Fourierist
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fourierist.bsky.social
Fourierist
@fourierist.bsky.social
130 followers 290 following 370 posts
Philosopher, anti-lion, lemonade enthusiast.
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fourierist.bsky.social
Before the ACW Sherman was superintendent of a military academy in Louisiana and his close friend was an instructor from Virginia who was very enthusiastic about secession. After the war, so maybe apocryphal, the friend recalled Sherman didactically explaining exactly what was coming:
Screen capture from the Wikipedia page for William Tecumseh Sherman. "You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it ... Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail."
December 6, 2025 at 8:11 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
I'm pretty sure you're supposed to ascend vertically through the enormous patio doors mounted horizontally outside the kitchen/greatroom/guestroom/dining room that is actually just a huge empty space ringed by sinks
December 1, 2025 at 11:15 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
There's a bit in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" where Hunter S. Thompson mocks the squares by saying that drug freaks could rig speakers under the worst conditions imaginable but evidently there wasn't a cop in the country who could set up a halfway adequate sound system in a ballroom:
We sat in the rear fringe of a crowd of about 1500 in the main ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Far up in front of the room, barely visible from the rear, the executive director of the National District Attorneys’ Association—a middle-aged, well-groomed, successful GOP businessman type named Patrick Healy—was opening their Third National Institute on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. His remarks reached us by way of a big, low-fidelity speaker mounted on a steel pole in our corner. Perhaps a dozen others were spotted around the room, all facing the rear and looming over the crowd so that no matter where you sat or even tried to hide, you were always looking down the muzzle of a big speaker. This produced an odd effect. People in each section of the ballroom tended to stare at the nearest voice-box, instead of watching the distant figure of whoever was actually talking far up front, on the podium. This 1935 style of speaker placement totally depersonalized the room. There was something ominous and authoritarian about it. Whoever set up that sound system was probably some kind of Sheriff’s auxiliary technician on leave from a drive-in theater in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where the management couldn’t afford individual car speakers and relied on ten huge horns, mounted on telephone poles in the parking area. A year or so earlier I had been to the Sky River Rock Festival in rural Washington, where a dozen stone-broke freaks from the Seattle Liberation Front had assembled a sound system that carried every small note of an acoustic guitar—even a cough or the sound of a boot dropping on the stage—to half-deaf acid victims huddled under bushes a half mile away. But the best technicians available to the National DAs’ convention in Vegas apparently couldn’t handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to address his troops during the Seige of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phase with the speaker’s gestures. “We must come to terms with the Drug Culture in this country! . . . country . . . country . . .” These echoes drifted back to the rear in confused waves. “The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach . . .cockroach . . . cockroach . . .” “What the fuck are these people talking about?” my attorney whispered. “You’d have to be crazy on add to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach!”
November 25, 2025 at 11:41 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
If you try to decide what is the worst thing about Amy Chua, it's a very crowded field, but IMO it's the fact that she wasn't just advising her students to get sexy for Uncle Brett, she sent her own daughters clerk for those perverts.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The daughter of Yale Law School professor and “tiger mom” Amy Chua, who praised Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a mentor to women after his nomination to the Supreme Court, is going to work for Kavanaugh this summer. Yale Law graduate Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld will serve as a law clerk to Kavanaugh for a year, beginning this summer, the court confirmed Monday. Chua-Rubenfeld had planned to work for Kavanaugh when he served as a federal appeals court judge, but his Supreme Court nomination intervened. Shortly after the nomination, Chua penned a Wall Street Journal essay extolling Kavanaugh “as a mentor for young lawyers, particularly women.”
November 13, 2025 at 1:28 AM
fourierist.bsky.social
Image 1 shows the desire paths. It isn't totally clear from above, but it descends a short but steep embankment with no landscaping, seen from the Walmart side in image 2. Image 3 is from the complex side so you can see they forced their way through a hedge.
A zoomed-in image of where the apartment complex interfaces with Walmart, showing that traffic by residents has cut desire paths through underbrush to access the Walmart Supercenter. A street-level picture that shows one of the desire paths. It is a dirt trail that the residents have carved by repeated journeys from their complex to the Walmart parking lot, with a short, steep descent that is inaccessible to shopping carts, let alone people with disabilities. A view of a nearby location from the apartment complex side, showing that there is a thick hedge planted to block the complex visually and physically from the Walmart Supercenter and the adjoining shopping area. The residents who created the desire paths had their work cut out for them.
November 11, 2025 at 12:36 AM
fourierist.bsky.social
This is a Walmart Supercenter in my community, adjacent to a large apartment complex that caters to low-income renters. I highlighted the pedestrian access in green. It is (A) circuitous and (B) doesn't even access the business so requires an extended walk through parking lots and frontage roads.
An overhead satellite photo of a very large apartment complex immediately abutting a shopping center, with a Walmart Supercenter the closest retail establishment to the complex. Sidewalk access is highlighted to show that it never actually approaches any of the businesses.
November 11, 2025 at 12:36 AM
fourierist.bsky.social
Here is a section of "The Road to Wigan Pier" (1937) where George Orwell discussed chronic unemployment in Depression-era Britain and the rise of what he termed "cheap palliatives." We're not facing the same circumstances but I think it's useful for approaching the issue you're reacting to.
Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets. You can’t get much meat for threepence, but you can get a lot of fish-and-chips. Milk costs threepence a pint and even ‘mild’ beer costs fourpence, but aspirins are seven a penny and you can wring forty cups of tea out of a quarter-pound packet. And above all there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days’ hope (‘Something to live for’, as they call it) by having a penny on a sweepstake. Organized gambling has now risen almost to the status of a major industry. Consider, for instance, a phenomenon like the Football Pools, with a turnover of about six million pounds a year, almost all of it from the pockets of working-class people. I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football Pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury. And then there is the queer spectacle of modern electrical science showering miracles upon people with empty bellies. You may shiver all night for lack of bedclothes, but in the morning you can go to the public library and read the news that has been telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco and Singapore. Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life. Do you consider all this desirable? No, I don’t. But it may be that the psychological adjustment which the working class are visibly making is the best they could make in the circumstances. They have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard. The alternative would be God knows what continued agonies of despair; or it might be attempted insurrections which, in a strongly governed country like England, could only lead to futile massacres and a regime of savage repression. Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution. Therefore we are sometimes told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing class—a sort of ‘bread and circuses’ business—to hold the unemployed down. What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence. The thing has happened, but by an un-conscious process—the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer’s need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives.
November 10, 2025 at 10:46 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
This world series has *everything*--heterochromatic pitchers, Japanese supermen, bench-clearing brawls, mystifying ground-rule doubles.
November 2, 2025 at 1:47 AM
fourierist.bsky.social
In the novel he explains that he originally intended to make a normal-sized human, but found the process was much faster when he used larger parts.

(I remembered this passage because it was prominently quoted in "Young Frankenstein.")
It was with these feelings that I began to creation of a human being. As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large. After having formed this determination, and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began. --Mary Shelley, "Frankenstein" pg 73.
October 26, 2025 at 11:55 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
I saw you post this manga page this morning and it gave me a brainworm that I have to purge:
October 17, 2025 at 11:50 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
The most baffling of these careers was, of course, the ornamental hermit:
www.smithsonianmag.com/history/orna...
The Honorable Charles Hamilton, an 18th-century British aristocrat and member of Parliament, was explicit in his advertisement. The ornamental hermit he was recruiting to live in the sprawling gardens at his Painshill estate in Cobham, England, must be silent, never speaking to the servants who brought him his daily meals. He must wear a goat’s hair robe and never cut his hair, nails or beard. Shoes were out of the question. If and only if the hermit fulfilled the terms of his contract, living in solitary contemplation without stepping foot outside of the estate for seven years, he would be rewarded with £500 to £700 (around $95,000 to $130,000 today). Mr. Remington (first name unknown), the man hired to fill the role, lasted just a fraction of that time. Three weeks after arriving, he was discovered drinking at a local pub—or so the legend goes.
October 16, 2025 at 5:04 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
The receptionists at the vet always grinned when they confirmed Bath Time was there for her appointment.

People would ask if there was a story, and I would say, "No, we just liked the sound of it and you can call a cat whatever you want."
A female orange cat named Bath Time, folded in half to the exact size and shape to fit inside an empty 12-pack Maruchan ramen packets box.
September 24, 2025 at 9:20 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
Cover art for the Moonstruck (1987) NES tie-in game.
September 15, 2025 at 12:52 AM
fourierist.bsky.social
Do know the story about why he didn't get to play the lead role in The Graduate?

www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/03...
screening of The Graduate. He even discussed the role with his friend Robert Redford, who was eager for the part. 'I said, "You can't play it. You can never play a loser.' And Redford said, 'What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.' And I said, 'O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?' and he said, 'What do you mean?' And he wasn't joking."
August 24, 2025 at 9:01 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
August 24, 2025 at 3:16 AM
fourierist.bsky.social
reaching Kardeshev Type II energy capture just to make infinite fake pictures of heartwarming football men
faked image from a Facebook AI-slop account depicted Peyton Manning helping a teenage grocery bagger who is having a bad day
August 19, 2025 at 6:15 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
This tweet, but for dating as an incredibly rich single person.

Starts out with your romantic dinner for two taking over a 3 Michelin star restaurant, but you get addicted to taking ever-stupider venues private until you're renting out the Las Vegas Sphere to watch Netflix together.
Thing Bad @Merman_Melville Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day. 2:03 PM - Jan 24, 2019
August 14, 2025 at 8:31 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
Law enforcement agencies have a "use of force model" or "continuum" that determines the appropriate level of force to use in a situation. You can find lots of these online; I attached one from Chicago PD.

Drawing a baton is much lower on the continuum of force than drawing a gun.
August 14, 2025 at 7:39 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
bonus:
I almost went with this one but I figured it was too much of a deep cut
Puyi, Xuantong Emperor
August 5, 2025 at 9:07 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
The basement of the Ipatiev House
August 5, 2025 at 8:27 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
This is cool but also a lot of the posts are driving me insane because people don't understand the assignment and they'll just share any show at all.
Mr. Show is not forgotten TV! Come on!
August 2, 2025 at 8:09 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
Hollywood power couple Roger and Jessica Rabbit
August 1, 2025 at 9:05 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
e.g. Naftali Bennett was addressing a pro-Israel lobbying group in 2022 (screenshot from Mondo Weiss mondoweiss.net/2022/03/we-h...).

We just have to make them understand how right we are. We just have to do "better hasbara". We just have to keep doing the same thing but improve the optics.
[T]he truth about Israel is that it’s a remarkable miracle of democracy in the toughest place on earth, and we ought to be proud of it and fight for it and never give up. But we also have to do better hasbara. I think Israelis have always been not good enough at explaining. It’s something we have to work on. Let’s make no mistake those who are out there to tarnish Israel, it’s not from real motives. It’s because they don’t like who we are and what our heritage is. So we’ll fight back everywhere.
August 1, 2025 at 4:51 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
also, there's always a tweet
A screenshot of a classic Donald J. Trump tweet from December 21, 2011, where he shared "Barney Frank looked disgusting--nipples protruding--in his blue shirt before Congress. Very very disrespectful."
July 30, 2025 at 11:29 PM
fourierist.bsky.social
It was comical how obviously he hated Sanders during the 2020 Democratic primary. Kessler did multiple columns about how Bernie was telling the truth but in a way that hurt his feelings. The one where he argued that "'millions' is misleading because it's only 8 million" was my favorite.
“Millions of Americans are forced to work two or three jobs just to survive.” — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in a speech in North Charleston, S.C., March 15 Sanders does not pussyfoot around and simply draws on the BLS data — which as we noted shows that nearly 8 million people hold more than one job. But most of those extra jobs are part time, not full time. And as we noted, the “millions” of people amount to just 5 percent of Americans with jobs. So that means 95 percent are not working two or three jobs “just to survive.” The percentage has been roughly steady since the Great Recession, and in fact is lower than in the mid-1990s, when it hovered around 6 percent. So Sanders certainly has the most accurate sound bite. But it’s lacking important context, making it misleading.
July 28, 2025 at 3:34 PM