I could give it a shot, and see if my ISP notices. If they do object then I guess I could move to a cheap VPS.

In both cases you have a person doing something that many people would consider bad. Then this person gets mad when others find out about their behaviour. If you don’t want people to find out you did something, maybe just don’t do it in the first place.

Interesting, I might look into that. I was thinking of just renting a VPS but maybe I don’t need to. Thanks for the info.

I think it’s pretty comparable. The guys in the OP are getting mad at Derek but they’re the ones who said bad things in the first place. Their actions caused this. All Derek did was let people know the truth, and maybe it’s good when people know the truth.

If you find out that someone cheated on their wife, do you have to keep it private to protect the cheater’s “privacy”?

Maybe it’s better if that person’s wife knows the truth.

Good guy Derek

I’ve thought of self-hosting a website at home on something like a Raspberry Pi but I thought of two problems with that idea:

1. I think most ISPs don’t like it if you try to host a website on a domestic internet connection, so maybe they would cancel your contract at some point.
2. If somebody out there doesn’t like the website you’re hosting then maybe they would try to attack your home server and therefore your home network, and maybe they would compromise your home network. Maybe it’s just safer to host a website on something like Hetzner.

I don’t know if I’m just worrying too much. Maybe I am.

I don’t think it’s just Putin which is why I mentioned the megalomania of other Russian elites. But Putin surely made the final decision to invade.

I didn’t say Russian only lies. I said Russia “has lied about pretty much everything for a long time”. That is not the same thing.

assuming the opposite of whatever Russia says

I’m not just assuming the opposite of Russia’s statements. I’m drawing a best guess conclusion based on two premises:

• Russia has a history of lying about its true intentions and actions
• Russian oligarchs and elites would absolutely be interested in mineral wealth, given their history of megalomania

I think it’s likely that mineral wealth would have been part of the Kremlin’s motivation to invade. Along with general megalomania and irredentism.

Maybe the primary cause was Putin’s megalomania, or indeed megalomania among quite a few Russian elites.

Occam’s razor would dictate that Russia is probably lying if they say they’re not interested in Ukrainian minerals, given that the Kremlin has lied about pretty much everything for a long time.

Putin is even saying he wants to sell minerals from Russian-occupied Ukraine to the US. Clearly he wants to profit from minerals in Ukraine.

It’s hilarious that you accuse the US and Ukraine of wanting to get rich from mineral rights, but you won’t accuse Russia of the same thing. In reality there will be rich people in each of those countries wanting to profit from minerals.

Why do you think that what Russia says is true?

Russia said they didn’t poison Alexei Navalny in 2020, but they did. They said they didn’t kill Alexander Litvinenko, and they said they didn’t poison Sergei Skripal, but they did both of those things.

People thought the first Trump presidency was a politically divided time, but maybe we’re now entering an even more divided time, given that social media is now fragmenting along political lines, more prominently than it did before.