"employing both hard power and soft power". russia only uses military might (hard power)
i'd say modern imperialism is much more complex than grabbing land (irredentism). for example, the best example of imperialism, the US, has tied european defense to the US via nato. if their european vassals don't buy enough weapons from them or are about to buy weapons from the wrong country, they get heavily punished economically (terminating trade deals, tariffs, threats etc.)
a lot of european NATO and other vassal countries weapon systems are tied to the US so it's likely that they could just shut down my home country's air force by pressing a button, if we switched over to politics they don't like.
our (finland) voting systems, e-authentications, healthcare systems are being moved to the US cloud. this gives america leverage to basically shut our country down if we ever go against their politics. from what i've heard, microsoft's services are spreading like a cancer despite this being the homeland of linux.
i saw a news article that claimed that the biggest american companies control like 60% of the internet's traffic. the americans could initiate a disaster to any "western" country if they wished by cutting them off.
this is what modern imperalism looks like.
now take anti-imperialist countries like russia or china. they would sell all kinds of things (including weapons) to satan if he treated them fairly. they have their own internet services, they don't give a fuck. they don't push them to anyone else to make them conform to their political ideals by holding the wire cutter. this is what makes the difference.
that being said, irredentism is still awful. i'm ideologically against all forms of killing, and that includes the russian attack on ukraine. just so we're clear here, this is just about definitions, i'm not trying to argue that russia attacking its neighbors is good in any way.
didn't mention .ml at all so i assume OP has blocked the second biggest instance for too many wrong opinions lol
edit: apparently it's not the second biggest anymore, still one of the biggest anyway and technically the "main instance" so you'd think it would be mentioned in some way but yeah looking at this guy's comments it makes sense
that and i wish you couldnt get banned from a sublemmy you've never interacted with.
just check my modlog, i've never broken any rules anywhere, yet i have the label of a "tankie bootlicker" forever stuck to my account from getting banned from a sublemmy i've never interacted with, probably cus the people running it are more paranoid than even stalin was
edit: it's not even a sublemmy apparently lol. it's a... whatever u call communities in piefed
it's kind of strange hearing about all this stability and everything on debian stable (and lmde by extension), when it was constantly broken for me and i had to do all kinds of weird fixes
i have a lenovo thinkpad t490s too so it's not like im running on brand new components or anything either
been running fedora kde for a few months and it's been running like a dream
i wish people would stop saying stuff like this
it really sucks being against this vile shit yet being grouped in with the genociders by my allies