19,380
At this point a small percentage of the populations of China and Japan were alive during WWII. China and Korea have reasons to be upset/distrustful of Japan, but reason to invade? Fuck no.
 
medinaria

medinaria

Member
Oct 30, 2017
2,546
JoJo'sDentCo said:
The people that currently live in Japan have it coming? That's fucked up.
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the point is literally not "I believe that the people in japan currently have it coming" and I do not know you can read what I said and think this

the point is that it is entirely possible that warmongers in china could construct an argument that is "the people in japan have it coming as a response to what was done to us" and that they could start a war based on this, as basically even the most cursory look at the state of relations between asian nations and the continuing relevance of "remember that shit you did in ww2" there would demonstrate

this is literally a place where chinese netizens are staging boycotts unless chinese game companies remove voice actors from their anime games after those actors visit certain shrines in japan that are related to world war 2

this does not mean they are correct, it means that it is a shitty and stupid argument as the tweet says and yet people in all different types of nations go to war because of shitty and stupid arguments as the tweet says and so therefore it is very real to say that there are people in china who likely do believe this and it's not at all unreasonable to believe that, in some world, they would go to war over it
 
Rosebud

Rosebud

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Member
Apr 16, 2018
43,634
JoJo'sDentCo said:
The people that currently live in Japan have it coming? That's fucked up.
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Exactly, how many people in Japan were even alive during WWII? Let alone making decisions

War mentality is fucked up

medinaria said:
the point is literally not "I believe that the people in japan currently have it coming" and I do not know you can read what I said and think this

the point is that it is entirely possible that warmongers in china could construct an argument that is "the people in japan have it coming as a response to what was done to us" and that they could start a war based on this, as basically even the most cursory look at the state of relations between asian nations and the continuing relevance of "remember that shit you did in ww2" there would demonstrate

this is literally a place where chinese netizens are staging boycotts unless chinese game companies remove voice actors from their anime games after those actors visit certain shrines in japan that are related to world war 2

this does not mean they are correct, it means that it is a shitty and stupid argument as the tweet says and yet people in all different types of nations go to war because of shitty and stupid arguments as the tweet says and so therefore it is very real to say that there are people in china who likely do believe this and it's not at all unreasonable to believe that, in some world, they would go to war over it
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But saying "has it coming" implies that it's somehow justified
 

Nerokis

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,568
She's said much dumber things. This was just a playful response riffing off the logic of the person asking her questions. Only thing that distinguishes it is how bad it can look with an uncharitable reading.

I'm fairly confident that, among all the things wrong with Elizabeth Bruenig, being a sadistic war hawk is not among them.
 
BUNTING1243

BUNTING1243

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,709
One of the sins with podcasting is that you can make a dumb joke and have it quoted back to you like it's actually a thing you believe. I'd encourage you all to read this bracing article Liz wrote a few years ago and ignore this dumb Twitter bait outrage. Lotta things you can say about her views on abortion, but she's definitely not a war hawk
 
Dyle

Dyle

One Winged Slayer
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
29,954
Let's agree that those sorts of unanswerable hypothetical questions are pointlessly stupid and remind anyone asking them to please seriously reevaluate their life so they stop wasting our collective time. Dumb questions often deserve dumb answers, she just went with a particularly stupid one

Also you need to stop making threads about dumb things random people who have at some point worked for the NYT say. She does not work there now and neither did the subject of your last thread like this
 
Lkr

Lkr

Member
Oct 28, 2017
9,530
it's a really shit thing to say, but what was the point of the question? the US has military presence throughout Japan, the US would be forced to respond.

also why the fuck would china be trying to launch an actual invasion of Japan
 

BumbaT BrowN

Member
Oct 27, 2017
589
All the over reactions against the quoted statements are what's wrong with social media today. I don't and have never heard of her but if you are being grilled with hypothetical scenarios for 5 minutes, of course you would at least indulge the other idiot for a few seconds to shut them up and be polite, and of course it will risk you being taken out of context and then get reactionary responses from others who will be "outraged" by it.

The "has it coming line" is not saying its justification, but saying it in the tit for tat angle of how stupid war can be, then in their mind it's China's turn to throw some shit over. I guess it has to be seen from the ridiculous context of the hypothetical scenario.

However the op seems to have it in for her and maybe with some justification from previous articles , however it seems like you came up a little short here op. There are better things in the world to be more positive and focus on. For those with terrible world views however, the idea is to have that someone that you might despise fall on their own sword and not have to nudge them on the back on every little quip they may have as a "gotcha" moment.
 
OrangeNova

OrangeNova

Member
Oct 30, 2017
12,670
Canada
BumbaT BrowN said:
All the over reactions against the quoted statements are what's wrong with social media today. I don't and have never heard of her but if you are being grilled with hypothetical scenarios for 5 minutes, of course you would at least indulge the other idiot for a few seconds to shut them up and be polite, and of course it will risk you being taken out of context and then get reactionary responses from others who will be "outraged" by it.

The "has it coming line" is not saying its justification, but saying it in the tit for tat angle of how stupid war can be, then in their mind it's China's turn to throw some shit over. I guess it has to be seen from the ridiculous context of the hypothetical scenario.

However the op seems to have it in for her and maybe with some justification from previous articles , however it seems like you came up a little short here op. There are better things in the world to be more positive and focus on. For those with terrible world views however, the idea is to have that someone that you might despise fall on their own sword and not have to nudge them on the back on every little quip they may have as a "gotcha" moment.
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You know they're never going to notice you right?

Also maybe don't imply that a country has it coming on being invaded by a world super power? I'm sure that's a real easy way to not be misinterpreted about something like this.
 
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