Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

Leon Wieseltier writes a blistering response to the Tom Paulin-Harvard-invitation-disinvitation issue in the New Republic. Worth reading, even by those uninterested in the particulars of the case, for the sake of this concise statement of what true freedom of speech must mean:

"If hate speech should not be restricted, then it should not be restricted even when it is me that it hates. The American way must be to take offense so as to give offense, to suck it up and then go after the substance of it, so that none of the mistake and the insult is left morally or intellectually standing."

And not just the American way; this must be the modus operandi of every liberal democracy worth the name.