What about the Taliban?

My friend Culturist John has some ideas about the Taliban.
The problem with his stance is that he leaves himself open to accusations not only of discrimination but of racial discrimination.

This uncontrollable spread of the Taliban influence in Afghanistan should be a lesson to us.

You cannot control the spread of an ideology with guns no matter how big or sophisticated your weapons might be. In the guns vs ideology battle, the ideology will always win.

We should take the lesson of Vietnam as an example. A bowl of rice and an ideology were enough to sustain the forces Viet Cong for 30 years. Even the world's most powerful and wealthy nation could not make headway against the ideology.

The war on ideas has a terrible history and none serves as a better example than the Catholic Church's Inquisition. Nobody wants to go down that path.

But hold on a moment.

Let's consider the idea of Free Speech.
We pride our culture on the fact that we have a certain degree of freedom of speech. It is of course only to a degree because we cannot say anything offensive or venture into the area of hate speech by selectively identifying specific groups.

So we are in fact caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

We rightly fear the ideologies that threaten our civilization but would like to defend the right of people to expound those and other offensive ideas.

What can we do?