Free speech??

I've written on this before, and I just updated several posts with the tag Free speech to make them easier to find.  And after Charlottesville, and the mess in Berkeley on Sunday August 27, maybe it's time to restate my views.

If Nazis don't have freedom of speech, I don't have freedom of speech.

Full disclosure:  I don't like Nazis.  I'm a history buff; I've read numerous books on World War II, including twice through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  I have a very clear view of who the Nazis were and what they did to people they considered "inferior" - which included everyone except white men of "Aryan" (which meant German) descent.  They considered women inferior beings suited only to produce more Aryan male babies.  I shouldn't even have to mention what they did to Jews - and yes, the holocaust actually happened.  There may even be a few American World War II vets still alive who remember liberating those concentration camps.

I've seen no evidence that the people who call themselves Nazis today, in 2017, are any better than the ones in Germany in the '30s and '40s.  They claim to want a "whites only" nation.  They show up armed at public rallies and beat up people who disagree with them.  One of them used a car to kill an unarmed woman in Charlottesville, and injured 19 more unarmed people.

We're Losing in Afghanistan

I just heard yet another newscast quoting Donald Trump as complaining, "We're losing in Afghanistan."  This impelled me to draft a post about why we are, of course, losing in Afghanistan.  When I searched my blog, I realized I wrote that post in January 2015, and as I reread it, I see it makes my points pretty well. 

Briefly, a formal army cannot defeat a guerrilla insurgency fighting on its own ground, with any kind of support from the local population, so of course we're losing in Afghanistan.

For the full argument, with historical detail, I refer you to this post:

Losing the Wars