Via Screechy Monkey at Miscellany Room, the Root fills us in on what really happened with Donnie Two-scoops and his invitation to gorge on french fries.

When Filet-O-Fish aficionado Donald Trump invited the Clemson Tigers to enjoy the White House’s first Presidential Value Meal, most of Clemson’s national championship football team members jumped at the opportunity to meet the original cheeseburger-swallowing clown. But The Root has learned that Clemson’s black players, some specifically citing racism and their disdain for Trump’s divisive politics, passed on the opportunity to hang out with the real-life Mayor McCheese.

“Filet-O-Fish aficionado” heeheeheehee

The Root spoke with three black Clemson players who each separately confirmed that many players, both black and white, had no interest in making the trip. All three acknowledged that Donald Trump was the reason they chose not to attend. Even more telling, most of Clemson’s white players were in attendance while nearly three-fourths of the school’s black football players took a hard pass on the chance to eat cold fries with the president of people who eat salads from McDonald’s.

I  wish I could be invited to do something at Trump’s behest so that I could take a hard pass. I would love to snub Mayor McCheese.

The ones who did go are younger and less starry.

To Clemson’s credit, all three students individually confirmed that Clemson’s coaches, staff or administration did not pressure them to attend the McNugget buffet nor did any official tell them to keep quiet about their reasons for not going. The players also noted that they harbored no ill feelings towards the players who chose to make the trek to McDonaldland.

“This team is a family,” said the freshman baller. “You don’t always agree with your family on everything but still … that’s my brother, no matter what.”

When asked if they regretted their decision to stay in South Carolina once they saw the piles of cold McMeat their teammates got to enjoy, all three laughed.

“Now if it was some Five Guys, I might feel different,” responded one.

Top athletes and they do excellent sarcasm.

In South Dakota news:

South Dakota lawmakers killed a bill that would [have] required trans student athletes to compete according to their sex assigned at birth.

That is, their physical sex as opposed to their “gender identity.”

“We’re thrilled with the committee’s decision,” said Libby Skarin, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, in a statement. “No one is harmed by allowing transgender people to compete consistent with who they are. The committee’s motion to kill this bill sends a clear message of inclusion and acceptance for our transgender friends and neighbors and that there is no place for discrimination like this in South Dakota.”

Hmm. Is it true that no one is harmed by allowing transgender people to compete consistent with “who they are” in their heads as opposed to their bodies? Is it true that no women or girls are harmed by being forced to compete with male bodies?

A Senate Education Committee hearing preceding the vote Thursday morning streamed live online. Some SB49 proponents, like Family Heritage Alliance director Norman Woods, said that supporting the bill wasn’t about “valu[ing] one student group over another” but about preserving “a basic standard of fairness.” Other proponents, like South Dakota Catholic Conference executive director Christopher J. Motz, used their time before the committee to undermine trans identities and gendered self-determination.

“Being a male or female is a physical reality,” said Motz. “To be male or female doesn’t proceed from one’s inner experience. It comes through one’s physical body.”

Even executive directors of Catholic groups can be right sometimes.

First this.

There are countless photos of Stacey Abrams and her glorious smile.

Axios must have had to search to find an image to fit the “angry black woman” trope. pic.twitter.com/NvH5HrVOlV

— Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath) January 29, 2019

Textbook: https://t.co/FSi0PmF4pZ

— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) January 29, 2019

And then an update.

https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1090353193731661828

I’m not sure what I think about it. There is more than one trope, and another trope is “women must not ever look angry or determined or authoritative or anything other than sweet.” To be honest in the first picture she doesn’t really look angry, to me, so much as…well, serious. Serious while talking. Do we want to flinch away from that?

I don’t think I do.

Ah those pesky breasts. What shall we do about them?

An African practice of “ironing” a girl’s chest with a hot stone to delay breast formation is spreading in the UK, with anecdotal evidence of dozens of recent cases, a Guardian investigation has established.

Community workers in London, Yorkshire, Essex and the West Midlands have told the Guardian of cases in which pre-teen girls from the diaspora of several African countries are subjected to the painful, abusive and ultimately futile practice.

…

“It’s usually done in the UK, not abroad like female genital mutilation (FGM),” [an anonymous activist] said, describing a practice whereby mothers, aunties or grandmothers use a hot stone to massage across the breast repeatedly in order to “break the tissue” and slow its growth.

Ouch.

They do it as often as every week.

The perpetrators, usually mothers, consider it a traditional measure which protects girls from unwanted male attention, sexual harassment and rape. Medical experts and victims regard it as child abuse which could lead to physical and psychological scars, infections, inability to breastfeed, deformities and breast cancer.

…

Nyuydzewira, who was herself subjected to the abuse as a girl, said British authorities were not taking the problem seriously, and have not prosecuted those doing breast-ironing on their children on grounds of it being seen as a “cultural practice”.

“The British people are so polite in the sense that when they see something like that, they think of cultural sensitivities,” she said. “But if it’s a cultural practice that is harming children … any harm that is done to a little girl, whether in public or in secrecy, that person should be held accountable.”

It’s politeness toward the “cultural sensitivities” of the adults. What about the girls? How about putting the girls first instead of the adults? Wouldn’t that be a more reasonable way to approach “cultural practices” that more powerful people inflict on less powerful people? Ask cui bono but also ask cui noxa.

Interesting. Public service media report on how Facebook helps advertisers target users of Facebook, and Facebook creates code to stop them. ProPublica is one:

A number of organizations, including ProPublica, have developed tools to let the public see exactly how Facebook users are being targeted by advertisers.

Now, Facebook has quietly made changes to its site that stop those efforts.

ProPublica, Mozilla and Who Targets Me have all noticed their tools stopped working this month after Facebook inserted code in its website that blocks them.

No transparency for you-oo, sorrreee.

“This is very concerning,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who has co-sponsored the Honest Ads Act, which would require transparency on Facebook ads. “Investigative groups like ProPublica need access to this information in order to track and report on the opaque and frequently deceptive world of online advertising.”

…

Facebook has made minor tweaks before that broke our tool. But this time, Facebook blocked the ability to automatically pull ad targeting information.

The latest move comes a few months after Facebook executives urged ProPublica to shut down its ad transparency project. In August, Facebook ads product management director Rob Leathern acknowledged ProPublica’s project “serves an important purpose.” But he said, “We’re going to start enforcing on the existing terms of service that we have.” He said Facebook would soon “transition” ProPublica away from its tool.

Facebook has launched an archive of American political ads, which the company says is an alternative to ProPublica’s tool. However, Facebook’s ad archive is only available in three countries, fails to disclose important targeting data and doesn’t even include all political ads run in the U.S.

ProPublica’s tool regularly found advertisers that Facebook’s missed.

What it all adds up to, said Knight First Amendment Institute senior attorney Alex Abdo, is “we cannot trust Facebook to be the gatekeeper to the information the public needs about Facebook.”

Is that kind of like the way we can’t trust Trump’s family to be impartial government servants?

Time to refresh our memories, again, on why Trump can’t enforce NDAs against people who work in his administration:

But such NDAs for government workers, when they go beyond prohibiting the disclosure of classified information, are unconstitutional on their face. I know, because I have litigated more pre-publication-review classification challenges against the government during the past 25 years than any other attorney. For decades, courts have made it clear that the government may not censor unclassified material, “contractually or otherwise.” Legal challenges during the 1970s and 1980s against the CIA settled the question that the government has no legitimate interest under the First Amendment in censoring unclassified information.

Oddly enough, Trump’s engorged ego doesn’t overrule that.

No known prior administration has relied upon the use of NDAs to try to silence public employees, because any such document was correctly perceived as legally unenforceable and problematic on so many levels. I never came across any similar attempts in my time in Washington during President Bill Clinton’s first term. The only comparable agreement that I’m aware of is one congressional intelligence committee staffers are requested to sign that prohibits post-employment discussion of committee procedures. The constitutionality of such an agreement is also suspect, but no known legal challenge has ever been made.

Trump however is not a fast learner.

A low level staffer that I hardly knew named Cliff Sims wrote yet another boring book based on made up stories and fiction. He pretended to be an insider when in fact he was nothing more than a gofer. He signed a non-disclosure agreement. He is a mess!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2019

Asia Bibi is free to leave, at last.

Asia Bibi, the Christian farm labourer who spent eight years on death row in Pakistan for blasphemy, is expected to leave the country after the supreme court upheld her acquittal.

The court on Tuesday rejected a challenge to October’s ruling brought by an extreme Islamist party, which led violent protests across the country in the autumn and called for Bibi to be killed.

Bibi, who has been held at a secret location since her death sentence was overturned, could be flown out of the country within hours. Two of her children are reportedly already in Canada, which has offered Bibi asylum.

Her lawyer told reporters she will probably leave today. (That seems risky and provocative at first glance, but maybe the idea is to say don’t even bother to riot because you’ll be too late.)

Hafiz Ehtisham Ahmed, an Islamist activist linked to the extremist Red Mosque in Islamabad, said Bibi may not be safe wherever she goes. “She deserves to be murdered according to sharia. If she goes abroad, don’t Muslims live there? If she goes out of Pakistan … anybody can kill her there,” she told AFP.

The Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) party, which was formed to defend Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and which led violent protests demanding Bibi’s execution after her acquittal, called on Tuesday for its members to be ready for action.

Murder people for the glory of god – one of the most enduring bad ideas humans have come up with.

Dave Ricks alerted me to this item in the CHE:

Two years ago, Harvard’s fraternities, sororities, and “final clubs,” which are not officially affiliated with the institution, faced an order from the university’s president: Go coed, or your members will lose the ability to hold campus-leadership positions and to be endorsed for outside scholarships. On Monday, Greek life struck back. A group of fraternities, sororities, and three students filed lawsuits against Harvard’s leaders, in both state and federal court, for allegedly discriminating against the organizations with the new policy.

It’s like single-sex schools and universities – I think they’re bad for male people and useful for female people. For similar reasons, all-white organizations are not the same kind of thing as all-black organizations. Underlings need to organize more than overlings do.

The policy was announced in 2016 by Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s president at the time, after a university task force on sexual-assault prevention found that “final clubs” fostered “a strong sense of sexual entitlement.”  But the new policy that followed applied as well to the Greek organizations, barring their members from leadership positions and endorsements for such scholarships as the Rhodes and the Fulbright.

Some members of all-female final clubs and sororities protested the new policy, arguing that women needed a single-gender safe space. Critics also questioned why women’s groups had to follow the same rules as men’s groups, which the task force’s report found to be more often a source of trouble.

Sometimes the “one rule for everyone” approach doesn’t work all that well.

Yer doin it rong.

Authorities in the United Arab Emirates have been ridiculed after it emerged that all of the winners of an initiative designed to foster gender equality in the workplace were men.

Well they have a gender too ya know!

“We are proud of the success of Emirati women and their role is central to shaping the future of the country,” a tweet from the official Dubai media office said. “Gender balance has become a pillar in our government institutions.”

But that doesn’t mean we nominate them for awards, for heaven’s sake. Let’s have a little common sense here.

However, according to rights groups, gender discrimination is still an entrenched problem across the UAE, particularly in the legal system, which prioritises men’s rights in family and personal status matters such as marriage, divorce and custody of children. UAE law also permits domestic violence as long as the assault does not exceed the limits set by Islamic law.

That’s why it’s safest for men to win all the awards.

Oh christ he’s serious.

The question I think we all should be asking ourselves is: at this time in America when there's so much evidence that our political system is broken – that both parties at the extreme are not representing the silent majority of the American people – isn't there a better way? pic.twitter.com/Gy1wf1cf8F

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) January 28, 2019

What an idiot. We don’t need another one of those. The fucking silent majority for god’s sake? That Nixonian relic?

And he emphasizes “extreme” in that empty little word-porridge. “Both parties at the extreme” – the extreme of what? It’s ludicrous to pretend the Democrats are at the extreme left in the same sense that the Republicans are at the extreme right. Nearly all Democrats avoid the real left as if it were Ebola.

Yes, of course there’s a better way, but no I don’t think the former CEO of Starbucks knows what it is or how to get us there. Not for a second.

Mister Starbucks shyly confesses his plans.

I love our country, and I am seriously considering running for president as a centrist independent.

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) January 28, 2019

In other words he’s hoping to throw another election to the orange criminal by running as a third party-er. So that right there is reason enough to tell him to fuck off.

But also…a centrist independent? Wtf? Center between what and what? Lunatic conservatives and reasonable conservatives? So, what, he’ll be a little bit wack but not as wack as Trump? Gee, that’s alluring.

We don’t need any new “centrists” because we’re already stuck between two conservative parties. People scream in horror about the extremism of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez because she thinks we should have universal Medicare aka a national health service, while all the other developed nations have had universal health insurance for decades. There is no left in electoral politics in the US, there is only right and far right.

Plus, what the hell does Howard Schultz know about being president? No more than Trump did and does. We don’t need more of that. Go away.

Siva Vaidhyanathan reminded us of this thing he wrote four years ago about Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz, who has apparently announced that he’s running for president ffs.

The next time you order one of those faux-Italian-named sweetened coffee drinks at a Starbucks store, you are likely to receive a cup with the hash-tagged words “Race Together” written on it, just above your misspelled name. If you ask the Starbucks employee what it’s about, she or he will tell you that it’s part of a new corporate initiative to inspire customers to discuss racial issues with employees and among themselves.

Dear god. Why would I want to do that? Why would anyone?

Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz is no doubt sincere about his belief in Starbucks as a site and his employees as facilitators of measured deliberation about the legacies of 400 years of slavery, segregation, violence, and migration. But his commitment rests on the naïve arrogance of privilege.

Along with, I’m guessing, a generous helping of vanity.

“What can we do to create more empathy, more compassion, more understanding?,” Shultz asked his employees this week (the company calls them “partners” to mask the nature of the labor-management relationship). “Perhaps we could do something that could be catalytic for the country.”

While making hot drinks from combinations of coffee and sweet syrups, or making change at the cash register. I don’t think so.

All over the United States, teachers, clergy, police officers, and community activists have always fostered carefully moderated conversations about race. In communities large and small, these conversations have had modest but largely local effects. Even after years of experience and deep training in facilitating such discussions, those who run them don’t necessarily find them easy or comfortable. In fact, the less comfortable the discussions are, the more good they might do.

Schultz has expressed no recognition of these longstanding efforts and conversations that hard-working professionals have been pursuing through the public sector and houses of worship. He seems to think that Starbucks should fill some vacuum he perceives in American public life. In doing so, he overestimates the centrality of a corporate chain of overpriced coffee shops to that civic experience.

Which is putting it mildly. Teachers, clergy, police officers, and community activists all get some training or education in the field, especially if they’re going to be fostering conversations on it. Baristas, not so much. It’s of course possible that some or many baristas have deep experience and education on racial issues, but they don’t all have it because that’s a major part of their job.

But if he thinks his employees somehow magically know how to facilitate conversations on racial issues, no wonder he thinks he somehow magically knows how to be president.

They’ve done it – on a Sunday afternoon. Everybody’s watching the game, so nobody will notice!

We notice.

Trump and his co-conspirators have lifted the sanctions on Deripaska.

The Trump administration on Sunday lifted sanctions on three companies, including the aluminum giant Rusal, linked to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Democrats had led a push in Congress to continue the restrictions.

Roger Stone is fighting back (or punching himself in the face – one of those.)

Since Friday, Stone has engaged in a blitz of media interviews, an unusual approach for someone who has been indicted.

Asked what he hopes to gain, Stone said he wanted to draw attention to what he saw as the inappropriate way his arrest took place.

“This was an expensive show of force to try to depict me as public enemy number one, the OG, to attempt to poison the jury pool,” Stone said, using a slang expression that means “original gangster.”

“These are Gestapo tactics,” he said.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) later told ABC that Stone used arguments that are typical for someone accused of white-collar crime.

“I think he’s going to need a much better defense than the one you just heard,” said Schiff, a former federal prosecutor.

Larry Tribe explains why they’re not.

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1089606237287862272

It’s not as if Stone is not the kind of guy who would destroy evidence if he had the chance, now is it.

Politico has more:

In a court filing Thursday, Mueller wrote that he wanted to keep the Stone indictment under wraps until the arrest because of a concern that publicizing the charges “will increase the risk of the defendant fleeing and destroying (or tampering with) evidence.” Stone was not persuaded by that logic.

“The idea that a 29-member SWAT team in full tactical gear with assault weapons would surround my house,“ Stone said Sunday, “17 vehicles in my front yard, including two armored vehicles, a helicopter overhead, amphibious vehicles in the back where my house backs on to a canal — that I would open the door looking down the barrel of assault weapons, that I would be frog-marched out front barefooted and handcuffed when they simply could have contacted me, I think people need to know about that.”

Stone said he had posed no flight risk and would not have tampered with evidence critical to the special counsel’s probe before the FBI searched of his residences in South Florida and Manhattan.

Oh well he says so, and he must be telling the truth, because he has such a long history of…lying.

James Kirkup points out that Women get treated far worse than men in Labour’s transgender debate.

[I]f general run-of-the-mill Twitter is angry and stupid, gender-identity Twitter is angry and stupid on steroids. Simply liking the ‘wrong’ bit of content on Twitter can have you branded a transphobic witch and burned at the electronic stake, at least if you’re a woman. No one, or more accurately, no woman, is safe from the online inquisition’s charges of transphobia. You might think that JK Rowling was about as insulated as a person can be from online vitriol, since she’s lovely, kind, thoughtful, the creator of the world’s most popular wizard – and a billionaire. But you’d be wrong, because even JK has had her turn in the ducking stool (by the witch-finders at Pink News) for the heinous crime of ‘liking’ tweets that said Bad Things and, in one case, linking to a column by Janice Turner of the Times who is, of course, a Very Bad Person because, well, she has some weird idea that women should be listened to and children protected or something. The cow.

There’s also follow-crime – following someone already Disapproved by the people in charge of disapproving the people they disapprove. Never mind that you can “like” tweets for all sorts of reasons, never mind that the same goes double for following – just charge ahead and abuse anyone who “likes” a tweet by someone who follows someone who forgot to put the cap back on the toothpaste tube.

Consider Ann Henderson for instance.

Henderson is a Scottish trade unionist and community worker who is currently serving as rector of Edinburgh University, elected by staff and students to chair the university’s governing body. She is also a Labour member from the left-wing/Momentum bit of the party that leaves a lot of Jewish people thinking hard about packing a bag and heading to the airport to buy a one-way ticket out of Britain.

In October the Edinburgh University student newspaper accused her of “transphobia.”

Why?

She retweeted about a meeting organised by A Woman’s Place UK, a feminist group largely run by left-wing women who organise public meetings to discuss changes to gender recognition laws to make it easier for men to change their legal gender and be recognised as women. The group worries such changes will undermine the legal and social standing of women, where ‘women’ is taken to mean ‘adult human females’.

…

But of course, in the looking-glass world of transgenderism, MPs talking to women about the law isn’t OK. It’s awful and transphobic, and so is anyone (or at least, any woman) with even the flimsiest association with such an event. So the mere fact of Ann Henderson sharing a tweet about that event with her 1,200 or so followers was enough to bring down condemnation from the university Labour Club, the Students’ Association and merit coverage in Scotland’s national press. Henderson has also been criticised by Lily Madigan, a transgender Labour activist and women’s officer, for the earlier offence of following WPUK on Twitter. How dare she, etc etc.

Just retweeting about the event, remember.

So far so normal, by the dysfunctional standards of the gender debate, where ‘woman gets shouted at for having opinion’ is the equivalent of ‘dog bites man’. But now Henderson has a new job. She was this week elected chair of the Labour Party National Executive Committee’s equalities sub-committee.

This, according to LGBT Labour, a party group, is an outrage. ‘We are appalled by the election of Ann Henderson to the chair of the Labour Party NEC equalities sub-committee given her history of sharing material that has been described as transphobic,’ the group said, in a statement (on Twitter, natch) first reported by LabourList.

Ahhhh will you look at that now, that careful ass-covering by means of “has been described as.” So agent-free passive voice, so conveniently vague, so meaningless, so idiotic, and yet so useful for insulating oneself from accusations of bullying or libel. The material has been described as transphobic; we couldn’t possibly comment – except to make a public attack on Ann Henderson for retweeting it.

But hey, she’s a woman, so she has it coming.

In September, according to the group, a [male] Labour MP did indeed meet a Woman’s Place UK and listened to their concerns about gender law reform and Labour’s policies. The MP’s name is John McDonnell and he is the Shadow Chancellor.

And if LGBT Labour or any of the other activists seeking to burn Ann Henderson for nothing more than a retweet have condemned him for outrageous transphobia, I can find no evidence of their outrage.

In short, a woman taps ‘RT’ once and is condemned. A man does rather more than that and nothing happens. Make of that what you will, but always remember: the gender debate is all about equality.

Which is to say, it’s eye-wateringly misogynist, and proud of it.

The CBC points out that men who think they are owed sexual access to women are a large and threatening group. Quite a few of them are murderous.

Involuntary celibates or incels are an online brotherhood of men who say they are unsuccessful in their romantic attempts with women.

Romantic attempts? Sexual attempts, mostly. They want access a lot more than they want cozy evenings in front of the fireplace.

Incels interact in forums online, like 4chan, Reddit and a few public incel boards, and even on popular social media platforms including Facebook and YouTube. They often express extreme feelings of misogyny and hatred.

In the worst cases, their online misogyny turns to violent fantasies, where many online encourage rape, violence and in some cases, killing.

Experts interviewed by The Fifth Estate have identified 120 instances of extreme violence in Canada by right-wing groups, including incels, in the past 30 years. This is compared to only seven by Islamist-inspired extremists.

There is some overlap though, which is interesting. Islamists are also very focused on getting total control over women.

“It’s about their proprietary violence, that they think they have some sort of inborn inherent right and privilege to access women and women’s bodies and so that is the bit that animates them,” Barbara Perry, a criminologist specializing in hate crime at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, told The Fifth Estate.

I’ve known a few men who did think exactly that. It’s not unusual.

The term “incel” gained more prominence in 2014, when a 22-year-old man in Isla Vista, Calif. killed six people and injured 14 others before killing himself. It was discovered Elliot Rodger had an extensive online presence, including a series of YouTube videos he made and posted — reuploading as they were banned and removed.

He also left behind a 137-page manifesto he wrote titled “My Twisted World.” The last video he posted was called “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution.”

“Tomorrow is the day of retribution — a day of which I will have my revenge against all of humanity,” Rodger said in one video. “I will slaughter every single spoiled stuck-up blonde slut…. You will finally see I’m the superior one. The true alpha male.”

Like Revenge of the Nerds but with guns.

Elliot Rodger was an inspiration to Alek Minassian.

In the past four years, there have been several killings by people who either self-identified as incels or who mentioned incel-related names and writings in their internet postings.

Nikolas Cruz, the man who is charged with killing 17 people and attempting to kill 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last year, praised Rodger online, saying “Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten.”

On Oct. 1, 2015, Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people and injured eight others in a shooting at the Umpqua Community College campus in Roseburg, Ore., before killing himself. Harper-Mercer posted online about being involuntarily celibate.

All because women are not a public utility like water, but autonomous human beings with their own choices and plans.

The Fifth Estate spent months infiltrating incel forums to get a sense of what goes on in these dark corners of the internet. Self-proclaimed incels often blame society and their genetics for not being successful in romantic endeavours. Using the term “involuntary,” experts say, indicates that incels have little self-awareness.

Incels believe women owe them sex, and in some cases people active on incel forums advocate for government-sanctioned girlfriends and sexual encounters.

Here’s a quick tip: government-sanctioned girlfriends are not actually girlfriends. Slavery and friendship are quite different things, even opposite things.

In memory of

In memory of Charlotte Shalomon, Yva, Malva Schalek and Otti Berger, Jewish artists murdered in Nazi concentration camps, among the 17 million victims of the Holocaust #womensart

#HolocaustMemorialDay pic.twitter.com/UqyaCzeHPw

— #WOMENSART (@womensart1) January 27, 2019