He’s exploiting exactly the same weakness that llms exploit to appear so smart: he just sounds confident all the time, and since people use confidence as a shortcut to evaluate accuracy, anyone who isn’t paying attention to the actual substance is going to just nod and smile at the confidence and assume everything is perfect.

Because your information is what a number of services use to make money. Even before VPNs come into the equation, you’re undercutting the service’s ability to sell you by anonymizing yourself.

That said, as noted elsewhere here, VPNs can be used by bad actors which can get you just put on a massive block list; and in addition, VPNs can be used to circumvent regional protections such as provisions on what countries can watch what content on video streaming services, which those services also want to prevent and so can block known VPN addresses to avoid.

For sure. It’s the classic:

Reading this now, and it strikes me as all the things I should have been taught about the Nazis beyond just the enormity of their cruelty:

Most important of all, how often just a little pushback stopped them stupid.

A student strike in German-occupied Belgium was enough pushback to stop the enforcement of the extradition of Jewish people there.

Italy, an ally at the beginning, would just say they would extradite their Jewish population, then not actually do it, in a loop, leaving the Germans frustrated simply by being lied to to their face and incapable of making progress.

You’re left with a picture of a bunch of bureaucrats following orders who are incapable of comprehending disobedience nor knowing how to handle it.