Jordan B Peterson Meet Tim Ball

Written by John O'Sullivan on January 29, 2018. Posted in Current News

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 say 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 are 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 a 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 web site: jordanbpeterson.com

Tim Ball’s website: drtimball.com

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