The claims about extreme complexity of the Late Roman/Byzantine state came into the popular imagination by Enlightenment and other Western thinkers who were deeply biased against the late Romans due to a long history of cultural conflict. The OP is completely correct here, the reddit comment is an extremely incomplete story. It notes that the Roman state was more complex than other Medieval states (correct), but to say that it was "too" complex is a culturally based judgment, not a fact. The origin of the negative cultural judgment about that complexity waen't coming from the Romans, they were coming from the Franks, Venetians, and later Western Europeans who in large part were repeating the old prejudices going back to the schism, but also justifying their own conquest and abuses of of the Roman people.
Please look at the publication date before accusing them of lying. The article I linked was published April 3, 2024. VDARE was charged in September 2025 (and suspended work due to the ruinous financial cost of the prosecution in July 2024). So which facts is my article lying about? Or are you simply presuming that the accusation must be true, despite no verdict yet?
Your article mischaracterizes the facts in a way that I sincerely believe could only have been a result of a dishonest party. You might claim that it's the VDARE fraudsters who lied and the publication didn't apply any diligence into actually reading the charges filed or investigating, and simply credulously repeated a story that was contradicted by the facts at the time of their writing. However you want to frame it, there's a kernel of deceit.
> the publication didn't apply any diligence into actually reading the charges filed or investigating
When that article was published, there were no charges filed. It was more than a year later that they were charged. And I'll ask again: which facts were false or mischaracterized? Can you be specific?
The essence of the article I linked was that:
1) Letitia's investigation was drawn out and financially ruinous.
2) She demanded all of their email records, which would have doxxed their writers.
3) The Brimelows are being investigated for using funds donated to their charity for personal expenses, which they deny.
The CNN article, as far as I could tell, contradicts none of these points. But perhaps I missed something?
Twice I've asked you which facts the article is lying about, and twice you've refused to answer, instead merely rephrasing your accusation ("mischaracterizes the facts").
Perhaps I am incapable of comprehending truth, but for the sake of others reading this, can you tell them what precisely the lies were?
Give that the technology is virtually always unstoppable and the behavior policing is on the rise in places such as UK, it seems that people might be wrong as to which of those two is actionable.
That's an interesting thing, but all the same, Plato's myths aren't history in any sense, and mistaking them for that is not an error of degree but of type.
Plato was neither a historian nor an archeologist, he had no way to know anything about the remote past. He made up and repeated myths, which you can impute whatever meanings you like onto, but you should try not to mistake them for a history even if they accidentally fit cherry-picked examples.
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