[Eaker]

One thing I do fear is the tyranny of the left but I’m also afraid of a tyranny from something akin to an American version of a Taliban.

So conservative FReepers are the Taliban?

I don't think you know what the word "Taliban" really means.

[re_nortex]

So conservative FReepers are the Taliban?

I don't think you know what the word "Taliban" really means.

Very well said and thanks for adding a much-needed note of exceptionally clear thinking and sanity on this matter.

[Nowhere Man]

So conservative FReepers are the Taliban?

No, but things could snowball into that if it gets out of control and the wrong people get in. It is like out of the old Robert A. Heinlein novel (I'm a huge science fiction as well as "noir" fan), "Revolt in 2100" (1953) where as a reaction to what the left is doing, the backlash is so great that after the revolt, you end up with that Heinlein called "The American Ayatolla." It takes place before "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961) where America was more of a libertarian place.

[Tublecane]

“Taliban” means religious in the same way all religious people are religious, only a little more./s

Seriously, though, I tire easily of political religiosity, especially among our side with some born agains’ imperialist foreign policy. But the idea that there could be an American Taliban. Have you seen tv, for instance, ever turned on the radio or looked out a window, even? Not that there couldn’t be a reaction. But I find it slightly less likely than constitutional government falling to a martian invasion.

That term I threw out, reaction, may be a bit misleading. For should there be a theocratic revolution it’ll almost certainly be leftist, just like the Ayatollian revolution. The other kind is highly unlikely. If that’s confusing, it’s because leftists control our historical imagination to a startling degree, and people have forgotten the difference. See the great little book “The Lost Literature of Socialism.”