Objection

When did Russia invade Belarus, exactly? I can't find anything about that at all, did you just make that one up entirely?

So imperialism only exists at a certain scale?

The bigger scale a country does imperialism on, the bigger a concern it is and the more attention should be paid to it, yes. Otherwise, you're just cherry picking.

The overwhelming majority of imperialism is done by the US, so trying to downplay that and shift the focus is no different from cherry picking some crime done by an immigrant while ignoring the general trend that immigrants tend to commit fewer crimes. This isn't a difficult concept, lol.

I was under the impression that it had more to do with a country’s foreign policy objectives

Objectives? That's pretty subjective, isn't it? It depends entirely on the country's motivations. So you could potentially look at the decades-long military occupation and plundering of Afghanistan and say, "Well, our objective was to build democracy so it wasn't imperialism."

You could assign all sorts of nasty motivations to a country like the DPRK, based on your own presumptions, and be like, "Well, they would try to take over the world even more than the US if they had the capability to, so they're more imperialist than the US," even though the US controls half the globe. That's completely absurd.

I could do one in Southeast Asia, but no matter where on Earth I did it, the US one would not be greyed out like China in the Middle East. Almost as if the only places other countries are "active" are regions nearby where they have legitimate security interests, while the US is out to conquer and subjugate the entire globe.

or exerting dominance over all of their previous vassal states

What does "exerting dominance" mean here exactly? I defined the labels on my map clearly and objectively, either military strikes or troops within borders. I also presented a bunch of specific countries that meet those criteria.

Russia has invaded one single country and has bases in a handful of others, mostly near its borders. How is that comparable to subjugating the entire Middle East through overt force from halfway across the globe? Surely you can see that US imperialism is much more extensive.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

I did though. The reason that I single out American imperialism is that there is so much more of it than there is for any other country. Show me a region anywhere on Earth that looks like this for Russia, China, or any other country.

As well as a good answer, yes.

And the US has done the same to other countries. And there are countless billionaires and corporations that influence US politics just as Israel does.

Maybe we should focus more on the general problem of class conflict rather than looking at it in terms of nations. If you got all the Israeli money out of US politics but did nothing about the other corporate money and corruption, it's hard to imagine much would change.

We're talking about blackmail material. If AIPAC is sufficient explanation for why congress supports Israel, why do we need all this conjecture and supposition that Trump is being blackmailed, when we know for a fact that he takes AIPAC money too?

Even if that's true, they are still in the US sphere of influence just like Saudi Arabia, and that's all that US politicians care about. They will happily overlook Israeli crimes just as they overlook Saudi crimes, and I don't see people suggesting the Saudis have blackmail material.

What do people mean by saying the US does whatever Israel wants? Sending them weapons to kill brown kids in Palestine, Lebanon, etc? The US wants to do that. Bombing Iran? The US wants to do that. Either you have to take the theory further and say that the whole reason the US wants to dominate the region is for Israel's sake (I don't know why they can't just want to dominate it for their own sake), or you have to ignore all the conflicts the US has gotten involved in in the region that aren't directly related to Israel, brushing them off as coincidence.

Either way, the simplest explanation is that the US is simply a militaristic state hellbent on domination and expansion through conquest, motivated by the same things that have always motivated imperial conquest, from Rome to Britain.

No. Of course it's possible, but if the only evidence is that he's doing everything Israel wants, then does Israel also have something on the vast majority of Congress? Did they have something on Biden, Obama, Bush, etc?

The simpler and more likely explanation is that all these politicians support Israel for other reasons, because Israel serves as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US and a staging ground to conduct it's campaigns of terror and conquest across the MENA region. Look at how many countries in that region the US has destabilized: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, and of course the Israelis themselves are attacking Palestine and Lebanon. Virtually every country that isn't already in the US sphere of influence. This is a consistent campaign of conquest that goes across decades of different administrations.

You don't have to blackmail US politicians to get them to bomb brown kids in the Middle East, it's what they all want to do anyway.

The first step to finding a solution is to recognize that the existing tools are woefully insufficient. Suppose we didn't have elections at all, suppose all we had was a monarchy where the only recourse within the system was to petition the king, to ask him nicely to act on our behalf. Should we still rely on that? Should we drop other approaches because they might sour the king's mood?

With a little imagination, you can find that there are inherent mechanisms for asserting power that are not provided by the system and which exist regardless of the system's best efforts to take them away. All systems are manmade and can be changed and dismantled if enough people stop cooperating with it. This does not have to look like a traditional revolution, with pitched battles and whatnot. Strikes, protests, development of mutual aid networks and dual power structures, even targeted boycotts can be more effective than voting for a candidate hand-picked by the ruling class.

The electoral system keeps people disorganized and divided, it directs energy away from those tactics instead of towards them. The idea that non-disruptive tactics could possibly someday produce change makes people unwilling to engage in tactics that are more disruptive, because nobody really likes being disruptive, taking risks, creating tension, but that tension is necessary to effect change.

The effect that electoral politics has on defining people's political identities cannot be overstated. The moment you cast your vote, no matter how reluctant it may be, there will be a part of you that wants to justify and defend your choice and before you know it you're now defending things that you never would otherwise. Nearly all political discourse becomes colored by this question of who to vote for. Again, think about how you would read news stories differently if you had no mechanism within the system for expressing your voice. But that is essentially where we're at because the mechanisms provided by the system are ineffective, but while we have this idea that they could be effective, people still define themselves along those lines.

Let me give you an example. I live in a solidly blue state, previously, I lived in a solidly red state for most of my life. At no point has my vote for president had any impact on the outcome whatsoever. This is true for the vast majority of Americans. And yet, when I talk about my refusal to vote Harris or Biden, people yell at me, a lot. Why? It has no material impact. It's because it's primarily a cultural signifier, a way of defining a political identity, and any material consequences are of secondary consideration. So long as people are allowing bourgeois parties to shape and define their political identities, that's going to dissuade them from engaging in direct action.