Georgia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

"US sanctions against Russia imposed by the Bush administration were lifted by the Obama administration in May 2010."

I didn't mention Chechnya, but since you bring it up, the Chechen wars both started under Clinton:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

If I'm in a boxing match, and my opponent collapses, I win :)

I understand that isn't as dramatic as some nuclear knock out game, but that's the reality :)

Or is your assertion that the USSR, had it won the cold war, would've eventually collapsed on its own, then later on changed its mind and re-invaded and acquired its lost territories? :)

My biggest problem with architects - they don't get to enjoy the fruits of their labors by doing production support :)

If every architect was required to be 24/7 on call support for the first 6 months after their design was released to production, they'd be a shitload more careful in what kinds of things they dream up. Sure, that black box back end with all that data sure looks pretty, but thanks to that decision to query it 1000 times per API call, means that you're going to blow through timeouts up and down the stack, backup threads, and bring the whole mess down. Thanks Mr. Architect!

I believe thug culture exists, and that people make the poor choice to engage in it.

I believe intellectual culture exists, and people make the good choice to engage in it.

You seem to think that people are objects, and that some invisible culture monster comes up to them, and forces them to comply.

Think rather that people are *actors*, who pick and choose what cultures to engage in.

Personal responsibility, think about it :)

Options:

1) cold war where US wins;
2) cold war where USSR wins;
3) no cold war where USSR just gets to keep doing whatever the hell it wants, including the murder of millions.

Given those choices, what do you think Stalin's victims would've vied for?

The problem here is that what is desired ins't some greater understanding of why someone makes a personal choice, the problem is that what is desired is some prescriptive solution to what is *assumed* to be a problem.

If you go into the "why" question, assuming the answer, you're eventually going to find it what you're looking for, but that's *not* going to be the truth.

The primal mistaken assumption here is that men and women are not different. They are. Physically, mentally, emotionally, biologically, they are significantly different from each other. Hell, even *within* the sexes there are all kinds of differences of spectrum!

If anything, what we should be doing is the opposite - find areas where there are even splits between men and women, and find out *why*. Because *that* is the unnatural state, *that* is something worth understanding.

What's your bet that nobody cares that Pinterest is dominated by women? Or that the Oxygen channel is viewed mostly by women? Or that cooking shows are viewed mostly by women? The attack on male dominated areas is a transparent victimhood ploy, not a quest for understanding.

So, what you're saying is that if men like shit sandwiches, and women don't, we need to work harder on getting women to eat shit?

Why not leave the men alone to their odd tastes, and let women make choices based on their own priorities?

Tell that to Stalin's victims.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

As evil as the US has ever been throughout its history, to itself and to others, we've never quite mastered the art of evil like others have.

Faint praise, I know, but true nonetheless.

As mentioned in my comment:

"This differs from gender significantly, though, since there are real, biological and neurological differences between the sexes, whereas race is an arbitrary social construct."

You can argue there are discernible "masculine" and "feminine" cultures in the US, but those are generally driven by the real sex differences.

Black skin, on the other hand, does not create thug culture - the soft and hard bigotry of low expectations does.

Ukraine was part of the USSR during the cold war, and Reagan's work to destroy the Soviet empire helped Ukraine become independent in 1991.

Obama's rampant Bush blaming and lack of backbone essentially undid the hard fought victory of the cold war.

Full quote, for context:

> No doubt, history is filled with all kinds of evil misogyny, racism, and homophobia...and large swaths of the planet still have those problems, especially in the islamic world.

1) sadly, most dark skinned folk in the US are affected by thug culture - this causes all kinds of poor outcomes, including lifespan and prison representation;
2) http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Freedom to choose thug culture, or non-boardroom careers, or lower wage careers does not mean the rest of the world is imposing these decisions upon others.

WHY is there an imbalance, and is it something we can potentially fix.

If individuals have been given the freedom to make choices, then it doesn't *matter* why there is an imbalance - nothing needs to be fixed. We need to respect the choices of free people.

If you find something that limits their freedom (say, sysadmins deleting feminine accounts), you need to fix that. Active exclusion reducing individual choices (regardless of gender), is wrong.

what explanation do you have for a lack of a normal distribution?

Freedom of choice, and wildly varying individual choices. In regards to race in particular, choices made have very little to do with blood line or skin color, and much more to do with culture and upbringing. This differs from gender significantly, though, since there are real, biological and neurological differences between the sexes, whereas race is an arbitrary social construct.

Now, you could make the argument that one doesn't "choose" to be born into a thug culture that promotes the knock-out game, gang banging, assaulting strangers who might be packing heat, or robbing convenience stores before assaulting police...but whether or not you embrace or deny the culture you're raised in ultimately comes down to personal responsibility.

Individual women are making choices in response to freedom.

I don't need to explain *why* they make their choices, and neither do they - just give them the freedom to choose, and get out of the way.

I like that - "actors instead of objects". That's a great turn of phrase.

And it emphasizes that any sort of gender/race/sexual orientation re-balancing is at its essence *objectifying* people. It's asserting that they must be defined by some label, and must obey some sort of normal distribution because of that label.

No doubt, history is filled with all kinds of evil misogyny, racism, and homophobia...and large swaths of the planet still have those problems, especially in the islamic world. But we lose sight of the truth, that people are individual *actors*, not *objects*, all too often. Fighting the scourges of discrimination of various sorts doesn't lead to some predetermined statistical balance, it gives individual actors the *freedom* to make the choices they'd like. Sometimes, those free choices are lopsided, and that's *okay*.