Free speech:

A reader, responding to my post criticizing the Guardian column writes:

[F]or a Professor of Free Speech, you don’t seem very enamoured with the concept of free speech.

Actually, as a professor of free speech, I rather like exercising my own free speech. Part of my free speech rights is the right to criticize others. I think the Guardian should have the legal right to print disgusting statements like the one it printed, or for that matter disgusting Nazism, Stalinism, racism, or whatever else. And then the rest of us should condemn it for what it’s doing.

Not everything that may be printed should be printed. That Hustler has the right to publish vile diatribes against Jerry Falwell doesn’t mean it’s good for the press to stoop to that level. Nor is there anything wrong with the public’s criticizing such speech. Public criticism is not the equivalent of government censorship — it’s the proper alternative to government censorship.

So I’m being quite consistent. My correspondent, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be consistent. He seems to be implicitly saying that free speech demands that I not criticize the Guardian for what it publishes, or suggest that the Guardian shouldn’t publish it. And yet he’s criticizing me for what I publish, and is implicitly suggesting that I not publish it (since presumably I ought not be publishing what he sees as anti-free-speech and misguided criticisms).