Full video from this event will be available on this page soon.

There’s not a lot to like about Vladimir Putin: he’s autocratic, vain and runs a corrupt government. And he doesn’t give a fig for human rights. The repression in Chechnya, the jailing of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the Pussy Riot protestors, the murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and of Alexander Litvinenko, the former spy – all this happened on Putin’s watch. Who would not be on the side of the 100,000 people who turned out on Moscow’s streets last winter to protest against Putin’s election to a third term as president and to demand fair elections and an honest government? Russia would be better off without Putin – who would argue otherwise?

As a matter of fact, millions would. Talk to many Russians and they’ll tell you that life under Putin is vastly better than under Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin let a handful of oligarchs hoover up Russia’s wealth while ordinary Russians were reduced to selling their possessions on the street. Putin, by contrast, has quelled the economic mayhem – inflation is down, pensions have increased. Even more importantly he has restored Russia’s sense of self-worth – crushing the Chechen revolt, refusing to play along with the West over Syria. Living in Notting Hill you might not find Putin to your taste, but for those facing the realities of contemporary Russia he is a godsend, the strong leader that the country needs at this crucial time of transition and uncertainty.

An apology for tyranny? Or a realistic appraisal of modern Russian realities? That’s the line that fiercely divides opinion and over which the experts from Russia and elsewhere battled on at the RGS on 23rd May 2013.

Full video of this event will be available soon.

Daniel Dennett is one of the world’s most original and provocative thinkers. A philosopher and cognitive scientist, he is known as one of the ‘Four Horseman of New Atheism’ along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens.

On May 22nd he comes to Intelligence Squared to share the insights he has acquired over his 40-year career into the nature of how we think, decide and act. Dennett will reveal his favourite thinking tools, or ‘intuition pumps’, that he and others have developed for addressing life’s most fundamental questions. As well as taking a fresh look at familiar moves – Occam’s Razor, reductio ad absurdum – he will discuss new cognitive solutions designed for the most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, consciousness and free will.

By acquiring these tools and learning to use them wisely, we can all aspire to better understand the world around us and our place in it.

“A distinguished philosopher of mind”

SOLD OUT  Tickets for this event have now sold out. Please email us on info@intelligencesquared.com if you would like to be added to the waiting list, including in your email a contact phone number and the number of tickets you require.

Eric Schmidt is one of the leading visionaries of our time. He has taken Google from a small start-up to one of the world’s most influential companies. On 25th May, in an event hosted by Intelligence Squared in partnership with TLG, he will set out the themes of his new book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, which he has co-authored with Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas. He will discuss:

• new technologies that will change lives: information systems that increase productivity, thought-controlled motion technology that will revolutionise medical procedures, and near-perfect translation systems that will allow us to communicate with anyone on the planet.
• the threat to privacy and security: how much of these will we have to sacrifice to be part of the new digital age?
• the politics of the hyperconnected world: who will be more powerful, the citizen or the state?
• the threat of cyberterrorism: will technology increase or undermine our security?

If you want to understand the future, don’t miss this rare chance to hear one of our most prescient and informed public thinkers.

Praise for The New Digital Age

Nate Silver is the 35-year-old data engineer and forecaster with superstar status. He shot to fame in 2008 for correctly predicting the outcome in 49 out of 50 states in the US presidential election. In 2012, when most media pundits and political analysts claimed the US election was “too close to call”, Silver trumped them all again, giving Obama a 92% chance of winning. Barack Obama has called him “my rock, my foundation”, and Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times described him as “our age’s Brunel”.

On April 30th he came to Intelligence Squared to discuss the themes of his latest book, The Signal and the Noise. We hear endlessly about Big Data, but when the quantity of data in our world is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day how can we find the signal in all the noise, the nugget of information that will help us make sense of it all, or maybe even predict the future? Silver explained how expert forecasters think, and describe what lies behind their success, covering the stock market, the poker table, politics, sports, earthquakes, the weather and disease control. With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our forecasts, never has it been more vital to know how to distinguish true insights from the noise of useless data.

‘Lord and God of the algorithm!’ – Jon Stewart, Daily Show

‘The Galileo of number crunchers’ – The Independent

‘A new kind of political superstar’ – The Observer

‘A 34-year-old Delphic Oracle’ – The Daily Beast

Mired in allegations of sexual abuse, corruption in the Vatican and the first papal resignation in six centuries, the Catholic Church is in crisis. Two thousand years of arcane methods, tired dogma and unpalatable lies have left the papacy crippled and out of touch. The secularised West has lost faith in notions of infallibility, of temporal power and of a world in which gay marriage, abortion and the use of condoms remain outlawed. The Catholic Church stands on the brink of entropy, and no amount of confession can save it. It is beyond redemption.

Or is it? In the wake of Benedict’s abrupt departure, Pope Francis has emerged as a beacon of hope for downtrodden Catholics worldwide. Finally there’s a leader who can reconcile the principles of the traditional institution with the needs of young church-goers in search of a spiritual path: a man of humility, concerned for those in want and committed to promoting dialogue between faiths and cultures. Moreover, as Catholicism in the West declines, the numbers of the faithful have surged across Africa and Southeast Asia, which as the West slumps into economic decline, must give grounds for optimism. The Catholic Church has come through a hell of a lot worse over the centuries, and with a new captain at the helm it can surely weather the storm. Pope Francis can save it.

Following last month’s sell out debate on gun control, we’re back for the latest in our series of monthly Versus debates with Google+. This time, we examined the Catholic Church.

Following the death of Baroness Thatcher, we are revisiting our sell-out 2004 debate: ‘Maggie Thatcher Saved Britain’. The evening saw Charles Moore, Lord Bell and Sir John Nott contend with Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, Billy Bragg, and Diane Abbott over the merits and shortcomings of the Iron Lady. The debate was chaired by Martyn Lewis.

TUESDAY 30 APRIL 2013, 8PM | TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF ART

For decades, Israel’s Jewish citizens have argued that their country is the only democracy in the Middle East. Its democratic institutions and western-style political culture are sources of national pride.

Critics argue, however, that Israel’s current settlement policy, unequal citizenship rights among Arabs and Jews, and the rise of fervently nationalistic religious groups threaten Israel’s democratic character. Even former prime minister Ariel Sharon said “It is impossible to have a Jewish, democratic state and at the same time to control all of Eretz Israel. If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all.”

In the liberal hub of Tel Aviv, one may be tempted to overlook the reactionary currents in the country. But polls show Israel is becoming less pluralistic. A 2010 poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis believe “a speaker should be prohibited from harshly criticizing the Israeli government in public”.  Critics contend that an anti-democratic or even racist political culture could become endemic.

Many others, however, contend that such a scenario is impossible. They maintain that the modern state of Israel is older than over half the democracies in the world and will continue to remain both Jewish and democratic. Even during wartime, Israel’s democracy has remained strong and resilient. Israel’s Declaration of Independence guarantees all citizens “complete equality of social and political rights…irrespective of religion, race, or sex.” The country’s political structure encourages a broad spectrum of beliefs and the country affords equal rights to Jews and Arabs, even those who deny the state of Israel’s right to exist.

Under its current policies, is Israel’s democracy in danger of fragmentation?  Or is it as vigorous as ever?  That’s the question that fiercely divides opinions. Come and join the fray on April 30 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Speakers for the motion

Professor Peter Beinart

Senior political writer for The Daily Beast, associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York, and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Crisis of Zionism, was published by Times Books in April 2012

Rabbi Michael Melchior

Former Cabinet Minister and Knesset member, currently is the Chief Rabbi of Norway and a Rabbi in Jerusalem

Speakers against the motion

Ambassador Yoram Ettinger

Member of the American-Israel Demographic Research Group, studies Jewish and Arab demography, expert on US-Israel relations and Middle East politics, former Minister for Congressional Affairs at Israel’s Embassy in Washington DC

Ambassador Dan Gillerman

Former Israel Ambassador to the UN, Former Vice President to the UN General Assembly, Currently Chairman of Gillerman Global

Chair

Charlotte Halle

A veteran reporter, and editor of Haaretz English Edition since 2008

All speakers are subject to change.

Some people just can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that a relationship is over. Finished. Unsalvageable. David Cameron, for instance. His long awaited speech on Europe has been one big exercise in denial. Yes, we should stay married to Europe, he says, because we can now renegotiate our wedding vows and get the EU to do things our way. Who is he kidding? If it were so easy to pick ‘n mix what we want from Brussels, wolfing down all the soft-centred goodies and rejecting the nutty ones, wouldn’t every member state do the same? That would be a certain recipe for a 27-speed Europe and why on earth would Brussels agree to that? After the euro crisis, Brussels is hell-bent on tightening the rules not loosening them. So once you discard the new wrapper Cameron is trying to put around a thorny old problem, the reality re-emerges in all its starkness: we can’t live under the old rules – Cameron himself is clear about that – and the new rules will entail an even greater loss of sovereignty. So time for divorce.

But do we really want to throw away all we have achieved in the post-war decades – years of painstaking negotiations which have led to a peaceful and prosperous Europe? Not only has the EU enhanced trade between its members – to Britain’s benefit as much as the others – it has also provided Europe with a real voice in the world. Of course it’s far from perfect. That’s why it needs to be reformed not rejected. And of course it involves some loss of sovereignty: in a globalised world that’s inevitable. But only political juveniles hanker after a lost world of unfettered sovereignty. Time to be grown up and accept that the EU is our future, warts and all.

So which side of the argument should we heed? This is the biggest national issue of our time: Britain’s destiny is at stake.

Hooray for porn! What would we be without it? Bored, repressed, frustrated. Porn nails the lie that sex is something we should be ashamed of. Porn tells us that that sex doesn’t just come in vanilla flavour. Porn lights up the lives of the depressed, the lonely, the sexually unadventurous.  It spices dull marriages; it brings excitement to relationships; it tells us where to look and where to touch. Porn allows the timid to indulge fantasies they’d never live out in real life and the adventurous to experiment with new forms of pleasure. Now that it has stepped down from the top shelf and waltzed across the internet we can all enjoy it without the stigma of being cast as dirty old men… and women. Secretly we all know it’s one of the great pleasures out there: all that remains is that we stop pretending it’s something dirty and come straight out and salute it.

Or maybe not. Is pornland really such a nice place to be? Far from nailing a lie isn’t porn selling a lie: that women are always eager and willing to engage in extreme practices, that bodies are always tanned and buffed, breasts always pert, orgasms always explosive? Isn’t this a recipe for frustration and disappointment? And to attract the restless voyeur, porn is always having to up the ante – cyber-sex is getting ever harsher, more degrading, more extreme.

Salute it? Why? When all intimacy is reduced to heave and thrust what scope is left for sensitivity and tolerance and love? And what kind of a warped, desensitised view of the world of human intimacy does this offer up to our children? Men finding it harder to be satisfied with their real world partners; women feeling inadequate and pressured to live up to the cyber-competition – this is the reality of pornland. So which is it – the great liberator of the libido or a blight on human intimacy?

A fraction of a second: that’s all it takes for your brain to send an instruction to your trigger finger. Ask Oscar Pistorius. Ask the people of Chicago, where gun related deaths exceed one a day. But that’s the thing about guns: the threshold between anger and homicide is miniscule. That’s why the US murder rate is four times the UK’s – it’s not that Americans are intrinsically more homicidal than Brits: it’s just that they have absurdly easy access to guns. So forget  everything you hear from gung-ho Americans about the precious freedom to bear arms as enshrined in the Second Amendment to the Constitution. That’s a useful freedom when you live in a frontier society with no organised police force and when the gun you’re firing is an unwieldy musket. But when the guns in question are semi-automatics that in a second transform a brawl into a bloodbath, it becomes a freedom too far. The right to bear arms is a wrong.

That’s your standard liberal line. But as usual with liberals it entails the smug acceptance that if we let nice Mr Central Government take responsibility for protecting us, all will be fine. It won’t. The US states with the highest homicide rates tend to be those with the tightest gun control laws. In Switzerland, where every adult male is legally obliged to possess a gun, there is virtually no gun crime at all. What unites the Swiss and the Americans is that they are both fiercely independent people, with a strong tradition of local government. “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.. they make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants.” Thomas Jefferson said that. Whose side are you on?

Whose indeed? Join us for the latest in our monthly series of Versus debates as we investigate the right to bear arms.

Combining the flair of Intelligence Squared debates with the innovative technology of Google+ Hangouts, we’re bringing the world’s best speakers to the fray, either hosting them on stage at the Sadler’s Wells Lilian Baylis Studio in London or beaming them in from wherever they are in the world. And you’ll be able to join us either at the venue or by tuning in on the Versus Google+ and Versus YouTube channels.