Canadian psychologist, Jordan B Peterson is the big YouTube sensation of 2018: the most viewed academic online. Peterson is called the ‘denier’ of political correctness and has much in common with Dr. Tim Ball, the ‘denier’ of man-made global warming.
To their supporters, climatologist (Ball) and psychologist (Peterson) are each the intellectual antidote to post-normalism. Both are well-spoken Canadian male ‘old school’ academics sounding a warning to wider society about a dangerous trend in western academia.
In Britain, newspapers like The Spectator are blown away asking “why are young Brits flocking to hear a psychology professor talk about morality?” Many more millions globally have embraced Peterson as a free speech champion.
The ‘Peterson Phenomenon’ certainly represents a populist outcry against ideological diktat about hate speech (to many, a war on free speech). But it also mirrors strikingly well the infowars fought for over two decades by 79-year-old Tim Ball against an ideologically-driven academia that vilifies any and all man-made global warming skeptics.
55-year-old Peterson is politically incorrect, championing free speech and denouncing Canada’s latest law requiring citizens to use made up non-gender specific pronouns like ‘ze’ that do not offend transsexuals. Peterson’s position – like Ball’s – is nuanced. Peterson respects transgender rights, but not heavy-handed draconian laws based on half-baked theories that chill open debate.
Professor Peterson, University of Toronto, refuses to comply with Big Brother and could yet face legal action. Likewise, Dr. Ball called out climate fraudster, Michael E Mann and that triggered a six-year (and counting) legal battle. The post-normal crowd says it’s time to jail Peterson. For more than six years they’ve been saying throw Ball in jail, too.
The mainstream has given Tim Ball very little air time – other than Channel 4’s 2007 showing of Martin Durkin’s film, ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle.’ Ironically, kudos yet again goes to Channel 4. This time for showing the full, unedited 30-minute ‘interview’ of Peterson by truculent yet privileged social justice warrior, Cathy Newman.
Watch the video below to see how Newman (33 times in 30 minutes!) tries to put (false) words: “So you’re saying….” into Peterson’s mouth. Would the hard-left BBC even dare chance a similar interview with climate skeptic Dr. Ball? I hardly think so.
Peterson’s core message – like Ball’s – is truth first before ideology. It is the long-held position of global warming skeptics who extol the traditional scientific method advanced by Karl Popper.
The ubiquitous fake news war, that featured so keenly in last year’s bitterly-fought US presidential election, has shown just how powerful social media has become in exposing mainstream media bias. On social media, where populism (free-thinking) thrives the post-normalists are suffering a real intellectual beating. In the case of the Newman-v-Peterson train wreck interview Newman’s modus operandi is amusingly exposed by Twitter users with this caricature:
Peterson: “I had bacon and eggs for breakfast.”
Newman: “So you want to kill all vegans?”
21st Century post-normal mass media is failing so badly because it deliberately skews discussion, censors non-conformists and misrepresents intellectual thought and analysis it doesn’t agree with on the Big Issues of our time.
As with Dr. Peterson, so with Dr. Ball.
Interviewer: “So, you deny climate change?”
Tim Ball: “No-one denies climate change, the climate has changed for 4.5 billion years.”
The sad truth is that modern ‘liberalism’ is light-years away from the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment; the waters of intellectual discourse are now so muddied by bi-partisan political bitching that debate has been replaced by name-calling, character assassination and intellectual disengagement (see: Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals‘ playbook).
Words and how they get conveyed are extremely important. Both Ball and Peterson have suffered (and will continue to suffer) rampant and systemic mainstream media misrepresentation. Both men have shown that the problem stems from powerful forces looking to shape a new global society which is desperate to snuff out dissent, especially from articulate and persuasive intellectual non-conformists.
Both Peterson and Ball are conservatives in their approach to modern day problems insofar as they both argue we should first look to the past for guidance on how we tackle future challenges. For instance, Dr. Peterson sees merit in analyzing and deconstructing the Old Testament as it may be one useful guide in surviving the ever-changing moral uncertainties of today.
Likewise, Dr. Ball, speaking of how we should better understand climate change, refers to the work of Hubert H Lamb, founder of Britain’s Climatic Research Centre. Lamb’s approach was useful, says Ball, because he recognized climate research is an infant science much in need of far more robust analysis of past weather events before anyone can meaningfully gauge what future climate might be.
On YouTube, there are also great videos of Dr. Ball speaking out. This interview, like others, is well worth a careful viewing. Early in the interview Ball succinctly spells out how words and terms, by self-serving politicians and the virtue signaling politically correct, are misused:
“People didn’t understand about climate but they understand about pollution… you hear about them [media/politicians] fixate on ‘carbon pollution’ …they have done this for 20 years, but the term ‘carbon pollution’ is a scientific contradiction because carbon is solid, it is not a gas, and the gas CO2 is not a pollutant. That’s their problem and why CO2 became the focus. It was done through the UN’s definition of climate change. One of the things I learned a long, long time ago from sitting on commissions of inquiry is it takes the politicians off the hook because they control it [the debate] through the terms of reference – the terms of reference being so narrow there is only one result you can come up with. So, they defined climate change as only human-caused and everything was deliberately designed to focus on CO2.”
That typifies Jordan Peterson’s battle in his interview with Cathy Newman. That Peterson is universally regarded as the winner in that contest suggests that genie will never be put back in the bottle. Peterson’s coherent and robust free speech victory over post-normalism may well be the harbinger of the wider collapse of that anti-intellectual ideology.
In that light, Tim Ball has this insight on the pending paradigm shift:
“I was invited to a breakfast table by Harrison Schmidt, the last astronaut to stand on the moon. He had a group of fellow astronauts and other scientists with him. As with so many, they had read what the IPCC said and could not believe the bad science and wanted confirmation from someone who had been in the battle for some time. They found what Klaus Eckart Puls discovered:
“Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data – first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it.”
Such “disagreeable” men and their words can change people – and for the better.
Jordan Peterson’s website: jordanbpeterson.com
Tim Ball’s website: drtimball.com
Read more at PSI
Dr. Ball has the courage to practice the scientific method unlike the global warming rent seekers who claim the science is settled like some preachy old uncle who seeks to be obeyed …just because .
I admire the Dr. Balls courage and those of other scientists who aren’t trembling behind their wallets .
From the earliest days of climate alarmism, I was a “denier” because of Dr. Tim Ball. At that time, probably 30 years ago, Dr. Ball wrote a regular column in the Country Guide magazine. His columns were about the weather and the climate. Often he pointed out glaring contradictions between reality and the claims of the climate change scientists. As opposed to screaming out alarmism, his columns were well written, and everything he said was backed up by real, verifiable data.
The farm magazines I get these days kowtow to government initiatives, like sustainability.
Wimps.
Researchers who didn’t join the global warming prostitution ring sadly go unnoticed. Dr. Tim Ball, who stormed the enemy rather than hunker down, deserves a medal for bravery.
I agree with Sonnyhill 100%.
I have called the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) nonsense a ‘prostitution of science’ for many years now. It really is nothing more than a means to an end, initiated and perpetuated by left-wing ideologues who have seized upon it as a fool-proof way of enlisting more ‘useful idiots’ to their cause.
What could possibly be more ‘caring and sharing’ than saving the planet from the clutches of greedy irresponsible capitalist swine who would sell their mothers for a dollar?
Dr. Ball is indeed a brave and worthy soul – as was Dr Robert Carter, deceased, (treated disgracefully by my local university, James Cook University, Cairns, Australia).
Canada’s Mark Steyn, too, is a voice for truth and freedom but must run the gauntlet of corruption in the form of a modern-day legal ordeal every bit the psychological equal of the Spanish Inquisition of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages.
At the age of 79 years, Dr. Ball may well become a victim of the age-old legal ploy of dragging out cases until the opposition ceases to be.
But God I hope not, because he absolutely deserves to win and his opponent deserves utter defeat and public shaming. Not that such a thing could ever occur these days, of course, since justice and journalism has gone the way of education these past few decades, and became a plaything of Fabian Marxism.
Dr. Ball’s accurate description of the continuing lie used by the Warmists to confuse and conflate life-giving carbon dioxide with something they call “carbon pollution” is especially relevant to the argument.
CO2, as anyone with even half a high school education knows perfectly well, is a colourless, odourless, tasteless, invisible trace gas in our atmosphere; a gas absolutely critical in its necessity for all macroscopic life on Earth.
But the CAGW scammers have succeeded in convincing the ignorant that it’s a black, sooty, dangerous pollutant. They’ve done this with misleading language, as we all know, but also with photographs of steam coming out of coal-fired power stations – but taken against the setting Sun to make the stream look black, like soot.
Very clever.
And clever enough to fool at least ‘some of the people, all of the time’, God help us!
The CAGW Scam is now some 30 years old. It’s a tool of the Marxist Left, in search of a global totalitarian control the murderous despot Stalin in his prime could only dream about. Climate change is portrayed as a massive global problem requiring massive global government.
Democracy is represented as being inadequate as a means to solve it.
An authoritarian regime on a worldwide scale is presented as the only way to fix it. But, unlike the Eastern European Soviet system of the post-WWII era, once the new global politburo (read: the UN and its EU subsidiary) is ensconced in a position of absolute power, there’ll be no escape.
Where subjects of the Soviet dictatorship could risk life and limb crossing from East Berlin into West Berlin, and thus to freedom, under the new system there’ll be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
Remember that the next time you’re tempted to vote for a leftist and/or ‘green’ party at an election … because their aim is to eliminate elections all together and save you the trouble of ever having to vote again.
Repression of the masses was ever thus.
Don’t be fool again!
I agree with Sonnyhill 100%.
I have called the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) nonsense a ‘prostitution of science’ for many years now. It really is nothing more than a means to an end, initiated and perpetuated by left-wing ideologues who have seized upon it as a fool-proof way of enlisting more ‘useful idiots’ to their cause.
What could possibly be more ‘caring and sharing’ than saving the planet from the clutches of greedy irresponsible capitalist swine who would sell their mothers for a dollar?
Dr. Ball is indeed a brave and worthy soul – as was Dr Robert Carter, deceased, (treated disgracefully by my local university, James Cook University, Cairns, Australia).
Canada’s Mark Steyn, too, is a voice for truth and freedom but must run the gauntlet of corruption in the form of a modern-day legal ordeal every bit the psychological equal of the Spanish Inquisition of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages.
At the age of 79 years, Dr. Ball may well become a victim of the age-old legal ploy of dragging out cases until the opposition ceases to be.
But God I hope not, because he absolutely deserves to win and his opponent deserves utter defeat and public shaming. Not that such a thing could ever occur these days, of course, since justice and journalism has gone the way of education these past few decades, and became a plaything of Fabian Marxism.
Dr. Ball’s accurate description of the continuing lie used by the Warmists to confuse and conflate life-giving carbon dioxide with something they call “carbon pollution” is especially relevant to the argument.
CO2, as anyone with even half a high school education knows perfectly well, is a colourless, odourless, tasteless, invisible trace gas in our atmosphere; a gas absolutely critical in its necessity for all macroscopic life on Earth.
But the CAGW scammers have succeeded in convincing the ignorant that it’s a black, sooty, dangerous pollutant. They’ve done this with misleading language, as we all know, but also with photographs of steam coming out of coal-fired power stations – but taken against the setting Sun to make the stream look black, like soot.
Very clever.
And clever enough to fool at least ‘some of the people, all of the time’, God help us!
The CAGW Scam is now some 30 years old. It’s a tool of the Marxist Left, in search of a global totalitarian control the murderous despot Stalin in his prime could only dream about. Climate change is portrayed as a massive global problem requiring massive global government.
Democracy is represented as being inadequate as a means to solve it.
An authoritarian regime on a worldwide scale is presented as the only way to fix it. But, unlike the Eastern European Soviet system of the post-WWII era, once the new global politburo (read: the UN and its EU subsidiary) is ensconced in a position of absolute power, there’ll be no escape.
Where subjects of the Soviet dictatorship could risk life and limb crossing from East Berlin into West Berlin, and thus to freedom, under the new system there’ll be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
Remember that the next time you’re tempted to vote for a leftist and/or ‘green’ party at an election … because their aim is to eliminate elections all together and save you the trouble of ever having to vote again.
Repression of the masses was ever thus.
Don’t be fooled again!
But…..when the public (politicized) discourse pits reason against faith, or faith against reason, if you prefer, will reason ever be embraced by the majority of us panic-prone human beings?
Proving the fact that the worshipers of Gaia and the Deep Ecologists and radical greens and followers of Al Bore their High Priest of Global Warming/Climate Change want deniers/skeptics persicuted for refusing to worship in the Church of Gaia and sacrifice a virgin or child