So a kid gets the urge to go on an adventure and voluntarily joins the army during Vietnam, requesting to go infantry.
He goes through training and ends up in the rice fields almost before he knows what’s up. He patrols for a couple of months, gets into a couple of firefights, takes some indirect, but nothing too crazy. But soon enough his unit gets airdropped deep into Vietcong territory and is ordered to take a hill that’s crawling with black pajama wearing guerrillas.
It’s the worst day of his life. He humps his gear uphill in the steamy heat, diving face first into the brush every time the tracers get flung his way. His buddy gets gut shot and bleeds out right in front of him, screaming for his momma. His Lieutenant trips a land mine and loses his legs in a sudden rip. For the first time, this young man actually sights in on a living body mere yards away and opens fire, seeing the bullets impact and staring his victim in the eyes as he dies.
It’s a twelve hour, exhausting, exhilarating, godawful mess of a day. But they win. They take that hill and make it safe for capitalism and democracy.
As they group up on the hill, still glassy-eyed and filthy and breathing heavy from the exertion, the platoon sergeant gathers them up and tells them to prep for extraction, the choppers will be there soon to take them home.
The young man loses it, breaks down crying and screaming- he demands to know, “What was the point of all that, then? Just kill people and kill ourselves to take a random ass hill for an hour? What the fuck, sarge?”
The platoon sergeant hushes him, calms him down, says, “You and me, we’re enlisted, kid. We don’t see the bigger picture, that’s the officers’ job.”
And that phrase catches hold of him, on the flight back to base. The bigger picture. The bigger picture. The bigger picture. Others can see it, but we can’t. We took that hill and got massacred because of the bigger picture.
When his tour is done, the young man applies for OCS and gets his butter bar; he wanted in on the secret that officers knew but Joe didn’t. But he finds that life as a platoon leader is just as crazy and violent and messy and pointless as it was before- they were still zipping around blasting VC, losing men, taking hills for no reason. Being a Lieutenant brought no wisdom. He asks his CO for clarity.
The captain says, “Ah, well. You and me, we’re military men. The strategy and goals of the fighting are crafted by the politicians back home. We just execute policy.”
And so the young man, who is no longer very young, runs out his contract and goes home. There, he runs for Congress. If the politicians could see the bigger picture, he would have to be a politician.
He is a good looking fellow, speaks well, has a certain intelligence and wit, has a glowing military record. He wins the election in a landslide.
But when he gets to Congress and starts coordinating political maneuvers with his new party mates, he finds he is as confused as ever. All the politicians were running around trying to get re-elected, trying to scheme and plan. They have no idea what made some hills in Vietnam valuable and some not, why some soldiers need to get gut shot and others don’t. Frustrated, he brings his concerns to a party leader- a senator of some renown- and asks about the bigger picture.
“Well,” says the senator. “We merely craft laws. The president sets the tone of foreign affairs. Our job is to get our guy into the hot seat and follow his lead. He’s the one who truly sees the bigger picture.”
And so the old man who had once been a young infantryman sets a new goal- the presidency.
He plans it out for ten years. He schmoozes, he crafts bills, he plays politics, he learns the ins and outs of fundraising and political alliances and PR. And at last, he campaigns for the highest office in the land.
He is a veteran congressman with a great record, nobody had any beef with him, and everybody knows he could play ball. He is still intelligent and charismatic, and his military record is of course a plus. He wins the election in a landslide.
When he enters the White House for the first time, he trembles. He was there, at last. This was it. He is going to finally see the bigger picture.
That first briefing crushes his soul. His cabinet babbles on, talking about Latvian trade networks, healthcare costs, a minor crisis in Somalia. It’s all chaos out there. It is all just as crazy and pointless and bizarre and arbitrary as it had been that terrible day in Vietnam.
The President erupts mid-meeting in a desperate fury, cutting off the Secretary of the Interior as she drones on about infrastructure.
”GODDAMN IT, YOU SOULLESS BASTARDS! WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT!? THE BIGGER PICTURE! WHAT’S THE BIGGER PICTURE?”
The room falls silent, in utter shock at his outburst. The emptiness after the screaming hangs heavy.
Finally, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff raises one hesitant finger as though to ask permission to speak, and asks, “Mr. President, are you telling me that you were on that fucking hill too?”
Well the cancel-culture letters came and went. I just gotta say that was some industrial-level gaslighting that Molloy spewed out, but the smell has now mostly dissipated. The Left is truly intellectually bankrupt. (So is the Right, but at least they won't try to get me fired for Wrongthink.)
Congratulations to both participants in the six-letter series on free speech.
Parker Molloy of TPA shifted my worldview in their direction, and has earned a lot of respect from me for being unapologetically pro-modern-day-social-justice while backing up their arguments with facts - two aspects that I wish went together much more often than I see online, where I despair about the quality of a lot that's put out there on both sides.
"Extreme reddists are dumb" and "extreme blueists are dumb" neither contradict each other, nor cancel each other out. But my own worldview is that people on the liberal-leaning side of the debate should value fact-checking and respect for the truth because, if the big debates of our time were to be decided by some omnipotent deity based on some standard of objective or scientific truth, we would win on just about every count. The western standards of scientific truth and truth-finding would give my side of the debate's answer on matters such as climate change and vaccine effectiveness/risks, just to name some big ones.
I am also completely with Freddie on the "free speech has traditionally always been a demand of the Left" thing, because if we ever do get an official bureau of acceptable online speech, however well it starts out, within a few years it might end up run by the other side - and Parker has very clearly shown the dangers of that in their three posts. (This does not affect Freddie's decision to ban discussion of a certain topic on his blog, because that decision is and always will be his - if it were taken over by someone else, it would no longer be "Freddie's blog".)
I was strongly but not favorably impressed by Horrorstör, which reads like the screenplay it badly wishes to be, and so works with its pile of reheated tropes in ways that would suit a popcorn horror flick but which fall flat in prose. I didn't know Hendrix had written anything else, but perhaps I'll give this newer one a try, in hopes it outdoes what its back-cover blurb leads me to expect. (A "digital enhanced edition" with a Spotify playlist! The man seems truly desperate to break into Hollywood, and good luck to him, I suppose. It certainly seems he could do with some.)
...I'll try it after I mow, anyway. It's late in the year for that, but I only moved into this new house of mine a couple Sundays ago, and I've been so busy getting the indoor functional areas into some sort of shape that I just haven't had the time. I do today, though, and I'd better use it lest I waste what may prove to be the last opportunity a temperamental Baltimore autumn will give me.
I noticed you turned off the comments for the Kanye West piece, and I know why and respect it, but I feel someone should point this out: whether you don't listen to people because you write them off as "evil" or you don't listen to people because you write them off as "crazy," you're still not listening to people. There really is no difference in the end between what you're doing to Kanye West and what they're doing to Kanye West, except that what you're suggesting absolves him of *moral* responsibility for what you suggest is "wrong-think" where as the others just call him evil for having "wrong-think."
I listened to his interview with Tucker Carlson, not because I'm in love with Kanye West (far from it--I find him egotistical to the point of being repulsive) but because I watch Tucker Carlson. But none of what he said did I find "morally" problematic. In fact, much of what he said had it come out of someone on the "left" with TDS would have gotten an "amen" from all quarters. But because he dared to praise Trump, he's bad. This is moral relativism at its worst. As for the White Lives Matter t-shirts, I find them ridiculous and suspect they are a grift of one variety or another, but I find Black Lives Matter t-shirts and the organization ridiculous and I *know* they are a grift. I find "All Lives Matter" to be a ridiculous statement. All of these slogans are indicative of a society trying to avoid the really big issues by distracting people with slogans, which is slightly ironic given your piece on "performative" religion. It's all "performance." There's nothing taken to heart by anyone.
And how did we get here? We stopped listening. We'd rather judge people as "immoral" or "crazy" than address what they have to say head on.
To that point, I've said my piece. You all can pile on if you wish. I'm not here to fight, nor am I here to defend myself. However, if we're going to save ourselves as a country or a species, we're going to have to burst out of our bubbles. I've tried to do that by reading Freddie deBoer with an open mind. Maybe you should do that by listening to Kanye West with an open mind.
As an educated conservative with roots in red territory but living in hyper liberal lands for many decades and intently studying the left species to the point that I can award myself a PHD in actual liberal studies, I have what I think is a simple explanation for the key root source of all political conflicts today.
Jonathan Haidt hits on this in his truly academic work to understand and explain the same. In his book The Righteous Mind, Haidt explains that liberals tend to operate on a very narrow moral filter that lights up almost exclusively on reaction to indications of fairness and harm. In contrast conservatives operate with a broad moral filter... one that requires them to balance moral considerations against each other to come to a choice of right vs wrong.
I have had the opinion that left people are more emotive and less rational... more prone to react to symbolism over substance. And that right people are less that way and thus the left people see them as uncaring. But today I see that as secondary to the moral filter explanation: left people just stop at the immediate indication of unfairness or harm, and right people keep going and do the math and problem-solving within their much bigger tent of moral considerations.
My observation is that the degree of this difference in moral filter processing is genetic. You are born with these moral filter tendencies, and although you can grow self-awareness over strong reactionary bias on either side, you are stuck with them.
Now, all of this was never the problem it was today. In fact the balance of both sides has been our strength. The left, more matriarchal in wiring, brought to the table the needed focus on immediate fairness and harm. Without this input, the patriarch right would otherwise revert to a Darwinistic model that accepted the consequences of too much human failure as necessary for the human condition to remain strong and healthy. But generally, because the US was founded on conservative principles that included objectivity, pragmatism and true problem-solving, the right side had dominated the overall management and leadership of the culture. The US has been a patriarchal design for good reason. And it has been the source of tremendous progress and benefits to the world.
Where we are blowing up today is that the media as controlled by a cabal of globalists has inserted algorithm probes deep into the psyche of the left political animal and is pumping a constant stream of alarmist narratives and memes and causing them to frankly explode in irrational, reactionary and largely unfounded fear and anger over symbolic fairness and harm. Right people are dumbfounded in how far this has gone... that nothing really makes any sense. The math does not add up. The science does not add up. All other moral considerations are not only avoided, but speak them and get fired, canceled and worse. Not only are we no longer solving any problems, we have become a factory for making everything worse.
Unsolved housing problems,uncontrolled immigration, uncontrolled crime, uncontrolled inflation, uncontrolled energy costs, racial relations, gender relations, sexulization for children, end of free speech, end of privacy rights. All of this is because the left has gained too much power and control at the very time the globalist project has taken over the media to manipulate the narrow moral filter of the left. And changes to the economy have shifted the money source so that the right is no longer able to effectively pull us back from the brink.
It seems to me that we are doomed unless more of the people wired as moderates start to recognize the programming they are being fed by their media feeds, and wake up to promote a return to a more conservative patriarchal leadership model. We see some of this happening in Italy, Sweden and GB. But then Brazil appears to be heading in the opposite direction.
But Jesus TDS is still there causing brain damage. Brett Stephens figured it out... but the never-Trumpers are mostly still stuck on stupid rage over the orange man and voting for oligarch cabal puppets like Joe Biden.
In my community, the well-off lefties are effectively blocking, through their political connections and well-funded legal challenges, a needed increase in lanes of the freeway that passes through their city. There are five lanes that shrink to three and then after the city it expands to five lanes again. The lefties are sure that it is unfair and harmful to the environment expanding those lanes. They also cannot tolerate the symbolism of adding the lanes as it just feels harmful as they are sure that the world is overheating and will melt everything. So every day traffic backs up for miles with frustrated drivers wondering why we lack the ability to solve the problem.
I see this as a great repeating metaphor of what is wrong with left power and control. Who cares about a scarcity of lanes when the world is melting! Well, all the people that must drive that freeway care. But those people don't have the power to get the lanes built.
We need to take much of the power away from these left people if we are to survive as a species. And we need to figure out how to prevent their reactionary manipulation by those owning ill intent.
Thanks for the "comment of the week" shoutout. Kind of wild to see my comment (halfheartedly) defending po-mo, relativist religion directly under a recommendation for My Best Friend's Exorcism, which I read a year ago, after which I wrote an entire essay objecting to its...po-mo, relativist approach to religion (one which, by random happenstance, includes a brief shout-out to *your* book):
(I have no idea if you've got a "no self-promotion" rule around here. Feel free to delete if that's the case. This is just a confluence of so many random things that I had to say something, haha.)
Letter series was great. From both sides. Freddie was a good conversation partner and it was interesting to see how his writing fit within the structure of the conversation. I would love to see more things like that.
That song was just gorgeous. Thank you.
So a kid gets the urge to go on an adventure and voluntarily joins the army during Vietnam, requesting to go infantry.
He goes through training and ends up in the rice fields almost before he knows what’s up. He patrols for a couple of months, gets into a couple of firefights, takes some indirect, but nothing too crazy. But soon enough his unit gets airdropped deep into Vietcong territory and is ordered to take a hill that’s crawling with black pajama wearing guerrillas.
It’s the worst day of his life. He humps his gear uphill in the steamy heat, diving face first into the brush every time the tracers get flung his way. His buddy gets gut shot and bleeds out right in front of him, screaming for his momma. His Lieutenant trips a land mine and loses his legs in a sudden rip. For the first time, this young man actually sights in on a living body mere yards away and opens fire, seeing the bullets impact and staring his victim in the eyes as he dies.
It’s a twelve hour, exhausting, exhilarating, godawful mess of a day. But they win. They take that hill and make it safe for capitalism and democracy.
As they group up on the hill, still glassy-eyed and filthy and breathing heavy from the exertion, the platoon sergeant gathers them up and tells them to prep for extraction, the choppers will be there soon to take them home.
The young man loses it, breaks down crying and screaming- he demands to know, “What was the point of all that, then? Just kill people and kill ourselves to take a random ass hill for an hour? What the fuck, sarge?”
The platoon sergeant hushes him, calms him down, says, “You and me, we’re enlisted, kid. We don’t see the bigger picture, that’s the officers’ job.”
And that phrase catches hold of him, on the flight back to base. The bigger picture. The bigger picture. The bigger picture. Others can see it, but we can’t. We took that hill and got massacred because of the bigger picture.
When his tour is done, the young man applies for OCS and gets his butter bar; he wanted in on the secret that officers knew but Joe didn’t. But he finds that life as a platoon leader is just as crazy and violent and messy and pointless as it was before- they were still zipping around blasting VC, losing men, taking hills for no reason. Being a Lieutenant brought no wisdom. He asks his CO for clarity.
The captain says, “Ah, well. You and me, we’re military men. The strategy and goals of the fighting are crafted by the politicians back home. We just execute policy.”
And so the young man, who is no longer very young, runs out his contract and goes home. There, he runs for Congress. If the politicians could see the bigger picture, he would have to be a politician.
He is a good looking fellow, speaks well, has a certain intelligence and wit, has a glowing military record. He wins the election in a landslide.
But when he gets to Congress and starts coordinating political maneuvers with his new party mates, he finds he is as confused as ever. All the politicians were running around trying to get re-elected, trying to scheme and plan. They have no idea what made some hills in Vietnam valuable and some not, why some soldiers need to get gut shot and others don’t. Frustrated, he brings his concerns to a party leader- a senator of some renown- and asks about the bigger picture.
“Well,” says the senator. “We merely craft laws. The president sets the tone of foreign affairs. Our job is to get our guy into the hot seat and follow his lead. He’s the one who truly sees the bigger picture.”
And so the old man who had once been a young infantryman sets a new goal- the presidency.
He plans it out for ten years. He schmoozes, he crafts bills, he plays politics, he learns the ins and outs of fundraising and political alliances and PR. And at last, he campaigns for the highest office in the land.
He is a veteran congressman with a great record, nobody had any beef with him, and everybody knows he could play ball. He is still intelligent and charismatic, and his military record is of course a plus. He wins the election in a landslide.
When he enters the White House for the first time, he trembles. He was there, at last. This was it. He is going to finally see the bigger picture.
That first briefing crushes his soul. His cabinet babbles on, talking about Latvian trade networks, healthcare costs, a minor crisis in Somalia. It’s all chaos out there. It is all just as crazy and pointless and bizarre and arbitrary as it had been that terrible day in Vietnam.
The President erupts mid-meeting in a desperate fury, cutting off the Secretary of the Interior as she drones on about infrastructure.
”GODDAMN IT, YOU SOULLESS BASTARDS! WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT!? THE BIGGER PICTURE! WHAT’S THE BIGGER PICTURE?”
The room falls silent, in utter shock at his outburst. The emptiness after the screaming hangs heavy.
Finally, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff raises one hesitant finger as though to ask permission to speak, and asks, “Mr. President, are you telling me that you were on that fucking hill too?”
Well the cancel-culture letters came and went. I just gotta say that was some industrial-level gaslighting that Molloy spewed out, but the smell has now mostly dissipated. The Left is truly intellectually bankrupt. (So is the Right, but at least they won't try to get me fired for Wrongthink.)
Congratulations to both participants in the six-letter series on free speech.
Parker Molloy of TPA shifted my worldview in their direction, and has earned a lot of respect from me for being unapologetically pro-modern-day-social-justice while backing up their arguments with facts - two aspects that I wish went together much more often than I see online, where I despair about the quality of a lot that's put out there on both sides.
"Extreme reddists are dumb" and "extreme blueists are dumb" neither contradict each other, nor cancel each other out. But my own worldview is that people on the liberal-leaning side of the debate should value fact-checking and respect for the truth because, if the big debates of our time were to be decided by some omnipotent deity based on some standard of objective or scientific truth, we would win on just about every count. The western standards of scientific truth and truth-finding would give my side of the debate's answer on matters such as climate change and vaccine effectiveness/risks, just to name some big ones.
I am also completely with Freddie on the "free speech has traditionally always been a demand of the Left" thing, because if we ever do get an official bureau of acceptable online speech, however well it starts out, within a few years it might end up run by the other side - and Parker has very clearly shown the dangers of that in their three posts. (This does not affect Freddie's decision to ban discussion of a certain topic on his blog, because that decision is and always will be his - if it were taken over by someone else, it would no longer be "Freddie's blog".)
I was strongly but not favorably impressed by Horrorstör, which reads like the screenplay it badly wishes to be, and so works with its pile of reheated tropes in ways that would suit a popcorn horror flick but which fall flat in prose. I didn't know Hendrix had written anything else, but perhaps I'll give this newer one a try, in hopes it outdoes what its back-cover blurb leads me to expect. (A "digital enhanced edition" with a Spotify playlist! The man seems truly desperate to break into Hollywood, and good luck to him, I suppose. It certainly seems he could do with some.)
...I'll try it after I mow, anyway. It's late in the year for that, but I only moved into this new house of mine a couple Sundays ago, and I've been so busy getting the indoor functional areas into some sort of shape that I just haven't had the time. I do today, though, and I'd better use it lest I waste what may prove to be the last opportunity a temperamental Baltimore autumn will give me.
I noticed you turned off the comments for the Kanye West piece, and I know why and respect it, but I feel someone should point this out: whether you don't listen to people because you write them off as "evil" or you don't listen to people because you write them off as "crazy," you're still not listening to people. There really is no difference in the end between what you're doing to Kanye West and what they're doing to Kanye West, except that what you're suggesting absolves him of *moral* responsibility for what you suggest is "wrong-think" where as the others just call him evil for having "wrong-think."
I listened to his interview with Tucker Carlson, not because I'm in love with Kanye West (far from it--I find him egotistical to the point of being repulsive) but because I watch Tucker Carlson. But none of what he said did I find "morally" problematic. In fact, much of what he said had it come out of someone on the "left" with TDS would have gotten an "amen" from all quarters. But because he dared to praise Trump, he's bad. This is moral relativism at its worst. As for the White Lives Matter t-shirts, I find them ridiculous and suspect they are a grift of one variety or another, but I find Black Lives Matter t-shirts and the organization ridiculous and I *know* they are a grift. I find "All Lives Matter" to be a ridiculous statement. All of these slogans are indicative of a society trying to avoid the really big issues by distracting people with slogans, which is slightly ironic given your piece on "performative" religion. It's all "performance." There's nothing taken to heart by anyone.
And how did we get here? We stopped listening. We'd rather judge people as "immoral" or "crazy" than address what they have to say head on.
To that point, I've said my piece. You all can pile on if you wish. I'm not here to fight, nor am I here to defend myself. However, if we're going to save ourselves as a country or a species, we're going to have to burst out of our bubbles. I've tried to do that by reading Freddie deBoer with an open mind. Maybe you should do that by listening to Kanye West with an open mind.
As an educated conservative with roots in red territory but living in hyper liberal lands for many decades and intently studying the left species to the point that I can award myself a PHD in actual liberal studies, I have what I think is a simple explanation for the key root source of all political conflicts today.
Jonathan Haidt hits on this in his truly academic work to understand and explain the same. In his book The Righteous Mind, Haidt explains that liberals tend to operate on a very narrow moral filter that lights up almost exclusively on reaction to indications of fairness and harm. In contrast conservatives operate with a broad moral filter... one that requires them to balance moral considerations against each other to come to a choice of right vs wrong.
I have had the opinion that left people are more emotive and less rational... more prone to react to symbolism over substance. And that right people are less that way and thus the left people see them as uncaring. But today I see that as secondary to the moral filter explanation: left people just stop at the immediate indication of unfairness or harm, and right people keep going and do the math and problem-solving within their much bigger tent of moral considerations.
My observation is that the degree of this difference in moral filter processing is genetic. You are born with these moral filter tendencies, and although you can grow self-awareness over strong reactionary bias on either side, you are stuck with them.
Now, all of this was never the problem it was today. In fact the balance of both sides has been our strength. The left, more matriarchal in wiring, brought to the table the needed focus on immediate fairness and harm. Without this input, the patriarch right would otherwise revert to a Darwinistic model that accepted the consequences of too much human failure as necessary for the human condition to remain strong and healthy. But generally, because the US was founded on conservative principles that included objectivity, pragmatism and true problem-solving, the right side had dominated the overall management and leadership of the culture. The US has been a patriarchal design for good reason. And it has been the source of tremendous progress and benefits to the world.
Where we are blowing up today is that the media as controlled by a cabal of globalists has inserted algorithm probes deep into the psyche of the left political animal and is pumping a constant stream of alarmist narratives and memes and causing them to frankly explode in irrational, reactionary and largely unfounded fear and anger over symbolic fairness and harm. Right people are dumbfounded in how far this has gone... that nothing really makes any sense. The math does not add up. The science does not add up. All other moral considerations are not only avoided, but speak them and get fired, canceled and worse. Not only are we no longer solving any problems, we have become a factory for making everything worse.
Unsolved housing problems,uncontrolled immigration, uncontrolled crime, uncontrolled inflation, uncontrolled energy costs, racial relations, gender relations, sexulization for children, end of free speech, end of privacy rights. All of this is because the left has gained too much power and control at the very time the globalist project has taken over the media to manipulate the narrow moral filter of the left. And changes to the economy have shifted the money source so that the right is no longer able to effectively pull us back from the brink.
It seems to me that we are doomed unless more of the people wired as moderates start to recognize the programming they are being fed by their media feeds, and wake up to promote a return to a more conservative patriarchal leadership model. We see some of this happening in Italy, Sweden and GB. But then Brazil appears to be heading in the opposite direction.
But Jesus TDS is still there causing brain damage. Brett Stephens figured it out... but the never-Trumpers are mostly still stuck on stupid rage over the orange man and voting for oligarch cabal puppets like Joe Biden.
In my community, the well-off lefties are effectively blocking, through their political connections and well-funded legal challenges, a needed increase in lanes of the freeway that passes through their city. There are five lanes that shrink to three and then after the city it expands to five lanes again. The lefties are sure that it is unfair and harmful to the environment expanding those lanes. They also cannot tolerate the symbolism of adding the lanes as it just feels harmful as they are sure that the world is overheating and will melt everything. So every day traffic backs up for miles with frustrated drivers wondering why we lack the ability to solve the problem.
I see this as a great repeating metaphor of what is wrong with left power and control. Who cares about a scarcity of lanes when the world is melting! Well, all the people that must drive that freeway care. But those people don't have the power to get the lanes built.
We need to take much of the power away from these left people if we are to survive as a species. And we need to figure out how to prevent their reactionary manipulation by those owning ill intent.
Thanks for the "comment of the week" shoutout. Kind of wild to see my comment (halfheartedly) defending po-mo, relativist religion directly under a recommendation for My Best Friend's Exorcism, which I read a year ago, after which I wrote an entire essay objecting to its...po-mo, relativist approach to religion (one which, by random happenstance, includes a brief shout-out to *your* book):
https://luketharrington.substack.com/p/i-just-read-my-best-friends-exorcism
(I have no idea if you've got a "no self-promotion" rule around here. Feel free to delete if that's the case. This is just a confluence of so many random things that I had to say something, haha.)
BACKDOOR COVER BABY
Letter series was great. From both sides. Freddie was a good conversation partner and it was interesting to see how his writing fit within the structure of the conversation. I would love to see more things like that.
Re: featured comment -
That's what shrooms are for. They absolutely fill the god-shaped hole, and you don't have to pretend to be religiously affiliated at all.