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Yes! Newsnight is back- and what a time to come back! Sounds like it is going to be an interesting show, and that playout of dramatic pictures sounds good.

Good to see newsnight back, the best programme on telly, but can we have something on Afghanistan as i dont think we are getting the truth about how well dug in the Taliban are there. can we also have more about the Taliban because as Jason Burke of the Observer points out, and try to get him on if you can, they are not a homogeneous lot.

Kenya is prove that democracy needs time to evolve. From feudal/tribal to democratic governance on these islands (Gt Britian) took an age and a half- why are we not surprised that Kenya is turning into the violent despotic hell hole after the recent elections- illustrated in most part by the police and army brutality, ordered no doubt by whoever is actually running that show..maybe Bob Mugabe has consulted the Kenyan elite in how to run a democracy- for a fee of course( that 'degree in violence' did'nt go to waste, did it Bob)

As for Pakistan..another fledgling yoyo democracy with one of its political lights turned off with the aid of an explosive device. Benazir Bhutto was from a family dynasty not unlike.. er the kennedys..power and money helps the wheels of democracy turn round and around$$$$$ (insert your own Dallas, motorcade and grassy knoll jokes here)

Can you play out newsnight with some shots of the newsnight xmas office party..I am sure there are a few camera phones with some interesting and maybe even compromising pictures on them...

#3 How long a country takes to arrive at democracy (and how long it takes to abandon it) has little to do with time per se I suggest. Instead, it's really a function of the mean IQ of a nation, its distribution, and how that changes, i.e. naturally, or is socially/politically engineered, over time. Sub-Saharan Africa has a mean IQ not much more than 70 and whilst this may be improved over time through selective breeding, it can't improve simply, or quickly, through changing environmental conditions, be these economic, social, educational etc unless those changes themselves have a clear impact on differential fertility. That's because the greatest myth of all is that 'cognitive' ability is psychological. It isn't, it's PHYSICAL, i.e it's largely genetically expressed behaviours to the extent that ability is not further damaged by bad environments (i.e. disease, poor nutrition, injury etc). One should, I suggest, be very suspicious of anyone who asserts that economic and other forms of environmental aid to Africa can achieve much more than opportunistically benefit the 'benefactors' to the extent that the above politically incorrect, but evidence driven, fact is not the primary focus.

We in the West are now developing enough problems of our own.....see the violent crime frequency, and note, democracy has been abandoned before:

(#10) Democracy comes in many forms Ed, it doesn't work very well in Sub-Saharan Africa, much of the Middle East or S Asia. Look at these place's mean IQs, TFRs etc. Then look up what Fisher had to say, and many others since.

It's a waste of time describing empirical facts and functional relations to many people, as they're far too arrogant/ignorant (not very bright), too prone to taking offence, resorting to argument, and, if/when that doesn't get them what they want, aggression.

You appear to be resistant to being taught matters of fact. Perhaps you too should try reading a little more carefully, as you appear to have some difficulty parsing my English? ;-)

With a mean IQ of a little over 70, one should think of most Africans as big, impulsive, 'children', and so like most children, not too good at 'rule governed behaviour', which requires a high level of verbal/symbolic competence plus the ability to defer gratification (good attention spans). Self-control or behavioural inhibition is the other side of impulsivity which we differentially grow out of, some more so than others. It's all a matter of frequencies. Some groups just can't cope with democracy, they require discipline. Mao knew that, as do many Muslim leaders. Populations have to be changed physically to be able to live democratically, Mao's sucessors know that too (hence the fertility, and especially the 1995 eugenics legislation). It suits the economic interests of some predatory anarcho-capitalist/liberal-democrats to undermine other nations' discipline.

Ed - thanks for the brilliant links to 3 devastating maps, and thanks to Barrie for prompting you.

It was democracies that created this horror, and perpetuated it - including a supposedly democratic vote at the U.N. General Assembly in November 1947 which in fact was subject to fraud by force majeure removal of 3 potential No-votes (Liberia, Haiti, and the Phillippines), forcing them to not only abstain (equivalent to a No where a two-thirds majority is close-run), but to actively vote Yes.

GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

Barrie, the problem with Berne is that TA is just a reworking of Freud's pseudo-science of Superego, Ego and ID, and like other triune concepts (e.g. cortical, limbic and brain-stem) it's metaphor not science. Typical Jewish Kabbalah (psychology and the social sciences in general, like economics, is littered with magical thinking). As a consequence, it isn't a useful, defensible, testable scientific tool (it's all a great read though).

The IQ concept is just a relative measure of individual differences (best thought of as analogous to height I reckon). It's not an absolute measure *of* anything, but a (relative) normative scale, and that's where its utility lies in relation to other relational measures. Proxies (these correlate very highly with psychometric tests, which is no surprise) like SATs in the USA, SATs/GCSEs here (see international PISA tests for world rankings which parallel IQ), determine who gets into higher education (even today), and from there, who runs the country. Reduce level of ability there and one can expect infrastructure to fall apart in time. Individual differences are not just measured in terms of the principal components of IQ. Gender (a physical dimension) and the verbal-spatial sub-scale dimension is another, but unless one has valid/reliable MEASURES (even ordinal scales will do) of individual differences, one doesn't have anything which one can rationally work with, so whilst it its's true that IQ (and its educational proxies) isn't all there is, as we don't have much else, the rest has to (professionally) be left out of the equation until we do. If anyone says they don't believe that IQ is all there is, or that it's flawed as a measure, well, they're just joining the scientific club, where they go astray is in rejecting this or comparing it to unscientific (non-measurable) concepts such as Berne's TA/PAC etc. This is a pragmatic point which many miss. At one time, professional government psychologists were just psychological testers (psychometricians), in many areas they've now lost scientific credibility in my view because they've ceased providing such services (a consequence of political correctness and subversive (in my view) legislation in the USA, a long story elaborated elsewhere ad nauseam). Note the discrepancy between sex and IQ at 120 and what we observe in education today (expecially higher).....What's being drawn attention to here really is quite radical...the opposite of what contemporary 'common-sense' seems to suggest in fact....

The bottom line is that people with IQs of even one SD or so below the European mean of 100 (i.e 85) will not make very good engineers, doctors, managers etc (if they ever get the chance) and if one is short of able people one or more SDs above 100, one can't expect much social structure, let alone 'liberal-democracy' to work without very high crime rates (our's is growing at an alarming rate, despite what the government asserts), any more than you one can expect to win gold medals at the 100m a nation has a mean height of 5' 1". It's basically that simple. Liberal-democracies operate by passing legislation and regulating/enforcing that legislation. It is rule governed behaviour which depends critically on educability.

As to the good-bad dimension, take psychopathy. It's very common in prisons/criminals (at one time it was defined as coterminus), and whilst criminals generally have below average IQs (mainly low verbal, they're predominantly male too, and disproportionately non-white/black in the US and UK), psychopaths can have very high IQs (e.g. Ted Bundy). Hare has said that if he was looking for a good source of psychopaths outside prisons, he'd look in the stock-exchange. Cleckley ('The Mask of Sanity') gave a rather good account of how/why one finds psychopaths in useful niches (e.g. as surgeons, which shows they can be managed). This all comes down to frequencies/probabilities, classes and most significantly, language (and training) and the management of behavioural diversity in an organised society. Sadly, one won't see much of that in sub-Saharan Africa because of their low, mean IQ. Soon, it will happen here too if it is not happening already. In the process we will just see people argue rather than grasp the language (the 'arguers' generally have no training in these areas - just like adolescent rebels).

Just as people here prey on those of low ability (e.g. sub-prime mortgages), they do upon African states, which is why I reckon Mugabe and others turned to China for 'democratic-centralism' to try to fend their 'liberators' from the West off.

I reckon 'Trotskyites' essentially won WWII and established the UN (see link at the end of my last post). Who was Hitler fighting, why, and just how different was he from Stalin?

Ed (#14) "Adrienne, facts I can accept. That "functional relationships are as simple and exclusive as your language (however parsed) implies, is a little more difficult to accept".

How do you know Ed?

Nobody but you has said they ARE smple, or exclusive. You say these things and so do not listen. It's anarchic argument for its own sake and it's endemic sadly.

Heads up Ed..... If one is teaching someone something (at any age) it doesn't go down too well when the student tells one what they don't already know and uses that as the premise for not accepting what they're being taught ;-)

This is not simple, if it were, it wouldn't be the case that so many people get it all so wrong. None of this is easily expressible in natural language as the intensional verbs of propositional attitude get in the way (guess how many readers will look into that point?). To understand any of this at all presumes that readers have the native intelligence (and humility) to grasp that a) it must take more than a few Newsnight blog posts couched in natural language to educate anyone in this area, b) that these posts can only serve as pointers, and c) that they're only being posted in the first place because there's something radically wrong with contemporary common-sense/popular psychology, i.e. that far too many people are being misguided/misled (politically) as to the empirical facts in the domain of human bio-diversity and how it's being manipulated. One learns a science by learning a new (non-natural, largely extensional) language, most people don't bother. They think they can translate, but they don't even know that they don't understand what translation is.

Ed (#18,#19). Yet more of the same. More inferences by you, followed by imputations from you. That is not how it works. You don't understand what you are being told. China is a democracy too, so was the Stalinist USSR. It's just not western democracy, and your anarchism is just subversion of the status quo wherever is takes root. You should indeed try harder :-)

Kenya is probably the cradle of mankind. As much of the rest of the world's population evolved from those who walked out over 30,000 years ago, it isn't just a function of time.

Mean brain size: E. Asians > Europeans > Blacks. Also, men > women. There are lots of other measures, all obscured/obfuscated by 'political correctness' (Cultural Marxism/Trotskyism aka your anarchism) as this makes it easier to sell nonsense etc to gullible people (your wu-wei breeds lots of them). The above continuum shows up in educational attainment in UK, USA etc (if you look for it).

As to the 'huh?' - that's only to be expected I guess. The secret is to respond to puzzlement more constructively, i.e. more inquiringly ;-)

Ed - I suggest you look up 'intensional idioms of propositional attitude' as advised ('knowing that' is one of them).... and whilst you're at it, look up 'solipsism' ;-).

The primary referent was Kenya (along with the rest of sub-Saharan Africa) and its political stability. It's not just a matter of race, it's a matter of gene barriers, families, tribes and behaviour. You'll see it in London, if you look closely enough.

Ed (#24) Disagreement is fine and can be constructive but sometimes it's just a function of one person not knowing what another knows, i.e has as assumptions in their model. Under such circumstances one provides the missing assumptions in order to test whether disagreement can be removed. If those tacit assumptions are rejected out of hand communication is irrational. At root, what I have said is something which Fisher (1958) covered. A lot more has been done since to establish the heritability of 'g'.

Essentially, dysgenesis has to be managed through eugenics (which covers family planning) or one reaps the whirlwind. Subvert efforts to actively manage differential fertility and one can, in time, kiss goodbye to civilisation, so yes, it happened to the Greeks, it happened to the Romans, and it's happened to many other civilisations since. My concern is that it is now happening here at an accelerated rate through subversive government policies fronted by the Conservatives in the past and now New Labour.

Colonialism can be exploitational, but it can also bring nations government, infrastructure and peace. We've seen more corruption and conflict in Africa (and elsewhere) since the end of colonialism, and the reason for that, I suggest, is that most of these nations do not have the natural human resources to manage themselves. Romantic ideology and especially Bolshevism/Trotskyism/Liberal-Democracy (not Stalinism/Maoism) do more harm than good under such conditions. One just ends up with families/tribes/dynasties, not parties. These are easily manipulated by those who then wish to exploit as they are inherently divisive.

The key variable is mean IQ and its distribution, and this, I reckon, is largely genetic. It can't only be LOWERED through education and sex equality as I have explained elsewhere and yet this is precisely what liberal-democratic 'anarchists' sell domestically and also export as freedom.

So I'm extremely wary of your idealism. If I am right, pushing for democracy under these conditions is in fact subversive and exploitational. It is done so simply to create free-markets for external internationalist predators (e.g. Russia in the early 1990s at the hands of the Chicago Boys) - too few people see the Socialist International for what it is, or how Human Rights/Civil Liberties groups (women are used most effectively here, they are gatherers and naive-equalitarians, hence all the sex-equality campaigning over recent decades) obfuscate the true nature of human behavioural diversity using political correctness which is marketed as 'freedom', 'equality' and 'choice' when in fact, looked at more closely, it's just market-making exploitation. Just note how many people refer to 'caveat emptor' under the naively false assumption that people can, uniformly, by their own 'volition', choose their lifestyles and choices.

Ed, you said: "Did the Greeks abandon democracy because they got suddenly stupid? Maybe it was lead water pipes? Inbreeding amongst the elite?"

In a word - Yes.

That's not far from Fisher's (1958) population genetics account (his book in 1958 is an update of his 1930, and is widely regarded as second only to Darwin's, which is why I referenced it). Dysgenesis probably does reach a 'catastrophic' hysteresis ('tipping-point'). Think about how below replacement level TFRs offer a period of grace through an ageing population (imagine a python swallowing its prey). Dysgenesis is an insidious trans-generational process, which is why, along with poor record keeping, it's been so long overlooked (counter-measures have, however, been built into natural religious law and these are targeted by subversives waging demographic warfare).

Making IQ and the psychology of individual differences taboos via political correctness post WWII (and especially the 60s) has just served to mask what's really going on. As I've said before, it began with the (Soviet driven) Morgenthau Plan. The target then, as now, was capitalist Western Europe and the USA. For the consequences, see the ETS report 'America's Perfect Storm' and for the UK, see the Leitch Report and the OECD's PISA 2006 data.

You also said "I hope the Africans are properly grateful for all the favours we've done them over the centuries."

Why do you think the rest of the planet's ancestors left 'Kenya' 30,000 years ago? Why do so many try to leave today?

The original slaves were not 'kidnapped' by 'Whites'. The slave trade was indigenous to Africa long before the Europeans came along. It was Black Africans who caught the slaves-to-be, and then sold them on. How often do we hear of the intra-Africa Black slave trade? Not often, and that's because it's part of the guilt-trip played against contemporary (non-minority) Europeans other groups have played the same game in recent decades and yet were also involved in the original slave-trade. It's all part of a mendacious, Politically Correct, hegemonic war.

Consider this in conjunction with the Lisbon Treaty to see what New Labour 'democrats' have really been up to. Just as the EU Constitution failed and they've tried the back-door, they will try the same with Regional Asssemblies (part of Balkanisation of the UK plan which explains the solution to NI) in order to bring 'power to the people'. Except, one should ask, who ARE those people? It won't be small local businesses, will it? Both main parties have been doing this for nearly 30 years under the cover of PR spin about freedom, democracy, individualism and so on. Dumbing down the UK through equalities and education has made this easier, and Labour has done it with gusto via education, education, education, and immigration, immigration, immigration. You're way of thinking is consistent wit that of these unwitting 'wreckers'.