About
Amori Linguae translates to 'for the love of language'. Hello, I'm Theo.
I am a geeky linguist and an anglophile. This blog is half fun, half serious, and a third roleplaying (and that's not a maths error). Feel free to talk to me. I only bite if you ask.
This blog is almost all queue.
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So the Senate decided to have hearings on the issue of rape in the military, which is epidemic in no small part because of massive failures in military leadership to deal with the problem effectively. Because of this, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has started to push for legislation, which has been effective in other countries, removing rape prosecution from the chain of command and having a more straightforward criminal justice approach. Her reasoning is clear enough, which is that a lot of commanders tend to treat rape like it’s just another form of sexual harassment, which is to say more like an H.R. issue and less like a criminal matter. She is very, very clear about this.
Straightforward, commonsensical. Which is why the conservative reaction ranged from incoherent to bizarre to shockingly misogynist. They hate being accused of waging a war on women, but they are no more going to stop doing so than they’re going to stop over the top pandering displays of patriotism. It’s just who conservatives are. Even though in this particular case, male-on-male rape seems to be as serious a problem as male-on-female rape, which means that calling this a women’s issue is even more asinine and offensive than usual. Not that this prevented Sen. Saxby Chambliss from saying that rape is just what happens when you expose young men to actual women.
Needless to say, there’s no evidence that rape is a result of hormone levels or extreme sexual desire at all. As ever, rape is a crime of violence that is usually motivated much more by the rapist’s desire to dominate the victim than any sexual urge. In fact, the military specifically has a problem with men raping men, and most of those rapists who rape men are straight-identified men. It’s not an expression of sexual desire at all, but an attempt to put someone in his or her place.
(via randomactsofchaos)
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“Federal regulators can sue drug companies for antitrust violations when brand-name drug makers pay generic competitors to keep cheaper, rival copies of a drug off the market, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday. In a decision that shifts the balance of power in the drug business, manufacturers will now have to defend the agreements against charges that they violate anticompetition laws, perhaps exposing the companies to a greater likelihood of aggressive competition from generic drugs and to lawsuits from drug retailers and wholesalers, insurers and others. Consumers also could benefit from sharply lower drug costs. The court did not address whether the agreements, called pay-for-delay or reverse payments, were presumptively unlawful. But it laid out a number of possibilities under which the contracts could be attacked by antitrust officials. In a 5-to-3 vote, with one abstention, the justices invalidated lower-court rulings that the agreements were legal as long as they did not keep a generic drug off the market for longer than the scope of the brand-name drug’s patent, even if the generic company had sued to have that patent invalidated.”
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“There are as many as 4,000 Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) in the United States, compared to the 2,000 clinics that provide abortion care for women.”
National Abortion Federation (via actualfactsaboutabortion)
Also know that the extreme majority of CPCs are not medically licensed.
(via stfuprolifers)
(via qrookedqueer)
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Sheriff Joe Arpaio Will Appeal Racial Profiling Decision
In a video statement yesterday, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, AZ said he would appeal a major federal court ruling from last week that ordered an end to practices of racial profiling. The decision from Judge Murray Snow of U.S. District Court in Phoenix, was a major blow to the Sheriff who has made a career as an anti-immigrant force who admits to targeting Latinos during neighborhood sweeps and traffic stops.
“We will appeal this ruling,” Arpaio said yesterday.
In the meantime, Arpaio said that he ordered his deputies to stop detaining undocumented immigrants solely because of their immigration status. “[T]he court’s order is clear,” he said. “We will no longer detain persons believed to be in the country without authorization whom we cannot arrest on state charges.”
But the impact of the ruling in the Melendres v. Arpaio case is not yet clear. Though the court issued an immediate injunction against unconstitutional practices of racial profiling, Arpaio’s statement suggests he may continue to target immigrants under the pretense that they’ve broken state laws. Arpaio’s 800 deputies regularly stop and arrest Latinos in Maricopa County by citing state laws written to target immigrants, including one anti-human smuggling law that makes it possible for the county to charge individuals with smuggling themselves into the country.
This shiftiness leads many to wonder about the impact of the injunction. “We’re going to have to wait and see what happens,” says Carlos Garcia, an organizer with Puente Arizona. “For people to be able to go to work without fearing that they are not going to be stopped or raided would something amazing.”
In his statement, Arpaio also shifted blame for his department’s profiling practices to the federal government.
“One hundred of my deputies were authorized and trained by the federal government, ICE, to enforce federal immigration law,” he said. “Now, a federal court has ruled that federal training was unconstitutional, and it led to racial profiling.”
Maricopa County deputies were indeed trained by federal officials to act as immigration enforcers through the 287(g) programs and were instructed they could use race as a factor in making stops, according to the decision from Judge Snow. But while the federal government helped empower Arpaio’s worst practices, when the 287(g) terminated the agreement, Arpaio continued to detain immigrants and changed his justification saying that he had inherent authority to enforce immigration laws.
Garcia and other advocates are also concerned about the thousands of people who Arpaio has already arrested.
“Who knows how many people have been illegally detained and arrested who’ve ended up with criminal convictions or removed,” said Cecillia Wang, an attorney with the ACLU, which brought suit. “Our case really was looking for injunctive relief to bring an end to the policy and practice of targeting Latinos and detaining people because of immigration status. But this decision does not have any direct impact for people already facing changes.”
Litigants will head to court again on June 14th when Judge Snow will outline next steps to remedy the illegal profiling practices. These could include the introduction of an independent monitor and data collection requirements.
(via randomactsofchaos)
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“The tech companies would be more convincing if their industry hadn’t been so complicit in the development of the surveillance state in the first place. Silicon Valley and its global analogs made it possible, and have made vast amounts of money in the process as government suppliers. They’ve been arms dealers not just to American spies but to the world’s most repressive governments as well. Moreover, even the Internet-related tech companies that haven’t actively helped the dictators and spies have been creating large businesses based on collecting, massaging and making money off of the data their users and customers provide in their day-to-day use of the services. And even if the companies themselves haven’t been abusing their ownership of these giant data collections, they have by definition left themselves and their customers vulnerable to government overreach.”
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Governor Rick Scott on whether paid sick leave is a good idea:
Florida’s governor just signed a bill BANNING paid sick leave.
You know, for as much as conservatives like to bible thump….
I’m pretty sure the Bible says a lot about helping the sick. Wasn’t that one of Jesus’s big points?
There’s one more reason I’m never moving to Florida.
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“Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are.”Self-confessed NSA leaker Eric Snowden, on being accused of spying for China by former VP Dick Cheney. (via quickhits)
(Source: thehill.com, via randomactsofchaos)
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BRB….selling my Microsoft stock…
Can we just take a moment to appreciate how sassy Sony is being? I mean, damn.
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There are a lot of people who seem to think that spending time on the internet will wreck a person’s vocabulary
But au contraire
the internet has taught me an assortment of new words to use that have completely replaced really disgusting words in my vocabulary
So I mean
Self absorbed adults can continue to vilify the internet while calling it the r-slur while I sit here and muse on what pestilent children they are.
(via moniquill)
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“We live in a profit economy and there is no profit in the prevention of cancer; there is only profit in the treatment of cancer.”
-Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, p 71.(quoted in Lisa Diedrich, Treatments, p 60.)
(via queerandpresentdanger)
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I just saw a post about pizza that tumblruser pizza hadn’t found yet. Weird.
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Bébinn: For All Your Pro-Choice Needs!: Advice: Accessing Abortion When You Need Funding and a Judicial Bypass
What can you do when you need an abortion, but you’re a minor in a state where you need parental permission you probably can’t get and you don’t have money? Here are some initial steps.
FaithS asks:
I am 16 years old and already have a 7 month old baby. My son has a…
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“A lot of the time when you tell someone that you’re bisexual, they ask for your credentials. They ask how many men have you dated? How many women have you dated? Which one do you prefer? Which one have you had more sex with? These are incredibly personal questions that you wouldn’t ask a straight or gay person, but bisexuality has “less validity” so we get asked all these stupid, intimate questions. And if you don’t want to answer then someone will make assumptions about you but if you do answer, and the fact is out of the three people you fucked two of them are one gender and one of them is the other then people will decide whether you are gay or straight, they’ll make the decision for you.”
