Censoring the far away past

Wait, the guy who still has 'Gigli' on his resume is worried that some ancestors were slave owners?
 
I bet somewhere in my family history there's a guy who ********** goats or something. What am I supposed to do about it?

This is the same idea, just on a much larger scale.

The Streisand Effect, once again, turns a minor little bit of disagreeableness into a full-blown scandal! When will celebrities learn?

As for The Nightly Show episode, I enjoyed it very much, particularly the bit with the ghost. Very good episode overall. (Except for John Legend's wife on the panel. She's quite nice to look at, but what was coming out of her mouth a few times put a taint on that.)
 
isissxn said:
I bet somewhere in my family history there's a guy who ********** goats or something. What am I supposed to do about it?

This is the same idea, just on a much larger scale.

The Streisand Effect, once again, turns a minor little bit of disagreeableness into a full-blown scandal! When will celebrities learn?

As for The Nightly Show episode, I enjoyed it very much, particularly the bit with the ghost. Very good episode overall. (Except for John Legend's wife on the panel. She's quite nice to look at, but what was coming out of her mouth a few times put a taint on that.)
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Who's lucky taint?
 
Noztradamus said:
"It's not the crime, it's the cover up that does the damage"
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Agreed. The fuss over this has attracted much more attention to Affleck's ancestors then if he had done nothing.

Now if it turned out that Affleck was a descendent of Ras Al Ghul........
 
TragicMonkey said:
Still....can't....manage....to care....about....Ben Affleck.

Sorry, I tried. Maybe if he commits regicide, or voyages to Mars, or invents a.....nope, I'm fooling myself. Even if he did those things, and turned out to be a vampire robot space princess, I'd still not be able to care about Ben Affleck. He's just so dull. He's so boring that if he were cannibalizing you from the feet up you'd still fall asleep.
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That's why it's funny. He's doing this to protect his image in the eyes of the public..
 
Maybe they could track down the descendants of the slave and have them meet the famous actor. Kind of a reunion thing.
 
marplots said:
Which reminds me - whatever happened to the rumor that Matt Damon was the illegitimate son of Dame Judi Dench and heir apparent to the house of Dench and the title "Dame?"
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Nonsense. Those are nonhereditary titles earned by various cultural luminaries. Dame Ngaio Marsh got it for her work in the theatre, Dame Agatha Christie got it for writing, and Dame Judi Dench got it by defeating the Queen in unarmed combat in the dojo. Matt Damon could never defeat the Queen, one blow from her tentacles would smash his hollow, birdlike bones to splinters. Were he actually one of Dame Judi Dench's starspawn he might survive that fight, but it's very unlikely.
 
Noztradamus said:
"It's not the crime, it's the cover up that does the damage"
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Which is nonsense. People have ancestries they might not want others to know about. It's not a "cover up", or anything that sinister. The trouble is that a lot of folk would somehow hold the slavery thing against him for no reason.
 
Belz... said:
Which is nonsense. People have ancestries they might not want others to know about. It's not a "cover up", or anything that sinister. The trouble is that a lot of folk would somehow hold the slavery thing against him for no reason.
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Is it that? Or is that he assumed that people would, and thus tried to conceal it? It's like he thinks he's important or interesting enough for people to care about. It's like dogs seeing a small animal try to flee, it's that action that draws their interest. Affleck caused a Streisand Effect on himself here. Because apparently he thinks that people a) care about Ben Affleck, b) care about ancestors, and c) watch PBS. Had he done absolutely nothing, maybe twenty people on Earth would have found out.
 
I'm guessing Ben has now learned the meaning of the term "Streisand Effect". Several orders of magnitude more people now know about his ancestors than would otherwise have been the case.
 
Belz... said:
Which is nonsense. People have ancestries they might not want others to know about. It's not a "cover up", or anything that sinister. The trouble is that a lot of folk would somehow hold the slavery thing against him for no reason.
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But his drawing attention to the issue is not helping.
 
Are we supposed to be putting down this guy because he's ashamed that one of his ancestors kept slaves? Granted the shame isn't really his to bear - our society has this stupid habit of letting things parents and other forebears have done influence our thoughts about a person - but there is absolutely no reason we shouldn't be able to completely disown the memories of ancestors we disapprove of, if such is our wont.

Especially when it comes to shows like "Finding Your Roots", which takes a person's entire family history and focuses on only one or two very interesting individuals anyway. It's not some kind of scandal to ask that the one or two relatives picked to concentrate on were people who had some kind of positive influence, rather than That One Guy Who Owned Slaves so that you have to spend this entire hour long show being mopey and contrite and having to explain how horrible you feel because someone who died generations before you were born was a complete sack of crap.
 
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