[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Okay. There are also the various flavors of cancel culture where people who spend a lot of time on social media learn about a bunch of sensitivities, that I would consider largely legit. I might disagree with the degree to how much vehemence with which these sensitivities are applied but there’s no room in reasonable discourse for the F word anymore and I dearly missed the R word but you just can’t use it anymore. I find that mostly reasonable. And then today I read up on Asperger’s, which is not an officially used term nor diagnosis anymore. I read a whole thing like that in comic book forum posted in a series of tweets and for one thing calling yourself Asperger’s versus calling yourself autistic is ableist. You’re saying you’re autistic but you’re better than most people who are autistic, you’re high functioning autistic; so that’s one problem with Asperger’s.
The other problem with Asperger’s is that Asperger was a Nazi who worked in concentration camps and he separated the high functioning autistic kids even though I don’t think they have the diagnosis of autism. He separated the high functioning weirdos who he thought could be brought around to be used as workers from the less functioning neurodivergent, not a term they use for kids, and the less functioning kids were just euthanized or murdered. So you really don’t want to use a term that honors that guy.
So, that’s cancel culture to not use the term Asperger’s anymore, not if you’re informed it’s just a reasonable constraint. There are a bunch of those constraints around issues of gender and ableism. So, one more constraint on diversion thought. Also, another constraint is when Tocqueville visited the U.S there were about four and a half to five million Americans, now there are 332 million Americans, everybody’s posting on social media. So, another constraint on original thought is that many of those 300 million of other Americans are smart and he thought you might have that’s not stupid, somebody else might already have had.
And like my boss at Kimmel, wouldn’t let herself look at Twitter in the morning at least when she was writing jokes because she was afraid and this was a legitimate fear that she’d see other people’s jokes on a subject and there wouldn’t be any other decent jokes to come up with in a limited amount of time. She’d take the time that she could have spent looking at Twitter and wrote her own jokes and often those jokes overlapped with other people’s jokes because often people come up with the same jokes especially when you have thousands of people tweeting about the same shit.
I know another guy who sued Conan O’Brien claiming that O’Brien was stealing his jokes. I forget the whole deal but he may have been submitting jokes to Conan O’Brien and then similar jokes were told by Conan O’Brien or else the guy thought that somebody was reading his tweets and stealing the jokes and he asked me because he knew I was a testify as a comedy expert and I said I can’t because I’m not buying your lawsuit because people come up with the same jokes. So that’s another constraint to original thought with so many people thinking odds are your thoughts aren’t going to be original.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 