Intelligence Squared

People everywhere are better off living in liberal democracy: that has been the reigning assumption of the western world. But could it be we’ve got it wrong? If you were one of the world’s billions of poor peasants might you not be better off under a system dedicated to political stability and economic growth – one that has lifted 400 million out of poverty – rather than one preoccupied with human rights, the rule of law, and the chance to vote out unpopular rulers? Thanks to the Chinese model of government life expectancy in Shanghai is now higher than in New York. So is China better off without democracy? Or is that just the age-old mantra of the tyrant? — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well

Hooray for porn! What would we be without it? Bored, repressed, frustrated. 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. All we need to do is stop pretending it’s something dirty and come straight out and salute it. Or maybe not. Porn after all is selling a lie: that women are always eager to engage in extreme practices, that bodies are always tanned and buffed, orgasms 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 more degrading and extreme. Men are finding it harder to be satisfied with their real world partners, women are 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... Su

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... — We’d l