Intelligence Squared

Bug splats. That’s what the American operators of drones, sitting in safety thousands of miles away, call the casualties of a drone attack in Pakistan or Yemen. Why bug splats? Because that’s what a human body zapped by a drone looks like on those Americans’ video screens. Thousands of those splats were in fact innocent bystanders unfortunate enough to be nearby the “target”. We call this warfare but it isn’t: it’s assassination. Drones allow political and military leaders, unhampered by public or legal scrutiny, to eliminate anyone they want killed. But moral and legal arguments aside, what do drones actually achieve? A drone strike is a sure way to inflame a community against the West and throw it into the arms of the local militants. In sum, drones are not just illegal and immoral. They are counterproductive.

That’s the cry we hear as we learn more about America’s drone programme. But do the gentle souls who condemn drones have a better strategy for dealing with the militants operating within the...

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Would you like the details of your sex life, private conversations, and hidden passions splashed across the pages of a British tabloid or published online? Could you do anything to stop it? In Britain, unlike in the USA or France, there is no right to privacy, only a much weaker "right to confidence". And though Britain has notoriously tight libel laws – making it the favoured destination for libel tourists – they only work retrospectively, after publication, by which time your reputation has been shattered. That at any rate is the view of former FIA president Max Mosley – whose proclivities were exposed by the News of the World.

In 2010 he applied to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for a change in the law that would make it compulsory to inform people before publishing private information about them. Did he have a good case? Or was he making an outrageous assault on press freedom?

Hear him and Rachel Atkins take on Tom Bower and Ken MacDonald QC in our debate from 2010.

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What makes a good artist? Can creativity can be taught? What kind of education ups the ante for success in today’s global culture?

These are some of the questions that were explored in this Intelligence Squared Asia debate in Singapore in January 2013. Singapore artist and curator Heman Chong and White Cube Asia Director Graham Steele proposed the motion. It was opposed by British artist Michael Craig-Martin and American art critic Blake Gopnik. The debate was chaired by Georgina Adam, editor-at-large of the Art Newspaper and FT art market columnist.

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Remember the rich man and the eye of the needle? Blessed are the meek? The last shall be first? Jesus didn’t hold much truck for wealth or power, nor was he exactly a supporter of family values. He didn’t even encourage hard work (“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin”). So you might easily conclude that like every other liberal Jesus would have voted Democrat.

Yet most God-fearing, church-going Americans vote Republican, the party associated with the rich and powerful. Is that because the Right fundamentally has the public good at heart? Tough love, after all, is still love, even if it means harsh treatment of the work-shy and feckless (or, as Romney knows them, the ’47 percent’).

In this debate from October 2012 Conor Gearty, James Boys, Tim Montgomerie, and Giles Fraser debated if Jesus would have been a Democrat, a Republican, or somewhere in between.

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Nearly four centuries after his death, no writer has come close to matching Shakespeare’s understanding of the world – or his gift for dramatic poetry. It’s not just kings and queens that he captured so uniquely in his transcendent verse. Shakespeare analysed the human condition, not just for Elizabethan England, but throughout the world and for eternity. Britain may not have matched the Continent for music or art but when it comes to literature, Shakespeare sees off all international rivals, whether it’s in the spheres of comedy, tragedy or the sonnet. Even today you and I quote Shakespeare without knowing it: if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if you vanish into thin air or have ever been tongue-tied, hoodwinked or slept not one wink, you’re speaking the Bard’s English.

Milton, say his fans, works on an altogether different, higher plane. In Paradise Lost – the best poem ever written in English – Milton moved beyond the literary to address political, philosophical and religious questions in a way...

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Are they out there? Intelligent beings from another world. Will we ever make contact with them? Is it even sensible to make guesses about whether life exists in other galaxies billions of light years from our own? How much do we know about outer space? What are black holes, dark matter and strange attractors? Is our universe just one amongst an infinity of multiverses? Can we dispense with the idea of a creator God?

On 16th March 2011 some of the greatest names in space exploration and the mysteries of the cosmos guided us to outer realms and argued about some of the most fascinating questions we’ve ever asked ourselves.

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Nobel laureate and giant of Western letters, Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul has excelled in both fiction and non-fiction. His latest book The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief is a travelogue in which Naipaul sets out to discover how far the old Africa's belief in magic has been subverted by the outside world. "I had expected that over the great size of Africa the practices of magic would significantly vary. But they didn’t. The diviners everywhere wanted to ‘throw the bones’ to read the future and the idea of ‘energy’ remained a constant, to be tapped into by the ritual sacrifice of body parts...To witness this, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of my book."

In this event from May 2011, V.S. Naipaul talked to Evening Standard editor Geordie Greig.

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You don’t have to like Vladimir Putin, or doubt that he’s a nasty piece of work, to recognise that the Russian president’s reaction to the crisis in Ukraine is largely justified. The promise that Russia managed to extract from the West, as it watched its old empire crumble, was that NATO would not expand eastward and that the Baltic states and Poland would not be absorbed into the EU. Not only have Nato and the EU broken that promise, they have even sought to bring Ukraine – for centuries seen as umbilically tied to Russia – into the western fold. The West has tried to influence elections in Ukraine. It has backed the overthrow of a democratically elected president. Putin isn’t being expansionist: he just wants Ukraine to remain a non-aligned buffer zone between Russia and the West. He couldn’t survive the national humiliation of it becoming yet another western outpost. So cut him some slack: we need more diplomacy and fewer threats of reprisals.

That’s the voice of the non-interventionists but haven’t...

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The books Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics have been worldwide sensations, selling tens of millions of copies. They have come to stand for challenging conventional wisdom using data rather than emotion. Questions they examine are typically: Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? How much do parents really matter? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it’s so ineffective?

Now the books’ two authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, have turned what they’ve learned into a readable and practical toolkit for thinking smarter, harder, and different – thinking, that is, like a Freak.

On 28th May they came to Intelligence Squared to discuss their new Frequel, Think Like a Freak. By analysing the plans we form and the morals we choose, they showed how their insights can be applied to help us make smarter decisions in our daily lives.

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Conventional wisdom tells us that a new star will rise in the East, and all eyes have been looking towards China or India as the 21st century’s new superpower. But remarkable as their recent economic growth may have been, the institutional frailty of both nations raises questions about long-term sustainability. Meanwhile the economies of South America have also been transforming themselves quietly and less flashily, unburdened by the dead weight of caste politics or communism. And it’s not just Brazil that catches the eye: at 9.8 percent Peru's growth rate last year was one of the world’s fastest. So perhaps we should all do an about-turn.

In this debate from March 2011, Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck College Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Brazilian Ambassador to the UK HE Roberto Jaguaribe, and Director of the Global Governance Initiative Parag Khanna spoke in favour of the motion.

Speaking against the motion were former Economist editor Bill Emmott, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at...

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