How about I speak your language. The problem is not religion, but blind religious devotion to an ideology. Which, by the way, leads to the fact that atheists are in no way immune to the problem.

Blind religious devotion to Stalin's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists. Blind religious devotion to Pol Pot's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists. Blind religious devotion to Mao's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists.

Putting absolute confidence in atheists immunity to blind devotion to any ideology is self-contradictory. Most of the worst cults start off with the acceptance of a similarly paradoxical premise.

Saudi Arabia. I don't care what lists it is or isn't on, it's where Bin Laden's from, it's where most of the 9/11 hijackers are from, it's a theocratic monarchy that keeps it's citizens in line with a combination of the threat of violence and a welfare state built on everything that's left over of the oil money after they've taken their share. They have numerous ties to terrorism, numerous human rights abuses and are not someone we should be supporting.

More over, it's where most of the money to support extremists in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan is coming from too. I'm hopeful the Saudi royals will be going the way of Saddam and Mubarak soon enough. It's the dictators America does NOT support who look to have a longer run ahead of them in places like Syria and Iran.

As a dictator, the benefit of not taking American money is that you don't need to worry what the American public thinks of your repressive measures in the longer run of things. That fees up the kind of brutal measures necessary to maintain 'order'.

You act as if we somehow have more "freedom" just because we elect our dictator (sorry - Mubarak calls himself "president")

No, YOU are acting like the Egyptian people under Mubarak's dictatorship had as much "freedom" as Americans. That's a gross insult to the suffering and persecution that the Egyptian people were suffering, and it's shameful.

There are many Egyptian Telco workers who think, 'If the government tells me to shutdown the ISP connection, I will obey, because the government knows best.' - These are the same types you find in the EU or US who say it's okay for the SA officers to stick hands down passengers' pants (i.e. grope penises) and touch women's breasts.* They think it's okay if the government does it.

Your experience in a free country doesn't translate quite so well to a dictatorship. The Egyptian Telco workers also think "If the government tells me to shutdown the ISP connection, I will obey, because the government will jail or possibly kill me and my family if I don't".

Don't marginalize the position and plight of those under repressive dictatorships by pretending it's akin to your own struggles in a free country. By all means fight to keep your country free. By all means point out measures in your free country that can lead to suppression and tyranny. By all means stand up against those measures. Just don't do it on the backs of those like the Egyptians fighting a very different and much harder conflict.

The AI beat a decent player of the european Starcraft scene.
But that same player would _not_ be able to hold his ground against the likes of Jaedong or Flash.

Even with that you are overselling the AI. It's victory against the human player was part of their test cases, specifically testing vs. Goliaths. Plainly that means the human had to allow the AI to survive long enough to face higher tier units. The match the human 'lost' was with both hands behind his back and similar to heralding a chess AI that can beat top humans who never move their queen.

You can actually watch the matches on youtube here. You can see the match is heavily one sided from very early on. And your right as well about the huge gap there still is from this player that won quite handily to where top Korean players are.

Having programmed an AI for that same competition, I can assure you that nobody should be surprised an AI can beat a human.

Turns out the AI didn't and can't. From a different article on the tournament:
The showcase game of the competition was a bot versus human match. In the exhibition match, =DoGo=, a World Cyber Games 2001 competitor played against the top ranking bot of the competition. The result was an exciting man versus machine match highlighting the state of the art in real-time strategy game AI.

While the expert player was capable of defeating the top performing bots in the competition, the results are quite encouraging. Read on for complete results.

Even the original article noted that the AI 'victory' against their human pro was the result of the human player artificially altering their play to build only a single unit they wanted to test out(Goliaths).

By that logic, that means we should go around and liberate all oppressed nations.

No, by your logic we shouldn't liberate anyone unless we can liberate EVERYONE. A better analogy is watching 300 people drowning and walking away because you don't want to pick favorites by saving only 2 or 3.

Read up on the history of Saddam's reign and who his puppet master was. Yes, that was Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand.

A better tip is to research the subject for more than 5 minutes on Google. Saddam was nobody's puppet. Yes, America, Rumsfeld and especially the CIA worked with him and even tried hard to influence him. So did the Russians. So did the Saudi Arabians. So did pretty much every major power in the world. Leaders of oil producing countries get a lot of international attention. Saddam was, importantly, not walking to the tune of America's harp. He wanted war with Iran for his own reasons, and America jumped on board because it worked for them too.

Then we gave him weapons, including chemical weapons to fight Iran.
That is in fact false. America did not sell Saddam chemical weapons. They did sell him some dual use equipment, most notably helicopters that he likely used to deliver the weapons. However, Saddam's suppliers of chemical weapons were primarily in Germany and Singapore. His largest financial backers, were Saudi Arabia. America did provide invaluable intelligence to Saddam though, specifically to most efficiently deploy his chemical weapons to maximum effect. So America's hands are plenty dirty, despite not actually selling the weapons themselves.

A lingering question is why should that detract from the positive nature of changing course and finally opposing instead of supporting such a monster. Seems to me that's the right direction to be headed.

regarding Saddam's atrocities it is said:
You act as if that blood isn't on our hands as well.

No, you are acting as though Saddam's atrocities aren't on America's hands. If that blood is on America's hands, how can you argue against them being expected to step up and put an end to them?

I can see the politically correct future already...

Wife: Did you sleep with him?
Husband: No of course I didn't! Not that there's anything wrong with homosexuality or infidelity...

now for the mods to decide if it's flamebait, funny or maybe even insightful.

We live in a society with two sets of rules. They basically boil down to this: if a big guy does it to a little guy, it's okay. If a little guy does it to a big guy, the little guy is gonna get stomped. That is the real American Dream

I pointed out that this wasn't unique to America, but it was the nature of the world/humanity. You seemed to disagree, and we went back and forth to the point of using ancient Egypt as an example. To which you respond:
You brought up the example of the slaves and the pyramid. I pointed out that that was a bad example, as the pyramids were built by volunteers.

Egyptian slavery(or volunteer labor if you prefer) demonstrates might makes right as a mentality, and I do insist it demonstrates it more strongly than American society does today. Comparing favorably do a slave state isn't high praise. I merely wished to point out that your criticism of the 'American Dream' extended much, much further into human nature in general. Do you deny that?

Your misinformation about the pyramids does not speak well about your understanding of the rest of history. The Pharaoh was a living God. Would a living God have to force slaves to build his tomb? No. Every Egyptian wanted to work on the pyramids, to take part in that immense religious ritual, and they were well paid and well taken care of. Archeologists know a lot about the conditions of pyramid workers, because many were buried nearby. Bones show signs of being professionally set. The workers were well fed and lived in better housing than most.

Working on your God's tomb was an honer, a privilege bestowed on the best and the brightest, not a labor of slaves.

I could stomach that theory if I hadn't originally been replying to your saying this:
That is the real American Dream: to become an Important Person, so you can play by the more advantageous set of rules and tell the little people what to do.

Waxing nostalgic for the good old days of Egyptian slaves worshiping their Man-God, while decrying the ways of the evil American empire.

Are you really sure that's where you want to go with this?

You should read a bit more about modern sociological, games theory, psychological, and economic experiments, which show that your worldview is incorrect. People are generally nice, because cooperation is evolutionarily advantageous.

I refer you, again, to history. Cooperation is advantageous. That is NOT the same as being nice to your fellow man. The pyramids are a lasting testament to what human cooperation can accomplish. Maintaining control over more than a million slaves requires a lot of cooperation, that doesn't make it nice.

History is war, conquest and the use of force against fellow man. Over and over and over again. Usually all that war and subjugation requires a great deal of cooperation, and yes, humans have proven good at it. I distinguish between that, and being nice.

Modern democracy's approach to balancing competing groups of co-operating humans with a mechanism other than brute force seems the best way to dodge the not nice aspect of cooperative competition. After all, the majority would likely win the violent contest anyways, so letting them 'win' can be expedient.

People are generally nice, unless they live in a society where there are two sets of rules. When being nice gets you taken advantage of, people become dicks out of self defense. That doesn't mean they want to be dicks, it means they have to, because they have no real access to justice.

I think that's backwards. People are only generally nice, when they have a society that encourages that as being in their self interest.

Modern economic experiments show that people would rather be fair and practice reciprocity than act in their own self interest.

History shows that in practice people act in their own self interest. It just sometimes takes the form of collective self interest. Selflessly risking your life in a war of aggression for betterment of your group at the expense of another is a recurring theme.

In any case, even if that IS the way things are, and people are just not generally very nice, it does not mean that is the way they should be.

I agree whole heartedly. Unfortunately I see the balance of the world, both now and historically, to be dominated by warlords oppressing those under them. Anytime a warlord is overthrown, more often than not the victor simply takes their place in power. There are exceptions of course, but I'd dare say stable democracies like America are the ones that stand out.

Which goes back to the prior post, I would say America on the whole is an example of one of the rare places where might makes right is more discouraged than re-enforced. With the caveat that this is a ridiculously low bar.

We live in a society with two sets of rules. They basically boil down to this: if a big guy does it to a little guy, it's okay. If a little guy does it to a big guy, the little guy is gonna get stomped. That is the real American Dream: to become an Important Person, so you can play by the more advantageous set of rules and tell the little people what to do.

I think your missing the forest for the tree. It's not just American society that double standard applies to. It applies sweepingly to the whole of human history, including every single historical and modern society.

People are just generally not very nice. As a result, odds are pretty good that if your reading this you are a bad person, shame on you!