It’s true! And not just in Egypt, it’s recorded as a standard burglar technique in 12th century Persia. So much so that catching a fellow in the middle of the night carrying a crowbar and a drill wouldn’t necessarily prove anything, but if he also had a live tortoise with him, well it could only be a professional burglar.
“The tortoise is employed thus. The burglar has with him a
flint-stone and a candle about as big as a little finger. He lights the
candle and sticks it on the tortoise’s back. The tortoise is then
introduced through the breach into the house, and it crawls slowly
around, thereby illuminating the house and its contents.”
I’m really blown away that only two senators voted against the FOSTA-SESTA package. That’s fucking wild.
Apparently two Republicans can sponsor a pair of bills and say “they’re to stop sex trafficking :)” and almost every Democrat in congress will go “sounds cool bro” and pass them.
not to be that guy, but, actually, SESTA’s cosponsors (Christine Gillibrand and Kamala Harris) were both Dems- which just proves OP’s point, I think, or one immediately adjacent to it
floral scents- magnolia, lilac, honeysuckle, geraniums, and roses being the main ones, but also boxwood and linden (which doesn’t actually smell like cum but the fact that people draw that comparison helps)
one or two days worth of clean sweat smell, with a moderate preference for that testosterone-y tang
specific static-y smells: the warm crackle of freshly dried clothes, and also cats
cheap old paperbacks, especially the kind that smell chocolatey
fresh weed, in all its varieties
the way very hot or cold outside air smells when you first step into it or open a window
most savory cooking smells
brownies baking
bourbon
basil
ginger
figs
coffee beans, though not as much coffee (I used to hate that smell)
wet leather
dead leaves
sweet musk (I am that bitch who likes Opium-type perfumes best, and I like patchouli and Old-Spice knockoff deodorant)
these are all kind of obvious! but I also am very drawn to a whole bunch of less pleasant smells- I couldn’t say I like them, but there’s compelling- some of which are less obvious: gasoline, day-old underwear, two-plus-day-old sweat, burning french fry grease, dog’s ears, my dad’s cigarettes, menstrual blood, hospital odor
the thing directly between these two poles is civet, which smells lightly fecal or like genital sweat to me, and satisfies both my ‘mmm, good scent’ and ‘compulsively smell-able, not necessarily good’ drives
I just want to draw your attention to the insistence by the authors of this nasty little piece that students are excessively fragile and litigious for not wanting to engage in ~dialogue with people who have direct institutional power over them, and for invoking the institutional power that purports to mediate disputes between students and faculty
this is pretty much exactly the way Schulman’s conflict is not abuse and anti-trigger-warning arguments are supposed to work, in tandem. this isn’t a limit case of ‘what can go wrong’, this is… how they’re supposed to work. and the fact that they’re being used to smear a trans academic and the authors’ students, instead of combatting fragility around critical discussions of Israel, or inclusion of sexually explicit content in a syllabus, doesn’t make that any less true.
the point I am making on Other Platform is that you can’t draw a comparison between students who want trigger warnings in classrooms and ones who want BDS advocates denied tenure because there are cosmetic similarities between their arguments and they both use institutional systems of redress to oppose the direct authority professors have over them without opening yourself up to the argument that, if your whole deal can also be used to defend this garbage, it’s also politically suspect
the whole thing about tactics? you can use them to multiple ends. you can’t generalise about students using institutional redress or social media campaigns being regressive without also opening yourself up to criticism when your arguments about the role of professors in questioning assumptions and whatever gets used to defend rank transphobia. I, personally, don’t need to see them used this way to see how bad they are, because I’ve already seen Schulman wring her hands about Anthony Wiener sending dick pics to a minor, but you can draw the comparison.
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