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 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.
1/20
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.
2/20
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.
1/19
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.
2/19
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”.
1/20
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.
2/20
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.
1/24
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.
2/24
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.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll explain the context of the upcoming Budapest Blunder, and how it follows the infamous Alaska Fiasco from two months ago and Trump’s absurd delaying of serious aid to Ukraine and effective sanctions on Russia for the past nine months.
1/20
Two months ago, Trump embarrassed the United States by rolling out the red carpet for war criminal dictator Putin and overall acting like a pathetic servant eager to meet his master. Of course, the Alaska Fiasco didn’t bring peace any closer.
Worse, the main outcome of the humiliation was to delay serious sanctions, which the US Congress, in rare bipartisan unity against Russia, was on the verge of passing. Two weeks by two weeks, Trump Always Chickens Out, postponing any real pressure on Putin for 9 months now.