In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American attorney, weeaboo and social media personality, Tyler Weaver (@ArmchairW). He's best-known for his copium-infused, pro-Russian analysis on the Russo-Ukrainian War, and for his deep admiration of Russian Imperialism.
1/17
Tyler spent 9 years in active service as an Artillery Officer in the US Army, and he frequently leans on his military background to lend credence to his takes and to shut down criticism. And although Tyler claims not to like credentialism, they seem very important to him.
2/17
As someone who often bends the definition of truth, Mr. Weaver has definitely chosen the right career path - he currently works as an Assistant District Attorney after graduating from the University of Washington School of Law in Jun 2022.
3/17
On X, Tyler is mainly known for 4 things: posting dubious anime girls, battlefield predictions that age spectacularly badly, downplaying all Russian strategic losses and war crimes and of course overestimating Ukraine's losses and their alleged war crimes.
4/17
Oh, and if you want to engage with Mr. Weaver, try to refrain from describing him or his book as "creepy". I mean, in his book he does describe in detail the breasts of a schoolgirl as she undresses, but that's just high-quality literature.
5/17
Apparently Tyler absolutely loathes Zelenskyy. During the early days of the full-scale invasion, he was supporting the rumour that he had fled to Poland and was hiding in a "Polish basement". That's pretty ironic, as it was actually grandpa Putin who was hiding in a bunker.
6/17
Then there's the other classics, like calling Zelenskyy a drug addict, claiming that he's not a "real Jew" (or that he's not a Jew at all), that he doesn't visit synagogues, that he & his wife are profiting from the war & that he's raising an army from children and elderly.
7/17
Tyler asserted that the claims of a massacre of civilians in Bucha were dubious, because they were made a week after Russians left town. In actuality, the news was starting to come out in real-time, but since the press could not visit the area until the Ukrainian Army...
8/17
...had forced a Russian withdrawal, journalists had to wait for verification. He called the incident an "ongoing psyop campaign" and demanded "hard evidence" for the massacre. That hard evidence came in a form of photos and video later in an article by the New York Times.
9/17
He's often described the abduction of Ukrainian children to Russia as "patent nonsense". The International Criminal Court seems to disagree with this statement,having issued an arrest warrant for Putin after determining the extent of child abductions equated to a war crime.
10/17
He's also downplayed war crimes conducted by Russian soldiers, claimed that Russia's soldiers and leadership have adhered to the Geneva conventions. Naturally, he's downplayed Russian casualties, too, suggesting that Ukraine has lost 7-13 times more soldiers than Russia.
11/17
As you can guess, his battlefield predictions are usually wrong. Good example of this is the recapture of Kherson, which Tyler called a "disastrous counteroffensive".He later stated that Russia actually didn't want to keep Kherson since they met their "withdrawal criteria".
12/17
He's stated that he's seen "zero evidence of any systematic Russian violations". UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine of course disagrees with Tyler, and in Oct 2023 reported about "continued war crimes and human rights violations gravely impacting civilians."
13/17
According to Weaver, Russia was surgical in Mariupol, minimizing the damage done to the city and asserting that power was back on and stores open while fighting was still ongoing. In reality, approximately 46% of buildings in Mariupol were either destroyed or damaged.
14/17
Emergency services collapsed completely, and civilians had to be buried in mass graves. A total of 350 000 citizens fled. The precise scale of death is still unknown due to the Russian occupation, but estimates put the number of dead civilians into the 10s of thousands.
15/17
Tyler's ignored all drone-footage verified evidence about completely demolished cities like Bakhmut and Mariupol, referring to them as "mere projection" and "hyperventilating stories," and claims that it's again Ukraine who shells their own cities and citizens.
16/17
Like @GeromanAT and @Trollstoy88 (RIP Zoka), Weaver has no trouble in lying, exaggerating and just making shit up to his +80 000 followers.
Thank you for the sous-chef @ArmchairCopelrd for helping me to prepare this soup and @UnintelAgency seasoning it to perfection.
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.