Yeah, to me religion is just cultural, ceremonial, practices designed to deal with their lack of understanding of the natural world, and assumption of supernatural forces. While animism wasn’t religion as we know it, it did have it’s adherence to practices, and ethics, etc. They were far more local, more based on individual tribes. They were religion, none the less. Just not widespread, centralized, formalized, religion as we see today.

Yeah, no shit

Yeah, you have to have access to top secret documentation, and make that public, before you get in trouble with the government in the US, by talking about their actions. While a serious issue, it’s not very comparable to simply talking about something that happened, out in the open, that has video, and photo, evidence of it circulating all around the world, getting you in serious trouble with the government. We can even openly talk about what was on those documents, without being swept away by the federal government, now that it is public.

This is just another person who has sided with one evil, and will always whataboutism for them.

They are the US intelligence operation in the middle east. They are an attack dog for the things the US finds important, meaning they agree with us on economic operations, and will go to war to protect it. Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc. These are all just countries who are willing to actively work in the economic interests of the US as it benefits them. This allows the US access to their intel, to put military facilities in their countries, to use new weapons systems through their conflicts. They protect the standing of the petrodollar.

The US doesn’t give a shit if a tiny, powerless, economically insignificant population, or a thousand, get wiped out. Preserving US domination is more important to the US government, and states like Israel will kill anyone in pursuit of that status quo. The only people they would need to have black mail on are government actors who aren’t willing to support them, there are not a majority of those, yet.

It went from niche hobby, to large secondary media market, to the largest entertainment industry in history. Game companies are, as you brought up, no longer being run by people interested in video games. While a lot of the talent they hire, are still people who are passionate about video games, a lot of them are, just people who learned a skill, in order to have a productive career. The latter is becoming a larger, and larger, percentage of the people actually making video games. Video games are just another industry now. Just like any other, they exist to make money, and the people who work for them are people who just want a pay check.

The indie development scene is the only hope really, for people who don’t want the top 40 pop charts version of games.