In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a Russo-Serbian-American actor, martial artist and carrot-enjoyer, Steven Seagal. He's best-known for allegedly pooping his pants, for his praise of dictators around the world, for being a dick, and for his sexual harassment lawsuits.
1/19
Seagal's roots go back to Russia, and his paternal grandparents were Russian Jewish (actual Russian Jewish, not the Donbass Devushka kind) immigrants. In an interview by Dmitry Borisov, ...
2/19
...he stated that his paternal ancestry can be located to the Siberian city Vladivostok but also to Belarus and St. Petersburg.
Steven got into the movie business in 1987, when he cooperated in Above the Law with Andrew Davis. With zero acting skills and ...
3/19
...experience in martial arts, he became one of the action movie B-listers, appearing in movies like Hard to Kill and Marked for Death. His wider success came from his 1992 movie, Under Siege. Until the early 2000s, Steven was somewhat successful action star, but after...
4/19
...the relatively successful Exit Wounds (2001), most of his movies have been released as direct-to-video.
His success during the early 90s also landed him a spot as a host on Saturday Night Live. The series' Lorne Michaels, David Spade and Tim Meadows described Seagal...
5/19
...as "show's worst host ever". They called on his humorlessness and on his ill-treatment of the cast and writers. Seagal also refused to do a skit with characters that had previously claimed they could "beat up Steven Seagal".
6/19
Seagal has also been involved in various business endeavors, of which most have failed to make money. In 2005, his company Seagal Enterprises produced an energy drink, "Steven Seagal's Lightning Bolt", but the product was quickly discontinued.
7/19
He's also launched an aftershave, "Scent of Action". In 2013, Seagal teamed up with Russian weapons manufacturer, ORSIS, to promote his signature rifle known as "ORSIS by Steven Seagal". He's also lobbyed for lifting off the US import restrictions on Russian firearms.
8/19
In addition to collecting sword, Seagal also collects sexual harassment lawsuits. He's been involved in various harassment cases since the early 90s, and for example Portia de Rossi has told that he'd unzipped ...
9/19
...his pants after saying "how important it was to have chemistry off-screen" during audition.
He also told then 16-year-old Katherine Heigl in 1994 that "he had girlfriends the same age". Seagal's also been accused of raping an 18-year-old.
10/19
As so many Russian shills,Seagal has been involved in cryptocurrencies. In 2020, after failing to disclose payments for the promotion of Bitcoiin2Gen & agreed to pay a total of 314 000 USD as penalty. He's also been blamed by various stuntmen for intentionally hitting them.
11/19
While filming the movie Out for Justice, Gene LeBell choked Seagal unconscious after Steven had claimed that his "immune" to such attacks. As a result, Seagal lost control of his bowels. This incident may be the reason why Putin likes him so much.
12/19
Steven Seagal is a huge Putin fan, once describing him as "one of the great living world leaders". He showed strong support for the annexation of Crimea, and even appeared there in Aug, 2014, at an event organized by the motor cycle gang, Night Wolves. At the event, he ...
13/19
...depicted Ukraine as a "country controlled by fascists". In 2016, Putin handed out a Russian passport to Seagal at an orchestrated event, but he had gotten his Russian citizenship already in Nov 2014, few months after appearing at the absurd event in Crimea.
14/19
In May 2021, the fake opposition party A Just Russia - Patriots - For Truth announced that they are giving Steven an official membership card to their party. In Mar 2022, Seagal celebrated his 70th birthday in Moscow, with many guests under Western sanctions as guests.
15/19
Later that year Steven visited Olenivka in Donetsk, with former Ponzi schemer and leader of the puppet state DPR, Denis Pushilin as his host. According to Pushilin, Seagal also interviewed Ukrainian POW's, thus breaking the Geneve convention.
16/19
In 2013, Seagal was invited as a guest at Ramzan Kadyrov's birthday party in Chechnya. Steven called him a "great leader", and Kadyrov referred to him as “almost a Chechen national.”
17/19
When visiting Belarussian dictator Lukashenko, Steven was given one carrot and one watermelon as a gift. After receiving the watermelon, he commented "Nice. Nice."
18/19
In Feb 2023,he was awarded with the Russian Order of Friendship for his "major contribution to the development of international cultural and humanitarian cooperation".Earlier this month,it was reported that Russia has recruited Steven to teach martial arts to its soldiers.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this: why we think Ukraine is so important and why we believe that souping vatniks and debunking their propaganda narratives is so crucial to counter Russia’s & their allies’ wars of aggression and achieve real peace.
1/20
War is expensive, and Russia is not a rich country that could afford this: Hospitals? Roads? Plumbing? No: everything into terror and destruction.
But not only that. There is a 2nd item in the Russian state budget that remains strong no matter what:
Manufacturing support for that terror and destruction. Propaganda. Vatniks. “Innocent” travel bloggers. “Independent” journalists. “Patriotic” politicians. Russia spends hundreds of billions of rubles a year ($5 billion) on this, and that kind of money buys you A LOT of BS.
In this second (and possibly last) Basiji Soup, we’ll explore how the Islamic Republic of Iran has prepared for a conflict with the US and Israel. We won’t cover the military aspects, but another kind of war — information warfare.
1/20
In the 1st Basiji Soup, we souped the Islamic Republic, its disinformation operations, its hypocrisy, its support of terrorism including Russia’s, its (one-sided?) relationship with Putin, and the mass protests against it that started two months ago:
The Internet blackout has been crucial in allowing the regime to cover up its massacre of the protesters and especially the scope of it, making it difficult to assess the number of victims. They went to great lengths to jam Starlink, after having made its use illegal.
In this 7th Debunk of the Day, we’ll expose the “Chickenhawk” fallacy. The chickenhawk accusation or the “go to the front!” imperative is a dishonest attempt to silence anyone supporting Ukraine by pushing them to go fight. A barely hidden death wish, as it’s always uttered… 1/5
…with zero regard for who you are or what your personal circumstances might be — you could already be there, on your way there, a veteran, or unable to fight. More broadly, not everyone can or should be a soldier, just as not everyone can or should be a policeman or a nurse. 2/5
Yet a society still needs those things to be done, and the fact that not everyone can go to medical school or fight crime does not mean that we have to surrender to invaders and criminals, nor that we cannot all have an opinion on healthcare. 3/5
In this 6th Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about a complex and controversial topic: conscription. It is used by vatniks to attack Ukraine for drafting men to fight, while conveniently ignoring the alternative, including the horrors of conscription into the Russian army. 1/8
Military obligations are a reality in many countries, from the most peaceful democracies to the most tyrannical dictatorships — unless you have “bone spurs”. Some argue it is a necessity for defense against invading armies, especially for small countries. 2/8
Others point out that it goes against individual rights or that a professional army is better. And Zelenskyy might agree: he did in fact end conscription. But then a full-scale invasion happened: exactly why many nations, including the US, still keep some form of draft. 3/8
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll introduce the International Olympic Committee (IOC) @Olympics . It’s mostly known for organizing sporting events, and for being supposed to foster the Olympic ideal while actually submitting to dictators.
1/15
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894 in Paris by Pierre de Coubertin with a noble goal: promote peace through sports. Politics out, sportsmanship in: sounds great in theory.
2/15
But in practice, the IOC has a long history of accommodating authoritarian regimes, always in the name of “neutrality,” “dialogue,” and “keeping sports separate from politics”, usually not in a particularly consistent or moral way.
In today’s Wumao Soup, we’ll tell you 15 things about the People’s Republic of China that you didn’t learn from TikTok, Douyin or DeepSeek.
1/20
This is our 2nd Wumao Soup. In the 1st one, we introduced how the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) online propaganda works. Now we’ll cover some of the big topics they hide or lie about. Think of it as an antidote soup to their propaganda.
1 - Tiananmen Square massacre
Yes, it happened. Yes, it was a massacre. Vatniks, wumaos, and tankies in the West deny it, while China censors the slightest mention of it, even the date it happened.