User:Frickiewolf

Greetings and salutations. I'm Wolfgang Frick, known as frickiewolf or wolf in my talk page signatures. I'm a Wikipedian born and raised in the Greater St. Louis area. I was born in 2001, and have been a member of Wikipedia since 2014.

I graduated from Kirkwood High School in Kirkwood, Missouri in 2020, and am currently studying political science and philosophy at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in political science with a minor in philosophy in 2024, I hope to go on to study law and work at a think tank in Washington, D.C., or to become a legal analyst or a pundit. Currently I do freelance political work, having run my first successful political campaign in June 2020 to elect my grandfather, Harold Frick, to the Board of Alderman for Pacific, Missouri.

From my sophomore to my senior year, I served on the staff of The Kirkwood Call, Kirkwood High School's student-run scholastic news-magazine and online publication. I was a web writer my first year on staff, and later served as design editor for my junior and senior years. I wrote a number of articles discussing my ruminations on current events, and oversaw the design and production of over 20 monthly magazines and two website redesigns.

I am what is generally described as a political junkie and a nerd, with a passion for technology and computers and for being litigious and studious when it comes to my study of American politics. I also love music (consumption, not as much production) of many genres, including electronic, alternative rock, experimental, jazz, dance, house and downtempo. I am also disciplined in many facets of new media, including web design, some front-end web development, graphic design, photography and video production.

Politics
I consider myself a constitutional conservative, in the words of the late columnist Charles Krauthammer in a posthumously released National Review column. Krauthammer describes this conservatism as a reaction to liberal overreach of federal power in the 20th century, and a belief that government exists solely to protect the fundamental Enlightenment values of individual liberty and freedom of association. In other words, I'm decidedly center-right, but I believe strongly in the importance of the Constitution and the duty we have as a country to protect the values it and its authors espouse.

Even though I have deeply enshrined political perspectives, I pledge to be non-partisan in my Wikipedia edits; I will only strive to make it a more ethical and bias-free platform, because at present I do not believe Wikipedia is free of bias, or that the majority of its editors commit changes free of bias. To boot, my opinion on that front is shared by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who wrote a blog post in May 2020 stating as much.

Key viewpoints
For the three people who will end up reading this user page, I have listed my key policy prescriptions.

In favor

 * Unabridged First Amendment rights to freedom of expression, excepting immediately violent speech or direct threats of serious harm
 * The right of all people to keep and bear arms, pursuant to the Second Amendment to the Constitution
 * Individuals should be able to take up those arms in self-defense
 * Legal immigration, on a broad scale with little to no intervention by the government (more Americans makes a better America!)
 * Assimilation of those people into Western culture
 * Efforts to increase legal immigration would help to further curb illegal immigration, to which I am ardently opposed
 * Laissez-faire capitalism, with very minimal government intervention and freedom to allow competition to flourish
 * Total equality under law for members of the LGBT community, notably codified in law
 * Overturning Obergefell v. Hodges but only provided Congress will legalize marriage equality on a federal level (I am not a fan of legislating through the judiciary)
 * Originalism in the judiciary and in interpretations of the Constitution

Opposed to

 * Socialism, communism and other forms and distillations of Marxist–Leninist economic theory
 * Fascism, totalitarianism, and other forms of government that deprive individuals of their fundamental liberties and punish dissenters
 * Keynesian economics (nicknamed "Obamanomics" after the disastrous recovery from the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession)
 * Government intervention in free trade and the free market
 * The United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so long as the United States continues to bear an undue amount of the cost involved in operating those organizations
 * Woke culture, and its implications on society
 * Cancel culture, whereby someone is ostracized from culture for opining on a social issue the wrong way
 * The erosion of higher education by depriving students of learning from multiple points of view and instead indoctrinating them with one worldview
 * Domestic terror, riots and looting committed against people and organizations labeled as public enemies by the woke

Technology
Since I was a small child, I have taken a keen interest in technology and computers. I received my first computer, a 21-inch iMac, when I was 10 years old. Since then, I have continued to develop expertise in that field, teaching myself graphic design, video editing and photography.

I've slowly shifted from a Mac person to a PC person after I discovered I could pay significantly less for much better hardware I could assemble myself, and built my first PC in June 2020. It's my current gaming and general use desktop PC. The specs are as follows, for those inclined:


 * Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (overclocked to 4 GHz from stock 3.6 GHz)
 * Cooler: NZXT Kraken Z63 all-in-one water cooler
 * Memory: 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4 CL-16 RAM, clocked at 3200 GHz
 * Motherboard: MSI B550 MPG Gaming Carbon (ATX)
 * Graphics: Gigabyte Windforce OC AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (8 GB GDDR6 memory)
 * Power Supply: EVGA 650W 80 Plus Gold Certified PSU
 * Case: NZXT H510 mid-tower
 * Boot Drive: Inland 256 GB M.2 NVMe SSD
 * Storage: Samsung 2 TB 860 EVO SSD
 * Operating System: Windows 10 Pro

For portable power, my daily driver is a 16-inch MacBook Pro from 2019. It contains a 2.3 GHz 8-core Intel Core i9-9980H processor, 16 GB of DDR4 memory, an AMD Radeon RX 5500M discrete graphics chip and a 1 TB NVMe SSD, and is running macOS Big Sur as well as Windows 10. I use this, and my third-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro for school and portable work.

My daily driver phone is an iPhone X. I've had it for nearly three years and it's still going strong, but I'm considering switching to a OnePlus 8 Pro for my next phone.

Roads
I'm somewhat of a roadgeek, having been interested in roads and highways from a young age. I'm a member over at the AARoads forum, where I contribute redesigns of sign assemblies commonly found on interstates and other freeways. A large number of my edits thus far on Wikipedia have been to pages for various highways in and around my home in St. Louis County, Missouri.