In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce an Irish politician and a MEP from (South) Ireland: Mick Wallace. He aligns himself strongly with another Irish MEP, Clare Daly, and his love for both Russia and China has been evident in his recent comments and appearances.
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His political career started at the Irish 2011 general election, and he was elected as an MEP in the 2019 European Parliament election. Wallace falls to the general category of "anti-imperialists", basically meaning anti-US and NATO.
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Wallace's views also line up perfectly with folk from the fake news blog The Grayzone: he's supported Venezuela, China, Russia, Belarus and Syria during his period as an MEP.
So if there's an authoritarian regime somewhere, it probably has Mick's support!
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He's called the Belarusian presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya a "pawn of Western neoliberalism", and Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as an "unelected gobshite".
In 2021, he visited the HQ of "Popular Mobilization Forces" an Iraqi militia supported by Iran.4/13
He also blamed the Syrian volunteer organization "White Helmets" - who have revealed several atrocities by the al-Assad troops in Syria, including bombings of hospitals - being corrupt and "paid for by the US and UK to carry out regime change in Syria".
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He was also one of the few MEPs who voted against condemning Nicagarua's Daniel Ortega for his human rights violations.
Wallace attempted to wipe out parts about the Russian involvement in the shooting down of MH17, which stirred up some emotions inside his MEP party.
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He's also criticized the sanctions imposed on Russian individuals by the US and EU as being illegal and not complying to the UN Charter. Mick has also attended protests supporting Algirdas Paleckis, a Lithuanian politician who was convicted of spying on behalf of Russia.
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He's also voted against Ukraine aid packages, demands of Putin to withdraw Russia's troops from Ukraine and against a resolution to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism.
In Mick's defense, he's also called for peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
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Incidentally, like so many other vatnik, this support started only after Russia's illegal annexation of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhanks & Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
Mick Wallace doesn't love just Russia - he also puts a lot time and effort to supporting China's geopolitical goals.
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He has downplayed the Uyghur concentration camps and called the reports on them "grossly exaggerated". In 2021 he stated that there is no solid evidence of the existence of these camps. Overwhelming evidence about the existence of these camps have been presented since 2017.
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In an interview by the Global Times,a Chinese state-run newspaper,he said that China "takes better care of its people" than the EU.Mick's also in the "Taiwan is part of CCP" gang. He's been featured the most in Chinese-language news articles than any other Irish person.
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Wallace's company declared bankruptcy on Dec,2016 with debts over 30 million EUR. Mick seems to be very bad with money in general: in 2012 it emerged that his company forgot to pay 2,1 million EUR in taxes.Later on he admitted "fiddling" his company's VAT returns on purpose.12/13
Bad financing seems to be almost an epidemic among pro-Russian actors...
Mick was going speak at the NO2NATONO2WAR event in Feb, 2023 with The Grayzone gang and other vatniks, but the venue cancelled their booking.
In today’s (first) Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about… “realistic expectations”.
Russia has the GDP of Italy. NATO — which Russia claims to be fighting — has 20 times their GDP, and a much stronger and more modern military. 1/5
Russia’s full scale invasion was supposed to take 2 days, but we’re nearing 4 years. They’ve lost a million men. Their economy is in shambles.
And yet we're letting them set their red lines instead of massive sanctions, strong support for Ukraine, and an immediate sky shield. 2/5
Russia thought their war was “realistic” because we’d let them get away with it. It wouldn’t be “realistic” to invade a European nation and redraw borders by force if the West had a strong and united response.
What’s “realistic” is what public opinion tolerates and accepts. 3/5
In this first (and maybe last?) Basiji Soup, we’ll look at… the Islamic Republic of Iran, its disinformation operations, its hypocrisy, how it sells its atrocities as virtue and its repression as morality, how it serves the Kremlin, and the current protests against it.
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Basijis are members of the most fanatical part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In a broader sense: Iranian regime loyalists & propagandists. They may be fewer than vatniks or wumaos, but the goal is the same: destabilize the West to protect a brutal regime.
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The regime oppressing Iran is a “theocratic” authoritarian state around a “Supreme Leader” hiding behind religion to justify its crimes: censorship, repression, executions, torture and terror — similar to Russia and its “holy war” against Ukraine.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce our first Czech vatnik, Tomio Okamura. He’s best known for building a political career on xenophobia while being of mixed origins himself, and for pushing Kremlin narratives in Czechia, a country otherwise very supportive of Ukraine.
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Okamura was born in Tokyo in 1972 to a Japanese-Korean father and Czech mother. He spent part of his childhood in Japan, and part in a Czechoslovak foster home where he was heavily bullied. His mixed origins made it difficult for him to fit in either country.
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Nonetheless, after working odd jobs in Japan, Tomio returned to Czechia and became a successful entrepreneur in Japanese tourism. He then rose in politics: Senator in 2012, MP in 2013, he founded two parties: Dawn of Direct Democracy and SPD (Freedom and Direct Democracy).
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll introduce an American billionaire, real estate developer, and wannabe diplomat, Steve Witkoff. He’s best known for trying to sell Ukraine to Putin and for helping Trump sell this treason and encouragement of genocidal war as “peace”.
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Steve studied law and political science at Hofstra University in New York. After law school, he worked as a real estate attorney, which led him into property acquisitions and development. He first met Trump in the 1980s when Trump was a client of his real estate law firm.
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In 1997, Witkoff founded the Witkoff Group, a New York–based real estate development and investment firm. The firm has owned and developed dozens of properties in New York and other major US cities, making Witkoff quite wealthy, with some interesting business connections.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, our first on a non-human vatnik, we’ll talk about… Grok @grok. It’s best known for turning into Mecha-Hitler and Mecha-Putler and for defending its vatnik master, Elon Musk, at all costs, up to being willing to sacrifice the rest of mankind for him.
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Let’s start with an introduction into how Large Language Models (LLMs) work, and the new “arguing with your toaster” phenomenon. LLMs like Grok are Artificial Intelligence (AI) but not the way we had imagined — a new form of intelligence that would somehow think like us.
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Instead, LLMs are basically “guessing engines” and search engines trained on a massive dataset to give you the output you expect: they are imitating intelligence rather than being an actual intelligence. They’re chatbots generating responses pretending to be a helpful AI.
Robert Amsterdam is also a registered (and well-paid!) agent of Maduro’s Venezuela, the socialist regime and ally of Russia which Tucker Carlson has recently defended for some reason, shocking many of his right-wing supporters.