That is more than simply a fair question; it's part of what I'm getting after, both on the original track and in accounting for a deviation.
In order to live in a community of any kind, individuals must accept limitations on their freedom and impose limitations on the freedom of all the other individuals in that community. This includes practice, speech, demeanor, interactions and manners. The limits may be severe and strictly enforced or casual and voluntary, depending on consensus.
The pact is not of mutual suicide but modus vivendi. Most functional organisms are capable of making such a deal work for them. Social organisms that cannot or will not do so are doomed to extinction.
I don't think I disagree with that, except you're reassigning life and death in the difference between the suicide pact and
modus vivendi. More specifically, the latter works well enough as such, but attends people.
With free speech, as a general proposition we already know what one of the limitations is; the thing about
fraud, though, is that it's not really
m.v. for people to carry freely through their days without defrauding each other. The juristic notion of suicide pact describes the wreckage of the system; it is possible to destroy the system, as such, by destroying the people, but for the most part the question that has been with us since Jefferson, at least, involves the loss of the Constitution, not the people. Indeed, the most famous questions of suicide pact and government function involve dissent itself°.
In living practice, we might also consider which parties of
m.v. are partaking under some manner of duress. This reflects questions of function: What does an argument do, if realized?
†
Regardless of arguments about political independence, sometimes a question put before us is dualistic. What does a third alternative do?
There is an interesting apparent coincidence, though statistical noise in history is a difficult quantification, between dualistic political propositions and third alternatives that read like softer versions of the dualism. We keep doing it, over and over again, in American society. And the thing is, these third alternatives propose to protect and perpetuate harm.
It is one thing to discuss abstraction. Once questions become specific, though, watch people scatter and maneuver. And of those who pretend to be somehow above, outside, or even better than, the question, observe how many of their positions would result in the perpetuation of a proposed dualism.
†
Looking back to the Trump-Biden example, if we take away the names and just look at what is stake, there is a massive, smeared-up range where everything blurs and bleeds into everything else. Viewing customs and habits of the bourgeoisie, we denounce and find despicable. Considering similar customs among the proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie, it's not so clear.
What we do know is akin to art, which might be hard to define but we know what it ain't, or some such. Maybe a small manufacturer has a great customer, a company who in turn adores the manufacturer for reliability, adaptability, and all those other things that make business work that much better. Cul-de-sac homeowners who have just enough wealth to tell their kids there's no college money because everything is tied up in assets. No, really, at this point, we're still squarely within the proverbial American Dream, and part of how people work three jobs while going to school and raising a kid because God Bless America.
And after that kid has worked to the bone and piled up massive debt to get a college degree, if the buying company happens to give that one a job because of friendship and professional relations with the parent, go ahead and make the argument that such outcomes are improper, and relearn what Marx screwed up in '48 by expecting the petit-bourgeois would break toward the proletariat.
To the other, getting a job on a corporate board overseas because someone views it as political access is clearly the kind of thing people just don't trust, and for good reason. And while they complain about political family finding benefit, we've never really tried to force the government to fix the problem, and part of the reason is that figuring out exactly what we need to do is really, really complicated, and some part of traditional American cynicism is that the elite will still find a way around the rules.
This is, also, in turn, part of why people have endured and barely tolerated untoward endeavors involving family of presidents, and thus why public process hasn't juristically crucified Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. And, certes, the psychoanalytic meaning of that history, as such, is its own neurotic mess, but the Trump gambit against Biden not only stakes that entire blurred range, generally°°, but also his own daughter and son-in-law, who in turn have greater exposure than Hunter Biden.
†
At some point, it's true, we must start accounting for theses of exception or exemption; the most obvious answer to endangering oneself and one's family in order to harm a political opponent this way is that one does not perceive the danger. Again, something about apparent coincidence between dualistic political propositions and third alternatives that advance the dualistic proposition.
This ought to be easy enough to illustrate:
• Get Biden → (How?) → Kid got benefit → (Okay: [Prosecute Bidens]) → (Consistency of standards: [Prosecute Ivanka/Jared]) → No, that's not supposed to happen! → (Why not?)
A passing moment, some years ago, saw a heap of nasty stupidity going on in a statewide zero-tolerance firearms policy according to blatant disparate impact, and there is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to cutting breaks for the white kid who tried to jack a school for a lark, but someone actually came out and said, explicitly, the rule was intended for other kids, not theirs. We know this attitude exists among the privileged.
The only way this scheme against Hunter Biden doesn't include Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump within the boundaries of its underlying legal and ethical assertions is if they are exempted for some exceptional reason, like Trump's unitary-executive assertion of all-purpose immunity, even from investigation, and even regarding things ostensibly having nothing to do with his presidency.
†
It is easy to snag up on the names and faces, but the underlying functional reality remains: Barring exceptional cause for exemption, one is subject to the harm they seek to fulfill; that is, the harmful implication of the particular political argument offered includes the proponent within its rubric:
If A
and B,
then C. The easiest way to avoid that is to strike B.
†
Vis à vis free speech:
Proponent: What you say offends religious belief, and therefore must be censored.
Response: Censorship is not allowed.
Third alternative: I think both sides are being too rigid. [Solution: Some censorship should be allowed per Proponent's need.]
Response: Well, the Proponent offends my religious beliefs, and therefore must, according to their own rules, be similarly censored.
Proponent: That's not how it works. Stop oppressing us so unfairly.
Third alternative: You see, both sides are to blame. [Solution: More censorship per Proponent's need.]
†
Does that sound somehow strange?
Shall we put some labels back into it? In my lifetime, ask the musicians and authors censored for the sake of Christianist delicate sensibilities. We could ask atheists. There is, after all, a counterargument that refusing religious supremacism is itself religious supremacism. The oppression of freedoms like mandatory prayer in schools or requiring teachers to pretend Creationism is science reminds who the real victims are, here, right?
Christian: You can't oppress my equally protected religious freedom by saying I can't force you to pray!
Atheist: Freedom of speech? Freedom of religion?
Third alternative: I think both sides are being too rigid. Christian needs to allow respectful dissent when requiring public demonstrations of piety. Atheist can respectfully dissent by simply remaining silent.
On the original track, there is the basic contradiction of one censorship as a fundamental function of free speech; the nonreciprocal expectation only highlights the dysfunction.
Additionally, there is a seemingly predictable tendency in certain pretenses of independence to take sides despite the pretense.
Why should it? Because somebody said so.
____________________
Notes:
° Note aside: An episode related to the Civil War is iconic in its own way for its own reasons, and it can actually be difficult to explain the connections to something we can witness, today, because nothing so tragic should ever be so funny.
°° Which, in turn, might seem like a difficult risk; admittedly, that the whole tax reform debacle hasn't chased away Trump's electoral base is an uncertain indicator, and thus probably unreliable. Comparatively, perhaps we might suggest that simplicity, or even questions of criminality and stupidity, can be defined according to the beholder. More directly, sometimes our assessments are wrong because the simplest, most direct, or otherwise is our own definition, while the behavior we try to assess really is that much differently founded. Nonetheless, Trump voters are seemingly willing to hurt themselves in order to achieve certain outcomes that don't necessarily make sense to the rest of us.
