Regarding the music festival, Asa Winstanley with The Electronic Intifada has done excellent work. Western media really just bought Israel’a line *we must immediately bury all these cars and any other physical evidence of the festival forever before anyone can investigate further because reasons…”

You’re talking about simple conquest. By that definition any offensive side in a war is imperialist, which is nonsensical as that means nearly every war in human history involved at least one “imperialist” power.

Imperialism is system of establishing and maintaining hegemony over large areas for the benefit of an elite (capital in modern times, patricians in ancient times, etc) within a metropole (probably too simple of a definition but it works). The Romans were an empire not just because they had an emperor and not because they conquered lands, but because they controlled lands from Spain to Syria and wealth flowed from those lands into Rome.

Following the news.

Between internet sites, twitch, podcasts, etc I spend hours a day just following the news.

What’s insidious about this for me is that following the news is a good thing. I feel I’ve found enough solid news sources that I can stay informed about what’s happening in the world. When I don’t follow along with what’s happening I feel anxious, like I’m going to fall behind and then I will somehow get behind and not be able understand what’s happening around me.

So while following the news in itself is not a bad thing, it has negative consequences in my life, mainly around time. It cuts into my time with my kids a bit. And it definitely cuts significantly into my time for reading books, which is probably my #1 hobby.

I’ve tried to reduce the time I spend on it all but it doesn’t usually work. So it’s a habit I’m trying to kick but not really being successful at it.

Invading / starting a war is not the same thing as imperialism.

I share most of the opinions expressed about it already expressed in this thread, so I’ll add one: whenever I’m exposed to libertarian media (podcasts, articles, etc), I’m really struck by just how surface-level the analysis is. It’s like, for anything going on in the world, they simply try to tie it back to “biG gOvErNmENt” and shoehorn everything into that. They won’t even show their work of how they get from A to B. I get that once you start applying dialectical materialism to your analysis of the world around you, other analyses can seem vulgar. But tbh even your typical liberal worldview seems more thought out than libertarians.

As an example, a libertarian I know was complaining about how California is going eliminate plastic carrier bags at supermarkets. I just asked “ok, then how else are we going solve the problem of plastic bags everywhere?” They just sorta shrugged off the question and said the government has no business banning bags.

I actually was a libertarian briefly a long time ago. It was the fact that it offers no real solutions for the biggest problems we face as a species was why I eventually abandoned it.

Reading about Google’s proactive involvement with the IOF in Gaza is truly sickening.