I'd argue this is too expansive of a view. It's a debate specifically coming out of the English Civil War, and specifically focusing on the tension between Parliament and the Monarchy. If you read Clarendon it becomes extremely obvious. Hobbes (like Clarendon) took the royalist view defending the king, and Locke set for an argument for parliament.
Some of it doesn't translate super well into modern times. For example, Locke barely touches upon judiciary. The modern notion of separation of powers came (I believe) from Montesquieu.
I will say that Hobbes gives a far more comprehensive argument than Locke does. And some of Locke's details, including his anthropology of the origin of commonwealths, is demonstrably false.
There were a few news outlets (I think maybe the Washington Post?) that got copies of recordings of these insane lectures when Peter Thiel did them in San Francisco. I think it would be in the public interest for them to release the lectures in full.
Maybe people should put some pressure on these outlets to do so.
There are two stories here. One is the alleged wrongdoing. The second is the fact that the Washington Post has a name of a former DOGE employee. I'm far more interested in the second story than the first.
Yes, it feels like another round of the same old tired "force everyone to use legal names online to save the children" that has been pushed continuously since the Internet driver's license of the 90s.
It will not save any children. It will destroy privacy, destroy free speech, and give lots of money to whatever corporation wins the bid for supplying the tech.
And of course, when that corporation gets hacked and all the personally identifiable information is put on the dark web, nobody will be held accountable.
Why not produce a second kind of phone that is for kids. Maybe have it linked to their parents accounts on a hardware level. The kidphone is physically restricted somehow to only installing certain apps, so that parents can ensure they are safe.
This approach would put the power back into hands of parents, keep the kids safe, and also prevent all this intrusive age verification stuff from happening.
Also it is a lot easier to police. You could physically look at the phone the child is using to make sure it is a kidphone. If not, then they are committing a crime, similar to a child smoking a cigarette.
I was not moving goalposts. I was saying that the way we interpret the words has changed over time, and therefore we are taking words that meant one thing in 1957 and reinterpreting them to fit assumptions for today. Thus the semantic drift creates a shift.
To address the other point, I think we're missing a question of scope. Is the EU a legitimate governing body for negotiating trade deals and employment regulations between countries? Absolutely. I question however whether in recent years EU has begun to either scope-drift or expand their scope beyond what might be considered reasonable.
I think this is a natural tendency within human nature, especially when a governing body is given some power. Over time new opportunities arise which allow the body to gain more power, and then they reinterpret founding documents to include some of the new powers they want. I think it is pretty clear this is happening with the EU. Look at the rise of nationalist parties in Germany and France, etc.
That treaty was established just over a decade after Hitler surrendered, when there were two Germanys, an Iron curtain across Europe, and a lot of other things which changed significantly after the Wall fell. Surely you would agree that those words meant something quite different then than they do now?
I don't think my framing was sensationalist at all. Chat Control is using the threat of child porn to make people forget the reasons why the ECHR cares so deeply about privacy. I'm not sure why Denmark is pushing it so hard, but governments have long feared and hated encryption.
Honest question. The EU was created as an economic and trade institution. How has it morphed into a wierd political institution, which NATO was already supposed to be?
The root question: how did an organization that ushered in things like the Euro become a body that decides whether Europeans are allowed to have personal privacy?
What's funny about this article is that it seems to focus on the Republic without addressing any of his other dialogues. What about the aporetic dialogs where there are no clear answers? What about his Parmenides where he rips to shreds his own golden theory of forms?
To say that he got "everything" wrong, there's an assertion that we now have some "correct" answer which supercedes Plato. Can we now say with confidence what defines justice, which in many ways was the point of the Republic? What about defining love, the topic of the Symposium?
Rather than taking an arrogant modernist high horse and saying Plato was wrong about everything, it might behoove to highlight some of the questions Plato raised, and see how well we can answer them today.