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Dont Look Up dramatically exposes the cynicism of the ruling class, who prioritise their own profits above saving the planet. But despite exposing the dead end of capitalism, the film ignores the potential for the working class to transform society.

Adam McKays satirical film Dont Look Up (available on Netflix) is one of the most divisive films of the year just gone.

The premise of the film is very simple. We follow astronomer and PhD student Kate (Jennifer Lawrance) and her supervisor, Prof Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who have discovered an enormous comet heading straight towards Earth. They try to warn the world that there is a 99.7% chance that the planet will be destroyed.

Clearly, the comet is a metaphor for climate change. The 99.7% probability is a reference to the percentage of scientists who agree that climate change is happening and that human activity is responsible for it.

ALERT! This review contains significant plot spoilers.

Initially, when the astronomers attempt to alert the President of the existential threat, she reacts by calculating the effect of a possible decision on the upcoming mid-term elections. She ignores the threat when she concludes that telling people of the comet may not be advantageous to her mid-term electoral campaign.

Frustrated, the astronomers speak directly to the media. But they find that their news gets barely a mention, as it is squeezed between segments. They are told by the TV hosts that they need to keep it light, airy and fun. Theyre questioned over whether the comet is actually real, whether this is not all a lie, and whether the planet is actually in danger.

Only when the president drops in the polls does she decide to take action.

Kate tells her: I didn't vote for you. But this is obviously much bigger than my misgivings. So I will be 100% behind this effort. No matter how offensive I may find you.

In other words, she states that this is not a political question; that they should put aside their differences, and all come together.

BASH CEO, Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), is an obvious composite of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos. He proposes mining the mineral resources on the comet, worth trillions of dollars. When his plan is leaked, the establishment launches a cynical campaign, explaining that mining the comet will create more jobs.

When the comet becomes visible in the night sky, the astronomers launch a Look Up campaign to convince the president to destroy it. The campaign is based on how liberals approach activism, i.e. raising awareness, asking the government politely to do something, with no involvement of workers or the masses.

In response, the President organises a Dont Look Up campaign, the supporters of which are clearly a sneering caricature of Trump supporters.

Meanwhile, Insherwells plan to mine rare minerals from the comet and shatter it into several harmless pieces fails. However, he, the president and a few hundred of the super-rich have a back-up plan to escape Earth on a spaceship and settle on another far-distant planet, leaving the ordinary people to die.

Dont Look Up is about how the capitalists despite having the resources and technology to solve the crisis prioritise their profits over saving the lives of the other 7.9bn people on the planet. To this effect, the film is good at exposing the cynical calculations of the establishment.

But where the film fails is its lack of any solution to this crisis facing humanity. This is ultimately since the film has been made from a liberal, not a socialist, point of view.

Of course, this is not the only film about a comet threatening our planet see Deep Impact and Armageddon, for example. However, it is extremely telling how confident these films are regarding saving humanity, in comparison to Dont Look Up.

Today, such illusions have been vaporised by the ruling class woeful response to the climate crisis and pandemic. It is true that if such issues are left to the capitalist class to solve, the result is that millions of ordinary people die.

Although the liberals are correct to not trust the conservative wing of the ruling class in solving these crises, they are incapable of seeing that the solution lies with the working class. In Dont Look Up, the working class is cynically portrayed as sheepish and stupid, simply as people who riot and loot.

For example, the film mocks how some people might be attracted to the idea that mining the comet will create jobs. This is typical of how the liberal establishment fail to understand how Trump gained popularity within a section of the working class with his promises of revitalising the US economy.; especially when you consider that the alternative was the establishment figure head Clinton.

If the entire planet is at stake, with eight billion lives about to be lost, just for a potential opportunity to make the rich even richer, then a very reasonable suggestion would be to take matters into our own hands.

This film has been released in a period where millions worldwide have taken to the streets over the climate, Black Lives Matter, and against austerity. But the potential for the working class to take power into its own hands to solve the crisis is completely ignored throughout.

At the end of the film the protagonists realise that all is lost; they are doomed. Kate says: Im thankful that weve tried. But had they actually tried?

Asking the establishment politely to give up their profits through a toothless campaign was bound to get them nowhere. And as their campaign predictably failed, they resigned themselves to their fate, went back to their families, and sought comfort in religion.

The film is profoundly pessimistic and fatalistic: a reflection of the outlook of liberals who see only doom and gloom as capitalism further deteriorates. Whether on the climate question, the pandemic, or even sexism and racism, they have nothing to say. They are oblivious to the fact that as capitalism declines, a new society is struggling to be born.

We need to shape our own fate and take ownership over our future. Whilst the liberals sit and weep, we fight for a socialist society based on the needs of the working class.

Original post:
Review: Don't Look Up: Don't leave it to the liberals to save us - Socialist Appeal

Ahead of another critical Covid-era general budget and an upcoming series of state elections, noted economy & political commentator Swaminathan Aiyar said the very fate of reforms in India likely hangs on which way the UP verdict goes.

"A lot of liberals like me might be very happy to see BJP lose the UP elections, but from the point of view of the economy, a bad BJP loss would mean a sudden squeeze or sudden slowdown in the entire reform process and that would not be good for the economy," said Aiyar in an interview to ET Now.

As it is, reforms have already been kind of relegated to the backburner following the major fiasco on the farm laws. Aiyar notes that after being badly bitten by the farmers agitation, Modi govt itself wants to go easy and slow on reforms. While the three farm laws were the most visible casualties, other reform measures including monetisation and the four labour laws will suffer too, he says.

Aiyar says that a lot hinges on the UP outcome: if BJP does well, it will be a vindication that the farm protests didn't reflect the general mood and so, the govt will double down on reforms. It will bode well for the fate of the entire pending reform pipeline. And India needs this to happen, because a govt must learn to look beyond protests that any privatisation brings in its wake, he notes.

If, on the other hand, the BJP loses or does badly in UP, it will lead to panic in government circles regarding the unpopularity of reforms, Aiyar says. That will send a lot of negative signals to the government, and at a time when there already is a lot of sloth in the monetisation process, such signals will wreck the reform agenda, he adds.

Bad signals from UP will likely stall the already sputtering monetisation of assets, leaving the govt with no realistic chance of meeting its target, Aiyar notes. "The national monetisation pipeline is supposed to get lakhs of crores of rupees within a few years. Will that really happen with this kind of slowdown of reforms," he asks.

As an example, Aiyar cites the UP electricity reform case. It may be recalled here that attempts to reform the UP power sector a while ago had led to a serious loss of face for the authorities there. As soon as official announcements were made, the electricity staff ganged up and threatened to shut down the entire state, following which the government had to beat an ignominious retreat. This, when New Delhi's stated official power policy is all about privatising discoms.

After the UP lesson, the BJP is moving very cautiously even in places that are under its rule, such as Puducherry and Chandigarh, Aiyar observed. All this means the reform process will without doubt be in danger if BJP suffers a serious defeat in UP, and will get a boost if the party has a good victory, he added.

He said the UP poll outcome will be more important than the budget in deciding the economy's road ahead. With the budget coming after the polls, the budgetary announcements will depend on which way UP goes, he said, adding that budget & UP polls together constitute the big picture at the moment.

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A BJP loss in UP will be bad news for economy even if it makes liberals happy, says Swaminathan Aiyar - Economic Times

Every movement contains a range of viewpoints, from moderate to extreme. Unfortunately, Americans on each side of the political spectrum believeincorrectlythat hard-liners dominate the opposite camp.

After the killing of George Floyd last year, for example, liberal protesters across the nation pushed for criminal-justice reform, and many of the specific changes they sought enjoyed a lot of popular support. Even recent polls have shown that, regardless of political affiliation, most Americans remain in favor of police-accountability measures (such as body cameras and a registry of police misconduct), the banning of choke holds, and tackling racial injustices head on. Some activists went much further, though, demanding the complete elimination of police departments. Conservative pundits noticed. Soon, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson was presenting call after vivid call to abolish or radically defund policing. They would like to eliminate all law enforcement for good, he told viewers.

Read: Americas real wokeness divide

But supporters of police abolition are the exception, not the rule, on the American left, according to research that my colleagues Matthew Feinberg, Alexa Tullett, Anne E. Wilson, and I conducted. In late October 2020, we asked more than 1,000 people in the United States whether they agreed that police departments are irreversibly broken and racist, so the government needs to get rid of them completely. Only 28 percent of the self-described liberals even somewhat agreed, indicating that this was not a solid consensus on the left.

Although far out of step with what most liberals actually thought, Carlsons sampling of liberal views was emblematic of what conservatives believed about liberals. Conservatives in our sample estimated that 61 percent of liberalsmore than twice the actual numberendorsed the abolition of law enforcement. This is a striking example of what plagues our politics: a false polarization in which one side excoriates the other for views that it largely does not hold.

Left-leaning readers might not be surprised that conservatives would accept as widespread a caricature of the radical liberal, given that they are so clearly blinded by racism or pro-police sentiment that they would excuse even the most unjust excesses of force. But waitis this portrayal of conservatives accurate?

No. It isnt.

Just as liberals came to rally around #BlackLivesMatter, conservatives gravitated to #BlueLivesMatter. From the vocal conservatives who made excuses for misconduct or blamed victims, some liberal commentators concluded that the right is dominated by police apologists. In fact, many on the right recognize both the humanity and hardship of police officers and those harmed by them. When we asked conservatives if police were almost always justified in their shootings of Black people, only 31 percent of respondents even somewhat agreed with the sentiment. Liberals, on the other hand, estimated nearly double that number of conservatives57 percentgave police a free pass.

Some caveats: Our research, which is available as a preprint, is under review and subject to change. We drew our large samples of respondents from online survey platforms, not from nationally representative polling. We recognize that this sampleand therefore our estimates of the prevalence of liberal and conservative opinionsis not an exact microcosm of the country. Still, other researchers have concluded that these platforms are reasonably comparable to nationally representative polling.

The gap that we identified between what partisans really think and what their opponents think they think shows up again and againbut only on a particular kind of issue. People have a more accurate view of the other sides position on many standard policy issues, such as taxes or health care. But specifically on culture-war issues, partisans are likely to believe a caricatured version of the opposing sides attitudes. These misconceptions have hardened into enduring stereotypes: liberal snowflakes and free-speech police, conservative racists and deplorables.

In reality, just a third of liberal participants agreed even a little with banning controversial public speakers from college campuses, but conservatives estimated that 63 percent of liberals held that view. Only 22 percent of conservatives expressed hostile and unwelcoming attitudes toward immigrants, but liberals thought that 57 percent of them did. Our data suggest that many people are walking around with an exaggerated mental representation of what other Americans stand for.

Where do these ideas come from? Partisan media outlets have an incentive to stoke their audiences outrage by making extreme views seem commonplace. In our work, we saw that the more people reported consuming partisan news (a category in which, drawing on the work of other researchers, we included Fox News and MSNBC), the more they believed in a caricatured version of the other side.

Conor Friedersdorf: Americas blue and red tribes arent so far apart

Peoples perceptions of others are powerful, even when theyre wrong. We found that people disliked their opponents primarily for the fringe views most opponents didnt actually hold. Worse still, partisans who disliked their opponents most were least willing to engage with them, which likely forecloses the chance to have their misperceptions corrected through real-life personal contact. Instead, an oversimplified, exaggerated version of the other sides views is allowed to live on inside of everyones head.

Whats more, partisans told us they were hesitant to voice their opinions about the most extreme positions expressed by people on the same side of the spectrum. For example, liberals were less keen to talk publicly about the downsides of censoring free speech than they were to talk about the benefits of universal health care. So although a majority of liberals opposed censorship, their reluctance to criticize it openly might have led conservatives to think that most on the left favored it.

So what should politically minded Americans conclude from our researchthat, gosh, their opponents are just like them, and everyone should join hands in the center? Nope. Some policiesand some partisansdeserve forceful opposition, even contempt, from the other side. Vigorous disagreement, both within and between parties, is essential in a functioning democracy. But democracy also requires at least some level of mutual comprehension. No matter where people are on the political spectrum, they ought to know whom theyre fighting with and what theyre even fighting about.

Read more:
Conservatives and Liberals Are Wrong About Each Other - The Atlantic

New Years is approaching, and one resolution will help our democracy: Make a friend with opposing political views and be kinder to people you disagree with politically.

Liberal women, this especially means you, given new research from media company Axios showing just how intolerant young leftists, particularly females, are compared with conservatives.

Axios, working with the Generation Lab, found just 5 percent of Republican college students said they wouldnt befriend someone from the opposite party vs. 37 percent of Democrats.

It also determined 30 percent of Democrats and 7 percent of Republicans wouldnt work for someone who voted differently from them, while 71 percent of Democrats but only 31 percent of Republicans wouldnt date someone with opposing views.

Researchers found college-age women more likely than men to take strong partisan stances, with 76 percent of women and 86 percent of men saying theyd work for someone who voted for the opposing candidate. Axios reported just 68 percent of women, as opposed to 84 percent of men, would shop at or support the business of someone from the other party.

This new research is sad but not surprising, given how liberal our college campuses are. A 2016 Econ Journal Watch study examining voter registration of economics, history, journalism, law and psychology faculty at 40 leading universities, for example, found Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 12 to 1.

The study, conducted by Brooklyn College business professor Mitchell Langbert, George Mason University economist Daniel B. Klein and FICO economist Anthony J. Quain, noted the liberal ratio among faculty under age 36 was 23 to 1.

Samuel Abrams, a Sarah Lawrence College politics professor, found similar trends in his 2018 survey of 900 university administrators (people who manage professors and campuses). He reported, Only 6 percent of campus administrators identified as conservative to some degree, while 71 percent classified themselves as liberal or very liberal.

This year, student newspaper The Harvard Crimson surveyed 236 arts and sciences faculty members, and a mere 3 percent described themselves as somewhat or very conservative, versus 76 percent who identified as somewhat or very liberal. Thats a ratio of 25 to 1.

While the University has made a concerted effort across the past decade to promote gender and racial diversity among its faculty, Harvard has not made any explicit attempts to bolster representation from across the ideological spectrum, the papers Natalie Kahn wrote in April.

The left frightfully claims our democracy is under attack, but democracys root demos means people. If millions of liberals refuse to speak with and feel concern for millions of conservative people even though liberals claim to be enlightened and tolerant who is the threat to democracy?

Democracy Dies in Darkness, The Washington Post intones. Does that include darkness about half your fellow citizens?

Michael Barone wrote in The Wall Street Journal about how liberals are so immersed in cultural crock pots that they dont realize their ignorance.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have shown that conservatives are better at understanding liberal views than the converse, Barone noted. Thats not surprising: Whereas liberal views permeate the news media and popular culture, liberals can easily avoid exposure to conservative views. That distorts their view of the world and produces oversensitivity to leftist social-media mobs along with overconfidence in demographic trends.

In a related vein, last summer the Cato Institute released research about political expression and self-censorship. It found 62 percent of Americans say the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe up from 58 percent in 2017.

Majorities of Democrats (52 percent), independents (59 percent) and Republicans (77 percent) feel they cannot express their views. Strong liberals are the only political group comfortable sharing their views (58 percent).

Cato found 31 percent of Americans support firing Donald Trump donors and 22 percent support firing Joe Biden donors; but 50 percent of strong liberals support firing Trump donors and 36 percent of strong conservatives support firing Biden donors.

My colleague Carrie Lukas wrote a whole book about our lopsided anti-conservative cultural bias. In Checking Progressive Privilege, she declared, Progressive privilege isnt just unfair to conservatives; it has warped our entire political environment and made our country more divided. Recognizing progressive privilege is the first step to ending it, so that we can have a fairer, more truly inclusive society.

To strengthen democracy, we need stronger civic fabric, which means speaking with and humanizing people with whom you disagree. Heres hoping for a brighter new year in which we do just that.

Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Womens Voice.

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Liberals should resolve to be more tolerant in 2022 our democracy depends on it - New York Post

Putting a bunch of Deep South conservatives and New England liberals together sounds like a recipe for fireworks. But a funny thing happened when that potentially combustible combination met online this fall.

Understanding. Civility. Maybe even friendship.

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute programs at LSU and the University of Southern Maine offered an eight-session opportunity for political opposites to talk with each other. When all was said, the participants found out they weren't quite as opposite as they expected.

That gives hope to the participants.

I had lunch with one of my fellow OLLI students just yesterday, and I asked him: 'Am I overstating the case here that most of us, the liberals and the conservatives, agreed on most issues most of the time at least to some extent much more than we disagreed? said Bud Snowden, of Baton Rouge. And he said thats absolutely right.

How can this be if, as pundits say, Americans are as divided as any time since the Civil War? The programs creator thinks the pundits have it wrong.

Mike Berkowitz, of Saco, Maine, organized and moderated the program. He says both traditional and social media have distorted Americans actual political and social differences, hyping the disagreements and obscuring areas of common ground to create the impression of an unbridgeable divide.

He said he believes if liberals and conservatives take the time to understand each other's beliefs and talked to instead of at each other, theyd be surprised.

So, Berkowitz started the Conservatives and Liberals; Not Conservatives vs. Liberals course.

The Louisiana-Maine program had participants meet on the Zoom video conferencing site for two hours weekly for eight weeks to explore the different philosophies on hot-button topics like abortion and gun control and to discuss their individual views. Berkowitz moderated the meetings and encouraged them to keep the discussions respectful.

Thats not to say the participants didnt come in with preconceived notions.

I didnt see compassion with conservatives, said Dorry French, of Falmouth, Maine, when asked about her stereotypes. Redneck, uninformed maybe I should quit while Im a little bit ahead.

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My stereotype of liberal northerners: rude, arrogant and condescending, Snowden said. That stereotype was dispelled. It really was.

The process of dispelling such stereotypes involved more than just conversation.

Berkowitz led participants through the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, which explores why liberals and conservatives have different intuitions about right and wrong.

That established a way for the students in the class to see how those who profoundly disagree about things like abortion based their beliefs in something both sides valued.

Both conservatives and liberals have a lot of compassion, said Keith Fleeman, of Auburn, Maine. Liberals have compassion, it seems to me, toward the person who is carrying the child, and conservatives have more compassion, I think, for the fetus itself that it comes to term. Ive learned to see the compassion on both sides.

It made the point that it was about differences in values, not 'these people are stupid' or 'these people are wrong, said John Kovich, of Baton Rouge. The training helped a lot.

No one changed their political views, Berkowitz said, but that wasnt the point.

Rather, they discovered that they were more like their political adversaries than they suspected. They said their discussions were more productive than ones they attempted with family and friends and much better than those that take place online.

Those who participated said they enjoyed it so much that theyve discussed continuing the virtual meetings.

It made a huge difference to be able to look people in the eye, even on a screen, and feel like you were getting to know a person rather than just a set of opinions, Snowden said. That made a huge difference to me in terms of saying what I needed to say and to hear what I needed to hear. That wouldnt have happened in a purely digital exchange, I dont believe.

But being around Yankee liberals was a new experience. What I came to understand is these are just people like I am.

Read more:
Peace on Earth? Program shows how conservatives and liberals just might get along - The Advocate