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What is the value in pretending that the reason people describe Cooper's perspective as "Nazi apologetics" is due to his criticism of Churchill rather than his statements like "Hitler is in heaven" or "Nazi Germany was infinitely preferable in virtually every way to modern France?" Your post is almost entirely about the former but I am very confident the reason people call Cooper a Nazi apologist are the latter!
Cooper didn't say this, he made this joke:
This is pretty ambiguous!
One interpretation is that Hitler can't be found because he's not in Hell, he's in heaven.
Another is that the shooter believes himself to be in heaven along with Hitler, but is mistaken, they're both in Hell.
Another is that the shooter is looking for "Hitler" who is actually Trump, who he mistakenly believes he sent to Hell.
The actual quote here is:
Where the picture on the left is Hitler and his officers with the Eiffel Tower in the background, and the one on the right is the drag Last Supper from this year's Olympic opening ceremonies. You can see it here: https://x.com/jessesingal/status/1830983770826047711
This one is harder to defend, but I think there are two possible angles.
One, he's literally talking about the pictures. The aesthetics here do, in my opinion, favor the Nazi picture. The drag last supper is gross, it features an obese man pretending to be a woman in the role of Jesus, the colors are garish, everyone is unattractive. If you were a time traveler who didn't know what the Nazis had done, you'd have no reason to think the Nazi photo to be repellant. A person in our time objects to the Nazi photo because of what the Nazis did, not how they were dressed.
Or, two, he's comparing the totalitarian endpoints of each ideology. Communism verus fascism. I wouldn't want to live in either Hitler's Germany or Stalin's USSR, but I don't think saying one is worse than the other is all that offensive.
Or an alien.
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The picture on the right, however, is not the endpoint of Communism, but a waypoint. In the endpoint, most of the people in the picture on the right are dead or in prison, because it was never going to turn out the way they thought it would and it's always worst for the non-conformists. Honestly, the endpoints of Fascism and Communism look pretty much the same: A corrupt political hierarchy eating each other for power while stealing from the people and murdering as many witnesses as possible.
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I'd choose Hitler's Germany over Stalin's USSR if those are my only choices.
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Well for one thing, those sorts of edgy outbursts don't really count as apologetics, whereas his long-form work often does feel apologetic in nature.
I also feel a jarring disconnect between the two Darryls. Surely the long thought-out works are more representative of his true beliefs? I would like to know what drives him to Tweet like he does. Impulse control? Whatever Jordan Peterson has?
My intuition would be that the long thought-out works are just that, thought-out, carefully curated and censored, where as the tweets are more reflective of his true feelings and how he talks when the cameras are off.
In vino veritas and all that.
Alternatively, tweets can represent a person's tribal knee-jerk sympathies while their long thought-out works represent having done the hard work to transcend these. In which case there would be a sort of veritas in both, but a different type of veritas in each and arguably a higher quality one in the effort work.
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It's a good reminder that Twitter must be destroyed. This point is so crucial we should repeat it like a prayer, like the kyrie:
Twitter delenda est,
X delenda est,
Twitter delenda est.
No one, literally no one, not even one, comes off well on Twitter. Even people I have profound respect for seem like unhinged lunatics. I barely use it, and have never posted, but every time I open it up and I'm greeted by the firehose of insanity, I realize why our discourse has gone so insane. There's no room for nuance, no room for discussion, no room for tone of voice or personality, it's spicy takes all the way down. There's no value in it.
The only use for it is formal, simple annoucements of objective events, like the posting of an article or video elsewhere. Any other use of microblogging is haram.
I think there are some people who come off well, but there are a lot who don't.
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I’ve been saying it for a while now, but I don’t actually know what we can do about it.
The government banning a nebulous category of Twitterlikes is worse. Social opprobrium is powerless and may or may not rely on Twitter itself. Maybe a data rights law could gut free-to-enroll services, ruining most social media? Apparently it was hard to make money off the site before Musk got involved.
The biggest negative element on most social media platforms (not just twitter) is recommendation algorithms that optimize for engagement by stoking outrage and other negative emotions. I think there's a decent change we see significant regulation of algorithmic content recommendation in the near future, and that the present state of social media is looked back upon in much the same way we view the pre-60s state of affairs with respect to smoking.
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Well said. Ceterum censeo Twitter esse delendam.
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I'm really glad for the presence of Twitter since Musk took it over. I don't know where else I'd so easily be able to access news that the legacy media would prefer to be hidden away.
10 years ago I'd have said Reddit, but that hasn't been true for a long time now.
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