It seems to have confused him.
It’s amazing, when you think about it, how much the rantings of the darlings of the Right, like Peterson or Rand or Fuentes, align neatly with what you’d see in the word balloons of a comic book villain. Ta-Nehisi Coates is just making the clear association between fascist words and fascist bad guys.
I consider myself lucky to have only had minimal exposure to JP.
Worth noting, I think, that Coates had been writing for Marvel for years by the time Peterson’s “12 Rules” book referenced in that panel came out. “Moving on to comics” seems disingenuous.
Yep, Coates’ first Marvel credit is in 2016 (later than I would have thought), but 12 Rules came out in 2018 (also later than I thought). The last 5 years have been indeterminably long.
I started Beyond Order but soon lost interest. Rand? Peterson? Ptoooey! Zarathustra shrugged.
After reading some intriguing stuff by Wendy Brown I decided to let Marcuse and Hayek fight a war in my head. Yeah I know Hayek and Chile. He does have enough adjacent grounding in evolutionary epistemology (per his pal Popper) to at least have more wits than Rand could ever muster. But he is the poster child for the neoliberal revolution. Marcuse provides a good juxtaposition as poster child for the New Left (some of whom may have gone on to become 80s yuppies).
@4 Hayek and Rand had in common both the fact that you can cherry-pick quotes out of context to make them seem less horrible that they really are and the tendency to play semantics to avoid admitting that, yes, they were staunch right-wingers bordering on fascist.
From A Knight’s Tale:
Chaucer: I will eviscerate you in fiction. Every pimple, every character flaw. I was naked for a day; you will be naked for eternity.
If I were casting Peterson as a supervillain, I would go with someone more pathetic, like Megamind.
Cue Carly Simon:
I wish I had the Red Skull’s orthodontist.
@7 Don’t insult Megamind like that.
@5–
Objectivism is just fascism for people too smug for fr populism.
Hayek was not a fascist because his thinking was too garbled and contradictory to pin any meaningful label on it (he argued that governments have a duty to never redistribute private wealth…and that governments have a duty to provide a safety net for the poor!) — but since he was a reliable propagandist for even the most brutal right-wing dictatorships, it’s more than fair to throw him in with the fascists.
@10–
Yep. Megamind is a super-intelligent comic villain who discovers that seizing control of the city is an empty power fantasy and then learns that his old patterns of deception need to be abandoned if he wants any kind of fulfilling life or relationship. Not much in common with Peterson at all.
chrislawson@12 Peterson has a lot in common with Space Dad.
@11. Objectivism occupied the headspace of someone who says that, because there’s no explicitly bigoted laws, bigotry doesn’t actually exist. It’s an attempt to have liberty while eating fascism.
Regarding the ramblings of fascists, are you expecting logic and consistency?
I recall Herr Doktor G saying “we will liberate the people from the tyranny of the intellect”.
Hayek? Rand? For some reason I started whistling the tune of “Alte Kameraden”.
@7 At least Megamind matured, I can’t see that happening with Peterson.
@16. I usually think of Sergei Eisenstein directing Die Walkure, but whatever floats your boat…
gijoel@17 True enough. Well, that is what alternate comic universes are for. Megamind without the redemption arc then.
Oh, what’s Peterson going to do? Sue Marvel for definition of character?