My Spectator column this week is about Don’t Look Up. Here are the opening paragraphs:
I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Don’t Look Up, the new satirical film on Netflix. It’s about a couple of American scientists who discover a giant ‘planet-killing’ comet that’s going to collide with Earth in just over six months. They try to warn the world about this existential threat but no one takes them seriously, from the President of the United States on down. Some people half- listen, but then get distracted by gossip or greed or lust, and when they do engage they come up with excuses, like pointing out the science is only 99.78 per cent certain, not 100 per cent, so why don’t we just ‘sit tight and assess’? Or maybe we can solve the problem with technology?
In case you haven’t got it yet, Don’t Look Up is an allegory about climate change, with a little bit of Covid denialism thrown in. Writer and director Adam McKay, whose last film was a vicious attack on Dick Cheney, believes we’re burying our heads in the sand when what we should be doing is paying attention to ‘the science’ before it’s too late. In other words, he’s from the Greta Thunberg school of environmental catastrophism. The correct response to the apocalyptic predictions being spat out by computer models, whether designed by epidemiologists or climate scientists, is to panic — big time.
Now, there’s an obvious flaw in this analogy, as I point out.
Given how many times environmental activists have warned of imminent disaster — Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, said that if we didn’t mend our ways we’d disappear in a cloud of blue smoke by 1988 — it would be more accurate if the two scientists in Don’t Look Up had been telling us a comet was about to destroy our planet roughly once a year for the past 50 years. You think I’m exaggerating? Peter Wadhams assured us that Arctic ice would disappear by 2015, Prince Charles said that we had eight years left to save the planet 13 years ago, and in 2009 Gordon Brown reduced that to just 50 days. It would hardly be surprising if people had grown a little wary of these doom-mongers.
Yet, incredibly, they haven’t. On the contrary, every time a climate scientist — or a 14-year-old girl — pops up to tell us the Earth is about to catch fire, the reaction of politicians, movie stars, media personalities, recording artists and just about the entire professional class is to start running around like headless chickens. Don’t Look Up has got this issue precisely backwards. The problem isn’t that these Cassandras aren’t believed. It’s that every huckster with an ‘End Is Nigh’ sandwich board around their neck is treated as a visionary prophet who can predict the future with 100 per cent accuracy. Where’s Adam McKay been for the past 22 months? Does he really believe the world didn’t panic enough about Covid-19? He’s like the last man in the theatre after someone’s shouted ‘fire’. Everyone else has stampeded for the exits, but he’s still sitting in his seat, thinking: “Why am I the only one taking that warning seriously? What’s wrong with these people?”
However, I go on to conclude that in spite of these obvious flaws, Don’t Look Up is actually quite funny. The moral is that it’s possible to enjoy the work of people on the other side of the political aisle without endorsing their crackpot ideology.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Leonardo Di Craprio ‘There is a big comet coming to kill us’
US Presient ‘What should we do?’
Leonardo Di Craprio ‘Inject everyone four times a year with this shit Pfizer just knocked up’.
CDC Finally Admits the COVID PCR Test Is a Sham
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2022/01/14/covid-pcr-tests-dont-work.aspx?ui=1fb065e0c4152b58bd4ed94cf29c7cbfad40307fb723460ddabacd55f3c58b0c&sd=20210518&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20220114_HL2&mid=DM1080826&rid=1378615855
Bombshell Admission — The COVID Tests Don’t Work
Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
Please come and join our friendly peaceful events.
Saturday 15th January 5pm
Silent lighted walk behind one simple sign
“No More Lockdown”
Bring torches, candles and other lights
Meet Corner of Castle Hill & High St,
Windsor SL4 1PQ
Stand in the Park Sundays 10am make friends, ignore the madness & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens Cockpit Path car park Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Henley Mills Meadows (at the bandstand) Henley-on-Thames RG9 1DS
Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
I went to see my Doctor.
I said ‘I’m ill’.
He said ‘What are your symptoms?’
I said ‘I’m perfectly healthy’
In the past he would have said ‘Get out of my office you nutter’
Today he says ‘Sounds like covid19’
Hmm. I’ve been telling that one since April ’20.
Do you have a double blind placebo controlled study to prove it?
Could be asymptomatic long Covid?
Before adding the only cure is to embrace communism
He said ‘how do you know youre healthy , have you done an lft?
“I haven’t got any symptoms” – ” that’s one of the symptoms” is my favorite meme , which I’ve no doubt you’ve all seen.
I wonder what happens if somebody complains about a medic who calls Covid19 a virus?
There’s a professional body, right? Isn’t “not talking shit” a professional standard?
Calling Covid19 a virus is akin to a bricklayer swearing blind that he’ll make mortar for your garden wall using screws and gravel and that no cement or sand will be needed…while insisting you call him a “professor”.
someone on here a few days ago noted a story of some woman have had C19 six times so far: I meant to write you have to say “bullshit” to these people and ask a follow up “you had pneumonia 6 times?” To which the reply is invariably “no i just tested +ve”: you got to shut that down and tell them “no pneumonia, no C19, sorry” (the English say ‘sorry’ when Americans say ‘sorry not sorry’ and crude Aussies, is there any other kind, say F*ck you).
ps loved the move Don’t Look Down, especially when you look at it from the angle of someone trying to be critical of the whole farcical medical tyranny we have be plunged into
“The moral is that it’s possible to enjoy the work of people on the other side of the political aisle without endorsing their crackpot ideology.“
If that were not the case I’d have had to hate most of the music and cinema of my youth – mostly made by worthy, right on lefty types of various kinds (usually delusionally posing as “rebels” or “courageous dissidents”).
“Don’t Look Up has got this issue precisely backwards.”
It is hard to believe just how wrong these panickers (covid or climate) are about their panic supposedly not being treated seriously enough, but I suppose the essence of panic is after all irrationality.
And it’s a politically useful belief, like the similarly opposite of the truth ideology that says our greatest social problems are those of political incorrectness, which must be hunted and hounded out of existence.
“Don’t Look Up is an allegory about climate change, with a little bit of Covid denialism thrown in”
“Covid denialism”?
If it wasn’t ‘climate Leo’ in the role I could have assumed it was about a couple of real scientists who were censored, mocked and ignored by the main stream press, governments and ‘real’ scientists (Looking at you Devi) while trying to get their message across – you know, like the last 2 years.
Don’t look up to Scotland because Nicola Sturgeon is …
Eat your food with a mask on? You simply couldn’t make it up. It’s straight out of the film Idiocracy. Life imitates art, but this is ridiculous.
A major part of the problem is that people in the West have become infantilised and donkey-esque docile.
Note how the government has described Omicron as being a “highly infectious variant”. Which is just another blatant lie. Even the scientist that first revealed this variant said it was no worse than the common cold.
The government can’t even change tactics without lying. Also note how this change in tactics was done in lockstep with other governments across the world. All of a sudden, right across the globe, the MSM started talking about how we’ll have to live with COVID-19.
The vaccines and, more importantly, the passports are still top of the agenda. Enslavement and serfdom is still the end goal. What’s happening now is that they are laying off the offensive to give themselves time to consolidate and fortify the ground they’ve already taken.
And the sheep will relax, glad that it’s all over. But the emergency powers the puppet governments across the world gave themselves are still on the books. Never to be rescinded. The British government is going ahead in leaps-and-bounds with the curtailment of freedom of speech.
There’s a new Ebola related disease doing the rounds in China. Note how the Western MSM was saturated with coverage of Chinese quarantine camps over the last few days:
Here; here; here; here and here.
Just like the Western MSM conditioned people in early 2020 with numerous news articles about people dropping dead in China from COVID-19, they are again conditioning us about another deadly disease in China, with the addendum this time that quarantine camps are part of the psychological package.
Anyone that thinks that the powers-that-be are rolling back and that normality will return soon, is very wrong. They are just going at it from a new angle. I will not be one bit surprised if this new plague doing the rounds in China shows up shortly in the West and is soon thereafter declared as a new pandemic.
And the sheep will completely trust the government, because, after all, the nice government and the trustworthy MSM had told them they had beaten COVID-19, and that all they had to do from then on was to live happily with it. This was all the proof the sheep needed to believe the government had no ulterior motives in regards COVID-19.
Thus, the sheep will believe that any new pandemic will be straight-up with no ulterior motives attached.
But bear in mind, one thing the Cabal might have learned from the last two years with COVID-19 is that a more vicious and contagious disease would have ensured more compliance from the proles. Let’s hope this new disease in China hasn’t been created at their behest to ensure more compliance with vaccines and lockdowns.
Gates did tell us this was pandemic number one , he’s a pretty straight up kind a guy.
“Note how the government has described Omicron as being a ‘highly infectious variant’. Which is just another blatant lie. Even the scientist that first revealed this variant said it was no worse than the common cold.”
You may need to rewrite that a bit.
“Highly infectious” doesn’t mean “causes serious illness”.
Omicron isn’t any kind of illness.
Cold symptoms do tend to be a bit infectious, mainly because people sneeze and cough out viruses. Colds “go round”. But that isn’t a great problem for society. Use a hanky. Open a window. Take it easy. Take a day off work if you’ve got a cold, or two if it’s a bad one. Mostly, obvious stuff.
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Another point is that it should be flaming obvious that if you’ve got a cold you shouldn’t be wearing a mask. If anyone over the age of 10 needs the reasoning explained to them, then…we are in a very bad place.
Well, you are somewhat correct. Pedantically, a highly infectious disease doesn’t necessarily equate to it causing serious illness. But you’d have to admit that when you tell people that a virus or disease is highly infectious, the first thing they’d associate this information with is that the mentioned virus or disease will cause then serious illness if they were to catch it.
In Johnson’s case, when he says Omicron is highly infectious, for the purposes of interpreting what he actually means, he has to be understood in context. Prior to him saying Omicron is highly infectious, he and his government had consistently spun the falsehood that Omicron caused serious illness and hospitalisations.
So, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Johnson was using the “highly infectious” description in order to lead people to believe that Omicron causes serious illness.
The film actually worked for me because rather than seeing the comet as representing COVID or climate I saw it as representing NPIs and vaccines.
Thank goodness Toby is fully on board in mocking the climate nonsense.
Didn’t Al Gore tell us we only had until 2010?
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/as-earth-cools-an-arctic-future-threatens-but-warmster-boris-wont-be-told/
This excellent piece helps to correct the propoganda.
I thought that was so Polar Bears didn’t become extinct like they did the last time we had a warm period.
Actually, i’m told that the Polar Bear population at around 55k is healthier than it has been for decades. In part to the moratorium on hunting from the late 1980’s but also because that they have their cubs on land, not ice, and the warmer climate is helping reduce cub deaths.
I watched this before knowing about the climate angle…thought it was quite entertaining, but I was quietly chuckling to myself how it was opposite to the current situation.
We should organise a remake, called “Cock up”.
I gave up on this after 15 mins and more F words per sentence than I could tolerate.
Modern Hollywood. Woke and abusive.
I made the mistake of wasting several hours of my life this week by watching said movie on Tues night…while in bed. First-off its runtime is way too long…IMO. Once it became yawn inducing I almost killed it off.
Throughout it labours smug, self-satisfied wokeness persistently… which after just 15mins or so as Neil says it becomes uber tiresome. It has a few guffaw moments when the A list leads seem to improvise… off the leash so to speak, and Rylance’s thunderbirds puppet style Gatesian technonerd kinda worked, but then again not.
However this particular viewer wished the Dibiasky comet had struck a good hour sooner, or ideally in the production office…Armando Iannucci funny it’s not. For incorrect political hysteria not much beats this…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM8DfCgVWx8
Agree entirely. They used to make films with not a single curse-word throughout… and they were great films too… still are.
The Herouni Antenna – The Death of the Big Bang! – YouTube
Measuring the microwave background.
I have to say that Mark Rylance absolutely nailed that character.
By way of comparison I recently watched “Wall-e” again. Basic premise is that earth has overflowed with rubbish created by hyper consumerism encouraged by a single global mega corp, and everyone runs away to space to live on cruise ships for a few years while robots clean it all up. 700 years later and they’re still there, partially evolved into fat slobs who spend all day staring at social media….
Yet dispite that horrific sounding synopsis, it’s actually a charming and genuinely amusing what-if comedy of errors, with various in-jokes included for good measure. It never comes across as preachy, and even includes a little romance, not to mention alot of Michael Crawford!
So even just over 10 years ago it was possible for moral films to be supportive and hopeful, not condemning and belittling. Oh, and race or religion never entered into it. Amazing.
Highly recommended.
While I got the climate change/covid analogy, I actually think it works well as a satire on politicians and governments, who are in hock to those who give them their funds. Corruption has become so obvious in the last 2 years, and the film showed how politicians are persuaded to act against the best interests of their people. Ultimately we ate very unimportant to them.
Mark Rylance was brilliant, and the scene with the rockets not performing as expected was genius – a great satire on reliance on fancy, untried technology and modelling projections.
Does anyone else appreciate the bizarre juxtaposition in the headline of the below article?
https://swlondonccg.nhs.uk/news/help-ive-had-covid-when-can-i-get-my-vaccination/
Humans are their own worst enemy. The real Armageddon is the “crisistocracy” itself: behavioural sink. The collective is so busy spiralling the plug hole they’ve forgotten that if they don’t jump out they’ll get sucked into oblivion.
I saw it. I was bored. Used to be I would socialise with humans instead of watch films but that’s not been an option for a couple of years. I do still remember humans. There are some new ones moved into an office next door a couple months ago but we have not spoken yet because distancing.
For me it came across as politicians are a useless way to run anything. They think too much about themselves and not about the people they were elected to serve. I think the film made a good hit in that regard.
I didn’t see any climate or covid stuff in there. Covid stuff would have triggered me but I made it to the end.
The film would have been more appropriately titled “Don’t Look It Up”.
All of the information is there if you want to find it and are prepared to examine it with fresh eyes, yet the doom mongers rely on your blind, undying trust to keep them in business.
Theyre not Cassandras ffs, Cassandra was telling the truth
The problem isn’t that these Cassandras aren’t believed.
They are not Cassandras! Cassandra was cursed always to tell the truth, but never to be believed.
These people are anti-Cassandras, they never tell the truth, yet are always believed.
I thought the message in the film was that governments always act in their own interests and not that of the people.
There was also the message that people in government are a bit dim and can easily be influenced by multinational businesses.
That sounds like a crappy film. The same kind of mesh was in Dan Brown’s “Inferno” (which has also got plague masks).
The apocalypse will be caused deliberately by a small number of humans, for profit.
This film lost me after 45 minutes, when my wife turned to me and asked “WTF happened to Hollywood?” Very smug and self-satisfied, with an adolescent line in humour and Jonah Hill playing the same character he always plays – read, potty-mouthed fat guy. Final straw was when Rob Morgan’s character was dragged from a taxi by police and said something along the lines of, “Don’t vent your rage on me just because of the pigmentation of my skin and the fact that your ancestors once emigrated to Northern Europe!”, in clear obeisance to BLM and the attacks on police. Personally watch movies to escape all this c-r-a-p. Very mediocre.