The price of tomatoes

The Gates of Vienna covers efforts by Finnish authorities to make all bloggers liable for statements on their sites, even those made by commenters, which may contain "racist" speech. There have been a considerable number of efforts to suppress speech deemed politically incorrect. David Broder discovered that Liberal credentials do not confer a leave to step beyond the Party Line. Nicolas Sarkozy was declared ipso facto illegitimate. The Flying Imams are ready to sue anyone who might even look at Islam the wrong way -- as the recently disciplined students at Tufts University must now realize. Larry Summers and Paul Wolfowitz learned to their cost the the social penalty of being on the "outs". Martin Solomon has described how moderate Muslims may be persecuted under the banner of tolerance.

"Tolerance" has now come to mean its exact opposite, in the long tradition of such such phrases as "peace loving communist countries", "the worker's paradise", "Iraqi freedom-fighterss" and "Uncle Joe". But then "free speech" was never free. Nothing worthwhile ever was.