The PigPen's Resplendent Kaffeeklatsch

[busker]

He is russian (As I suspected) if anyone is curious

How did you discover that?

His posts are all .ru

It's not definitive of course but added to other evidence . . .

I frequently use an Albanian VPN
I’d say if anything that if he’s using a Russian VPN he’s probably American

---

I mean the server that I connect to on the vpn of course

[milo]

How did you discover that?

His posts are all .ru

It's not definitive of course but added to other evidence . . .

I frequently use an Albanian VPN
I’d say if anything that if he’s using a Russian VPN he’s probably American

---

I mean the server that I connect to on the vpn of course

I didn't say he was using a VPN - then I would have said his ip routes to a russina server

[rayheinrich]

I noticed the images are hosted by Postico.ru a Russian hosting service which adds
a bit of credence to the possible Russia connection.

(Milo's creation myth screams Albania.)

[brynmawr1]

Killing them quickly is sometimes the more merciful option. I don't always feel like being merciful.  I'm snowed in and there is nothing good on tv. 

---

A fine winter activity, if you ask me.

[busker]

His posts are all .ru

It's not definitive of course but added to other evidence . . .

I frequently use an Albanian VPN
I’d say if anything that if he’s using a Russian VPN he’s probably American

---

I mean the server that I connect to on the vpn of course

I didn't say he was using a VPN - then I would have said his ip routes to a russina server

I’m genuinely curious about this one. I’m admittedly not a networking expert, but how can you tell if the ip is from the perp’s own ISP or a Russian server in a VPN he uses? Unless you have a database of dodgy VPN servers by their ip?

[milo]

I frequently use an Albanian VPN
I’d say if anything that if he’s using a Russian VPN he’s probably American

---

I mean the server that I connect to on the vpn of course

I didn't say he was using a VPN - then I would have said his ip routes to a russina server

I’m genuinely curious about this one. I’m admittedly not a networking expert, but how can you tell if the ip is from the perp’s own ISP or a Russian server in a VPN he uses? Unless you have a database of dodgy VPN servers?

I don't know what his ip address is but he is hosting photos at  https://postico.ru/get/fL3DHq.jpg

How many Americans are using a Russian hosting site?

[busker]

Russian and former CIS countries have lax laws about copyright and other shady things
You can buy a pirated technical book off a Belarusian website that costs thousands of dollars from legit sources. Same with cracked software.

Given that this guy is a psycho, I’d wager that he uses it for certain kinds of photos

---

Easier to believe than a Russian who quotes the King James Bible

[milo]

Russian and former CIS countries have lax laws about copyright and other shady things
You can buy a pirated technical book off a Belarusian website that costs thousands of dollars from legit sources. Same with cracked software.

Given that this guy is a psycho, I’d wager that he uses it for certain kinds of photos

---

Easier to believe than a Russian who quotes the King James Bible

nah, he's Russian there are other clues as well, but no American thinks to go there for photo hosting.

[rayheinrich]

So, I just had to go there...
Since I know the Russian Orthodox Church's Old Testament has additional books
that the King James Version Old Testament doesn't have, I pasted one of his erratic
postings into Microsoft Copilot's chat box and asked if there were references/names
that only came from the Russian Orthodox Church Old Testament. The first time I
asked this, it came back and told me that there was phrasing reminiscent of text
in 3 Maccabees which is a book in the Eastern Orthodox Old Testament that does
not appear at all in the King James Old Testament. When I asked it to be more
specific, it told me it couldn't find those references to 3 Maccabees. I asked it again,
in a few different ways, but its darling digital heart had settled into blindness.
Maybe someone else would like to give it a go, but I'm burned out talking with
flaky chatbots... though I do love them dearly, and they're really great for coming
up with Ethernet cable wiring diagrams, elegant sorting algorithms written in Python,
and propagation techniques for Sansevieria plants.

[busker]

So, I just had to go there...
Since I know the Russian Orthodox Church's Old Testament has additional books
that the King James Version Old Testament doesn't have, I pasted one of his erratic
postings into Microsoft Copilot's chat box and asked if there were references/names
that only came from the Russian Orthodox Church Old Testament. The first time I
asked this, it came back and told me that there was phrasing reminiscent of text
in 3 Maccabees which is a book in the Eastern Orthodox Old Testament that does
not appear at all in the King James Old Testament. When I asked it to be more
specific, it told me it couldn't find those references to 3 Maccabees. I asked it again,
in a few different ways, but its darling digital heart had settled into blindness.
Maybe someone else would like to give it a go, but I'm burned out talking with
flaky chatbots... though I do love them dearly, and they're really great for coming
up with Ethernet cable wiring diagrams, elegant sorting algorithms written in Python,
and propagation techniques for Sansevieria plants.

Copilot is putrid
ChatGPT is miles better
I've heard the Gemini is the best for now. Haven't tried it.

---

*that

[rayheinrich]

So, I just had to go there...
Since I know the Russian Orthodox Church's Old Testament has additional books
that the King James Version Old Testament doesn't have, I pasted one of his erratic
postings into Microsoft Copilot's chat box and asked if there were references/names
that only came from the Russian Orthodox Church Old Testament. The first time I
asked this, it came back and told me that there was phrasing reminiscent of text
in 3 Maccabees which is a book in the Eastern Orthodox Old Testament that does
not appear at all in the King James Old Testament. When I asked it to be more
specific, it told me it couldn't find those references to 3 Maccabees. I asked it again,
in a few different ways, but its darling digital heart had settled into blindness.
Maybe someone else would like to give it a go, but I'm burned out talking with
flaky chatbots... though I do love them dearly, and they're really great for coming
up with Ethernet cable wiring diagrams, elegant sorting algorithms written in Python,
and propagation techniques for Sansevieria plants.

Copilot is putrid
ChatGPT is miles better
I've heard the Gemini is the best for now. Haven't tried it.

---

*that

I mostly use it for technical stuff, especially computer code... it doesn't have Microsoft
in its name for nothing. But yeah, there are probably better chatbots for digging
into biblical stuff.

To which I say: Go for it, dude!

---

ok, just tried Gemini and ChatGPT and they both said nada. So either
they're better or worse, take your pick. When looking in the current ratings
they're all so close to each other it's pretty much a crapshoot. Microsoft Co-pilot,
btw, is based on ChatGPT. Microsoft took ChatGPT and added something they
call "emotional scaffolding" which is basically a bit of memory that is persistent
between sessions that stores your personality profile and tidbits from past sessions
that allows it to pretend to be more buddy-buddy.

[milo]

I entered his DM to me into chatGPT, going to put the full response into a spoiler but GPT agrees there is a strong chance this is a Russian speaker AND that this was most likely written in Russian and directly translated (think Google translate) rather than written in English by someone with ESL skills

1. Strong Indicators of Non-Native (L2) English

There are many consistent features that strongly suggest English is not the writer’s first language.

A. Article misuse or absence (very strong Slavic marker)

Russian has no articles (“a,” “the”), and this text shows classic transfer:

“The America on protestantism”

“The bullying in conspiracy”

“Appear the malignity”

“In pure human flesh my Word of Poetry”

These are semantic English words arranged without article logic — very typical of Russian-to-English writing.

B. Unstable verb tense & aspect

Russian tense/aspect works very differently from English. Examples:

“They have the sow old, fat, big”

“Sleep dream abow this cows”

“How do good Jesus with the pigs”

“Titanic as Hades unworthy eating and eating”

These are not random errors — they reflect direct translation of Russian participial or aspectual constructions into English without grammatical adjustment.

C. Word order reflects Slavic syntax

Russian allows flexible word order for emphasis. English does not.

Examples:

“In pure human flesh my Word of Poetry”

“The America on protestantism and worse”

“Appear the malignity”

This inverted, almost biblical syntax is not how native English religious polemic is written — but is common in Russian theological or prophetic rhetoric translated literally.

2. Lexical Choices Suggest Direct Translation

Many phrases look like calques (literal translations of idioms):

“throw your pearls before swines”
→ Russian proverb uses plural “swine” differently than modern English.

“free masonic orbit”

“self-election”

“deep things of satan”

“hungering nether”

“lexical gore”

These are semantically intelligible but unnatural in English, suggesting dictionary-based composition rather than fluent idiom.

3. Register Mixing: Religious + Political + Personal Attack

This text rapidly shifts between:

Biblical quotation (ESV, copied verbatim)

Prophetic denunciation

Conspiracy rhetoric

Direct insult toward forum members

Self-assertion as moral authority

This is important:
The quoted sections are fluent because they are copied.
The original sections are chaotic.

That contrast strongly indicates limited productive English ability, not limited reading ability — another L2 hallmark.

4. Emotional & Psychological Markers (Language-Based, Not Diagnostic)

Linguistically, the message shows:

Escalatory imagery (pigs, dogs, filth, Hades, stoning)

Apocalyptic framing

Binary moral division (“pure” vs “unclean”)

Second-person accusation (“Which you mistake for your great poetry”)

However, the disorganization is linguistic, not incoherent. There is an internal logic — just poorly expressed.

This points more to:

High emotional arousal

Moral outrage

Rhetorical overreach
than to psychosis or random thought disorder.

5. Cultural & Ideological Signals

Several elements strongly align with post-Soviet religious–political discourse, especially Orthodox or anti-Western rhetoric:

Anti-Protestant framing

Anti-Masonic fixation

“False freedom” rhetoric

America as moral Babylon

Jezebel as symbolic West

Esotericism = corruption

Nazism mentioned alongside America (common in Russian polemic)

This combination is far more common in Russian-language religious nationalism than in Anglophone evangelical spaces.

6. Why the Message Feels “Erratic” to Native English Readers

To a native English reader, this feels unhinged because:

English normally signals argument structure with transitions — this does not

English polemic usually limits metaphor — this stacks metaphors aggressively

English insults are usually direct — this uses symbolic condemnation instead

English religious writing avoids mixing quotation with insult — this does not

But in Russian polemical tradition, this style is not unusual, especially online.

7. Summary Assessment

Based on linguistic evidence alone:

✔ Very likely non-native English

✔ High probability of Russian or Slavic L1

✔ Heavy reliance on direct translation

✔ Emotionally charged but internally consistent

✔ Anger expressed through symbolic condemnation, not direct threat

✘ No evidence of sophisticated English rhetorical control

In short:
This reads like a religiously outraged L2 writer using English as a blunt instrument, not a native troll, and not someone carefully crafting an English literary attack.

[wasellajam]

Well, finally something interesting out of all that crap.

But what if it was written in English then direct translated back and forth multiple times. Telephone.

[milo]

Well, finally something interesting out of all that crap.

But what if it was written in English then direct translated back and forth multiple times. Telephone.

I think that may be possible but I don't think his intent was to convince anyone he was Russian.  If anything, he seemed to be attempting to conceal the fact.

still - the investigation will continue upon his inevitable reappearance

[wasellajam]

So, I just had to go there...
Since I know the Russian Orthodox Church's Old Testament has additional books
that the King James Version Old Testament doesn't have, I pasted one of his erratic
postings into Microsoft Copilot's chat box and asked if there were references/names
that only came from the Russian Orthodox Church Old Testament. The first time I
asked this, it came back and told me that there was phrasing reminiscent of text
in 3 Maccabees which is a book in the Eastern Orthodox Old Testament that does
not appear at all in the King James Old Testament. When I asked it to be more
specific, it told me it couldn't find those references to 3 Maccabees. I asked it again,
in a few different ways, but its darling digital heart had settled into blindness.
Maybe someone else would like to give it a go, but I'm burned out talking with
flaky chatbots... though I do love them dearly, and they're really great for coming
up with Ethernet cable wiring diagrams, elegant sorting algorithms written in Python,
and propagation techniques for Sansevieria plants.

So I know someone who was diagnosed with a somewhat rare disease and saw something interesting from AI. Her doctor said he was really excited about AI at first, but he knew that article and when he checked the papers cited they didn’t exist. Since then I usually scroll past it. More power to you guys who have learned how to use it sanely.

[RiverNotch]

So, I just had to go there...
Since I know the Russian Orthodox Church's Old Testament has additional books
that the King James Version Old Testament doesn't have, I pasted one of his erratic
postings into Microsoft Copilot's chat box and asked if there were references/names
that only came from the Russian Orthodox Church Old Testament. The first time I
asked this, it came back and told me that there was phrasing reminiscent of text
in 3 Maccabees which is a book in the Eastern Orthodox Old Testament that does
not appear at all in the King James Old Testament. When I asked it to be more
specific, it told me it couldn't find those references to 3 Maccabees. I asked it again,
in a few different ways, but its darling digital heart had settled into blindness.
Maybe someone else would like to give it a go, but I'm burned out talking with
flaky chatbots... though I do love them dearly, and they're really great for coming
up with Ethernet cable wiring diagrams, elegant sorting algorithms written in Python,
and propagation techniques for Sansevieria plants.

*pokes head from out of a hole*

So Dyophysite Orthodox Churches (not just the Russians but also the Greeks, the Georgians, the Ukrainians, the Bulgarians, the Serbs, the Arabs, etc.) have a number of texts that aren't canonical to Protestants. The books we share with the Roman Catholic Church, you probably already know, so I won't list them here, but as for the books the Latins missed out on, there's 1 Esdras (included only in the Appendix of old editions of the Vulgate. Fun fact, when Church Fathers referred to two books of Ezra, they weren't referring to Ezra and Nehemiah, they were referring to 1 Esdras and Ezra-Nehemiah), Psalm 151 (the Miaphysite Orthodox Church in Syria has Psalms 151-155, in fact), and 3 Maccabees. And because both the structure of the Orthodox Church is not as centralized as the Roman Catholic Church and our notions of canonicity are somewhat looser (canonicity, for instance, could be defined as books which are read in Church services, only Revelation is never so read), the East Slavs in particular (maybe also the Georgians, I'm not sure) also consider as canonical the Prayer of Manasses and 2 Esdras (both in the Appendix of old editions of the Vulgate), while the Greeks have in their own appendix 4 Maccabees.

As for English translations, obviously the translators of the KJV never worked on Psalm 151, 3 Maccabees, or 4 Maccabees....and, in fact, the version of the Old Testament they based their translation on isn't the one used by most of the Dyophysite Orthodox Churches, since our Bible is based on the Septuagint---the pre-Christian translation, or set of translations, of the Hebrew into Greek---rather than the Masoretic, or a parallel Hebrew recension of the Bible whose earliest complete manuscripts only date back to around 1000 AD (we have complete Septuagint Bibles from around the time of Constantine, 700 years earlier). This confusion sorta dates back to St. Jerome, who decided to translate his Old Testament from the proto-Masoretic rather than the Septuagint, afaik because he thought that more quotations matched up that way, only he was kinda wrong about that (the New Testament was written in Greek after all) and imo he was sorta disregarding the established traditions of the Church at that point.

St. Jerome's proto-Masoretic version of the Psalms, however, never caught on, with most people preferring the Latin version based on the Greek (note that other translations of the Bible into Latin already existed by St. Jerome's time; in this case, afaik he just revised a preexisting one, if he was actually involved in the translation of this book at all), so a lot of English translations of the Psalms were based on the Greek before the KJV (one of those translations, the Coverdale Psalter, became the version used by the Book of Common Prayer for long after the KJV became the standard English edition of the Bible). 

As for the whole Septuagint, there's a version that I've not encountered by some guy of all the books of the Protestant canon, then there's Sir Lancelot Brenton's 19th century translation (which is sort of a revision of the KJV for the Protestant canon, a copy-paste job of the so-called Apocrypha, and fresh translations of 3 Maccabees, 4 Maccabees, and Psalm 151), then there's modern translations like the New English Translation of the Septuagint (which is a sort of revision of the NRSV). All this to say, one should find some quotations of the Orthodox Bible that sound a lot like the KJV, though afaik the verbs should be a dead give away, since Brenton tended to forget that 3rd person present of his diction ended in -eth, not -es.

Bonus information: the Miaphysite Orthodox Churches (the Copts, the Syrians, the Armenians, and the Ethiopians) take the flexibility of the canon in the Dyophysite Orthodox mindset and really run with it, including more obscure books like the Book of Enoch (which, to be fair, is quoted as Scripture by St. Jude in his epistle) or 2 Baruch. The Book of Enoch has an 18th century translation somewhat based on the KJV, and then there's a collection of translations of a lot of these more obscure books from the early 20th century based on the Revised Version.

Written in less than an hour without the help of AI!  Just don't ask me to provide citations, not because I can't provide them, but because it's a lot of extra work. A good starting point is Gallagher and Meade's (2017) The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity, or the various Oxford or Cambridge or whatever handbooks on canonicity and the Eastern Churches. Oh, and most of the translations I note above are freely accessible online, including even NETS: https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/

[busker]

River, that’s an excellent essay.
Wikipedia also tells me that the book of Enoch is canon in the Ethiopian Bible

The vulgate and the codex Sinaiticus which incudes the Septuagint as the OT date from about the same time. We know when the vulgate was written, but there’s a hundred year range for the dating of the CS. So the vulgate is as legit, IMO. We don’t know what earlier editions of the Septuagint read like.

The book of Enoch is a favourite one of conspiracy theorists and general nutcases because it talks about giants, ergo “history is bunk. Giant sloth fossils are actually Giant skeletons. NASA wants to hide the truth”.

My question to you is: why would you not use the Vulgate for the OT in preference to the Septuagint, when the earliest manuscripts of the latter date from about the same time and have no properly identifiable author?

[RiverNotch]

So far as I know individual books of both the Greek and the Latin can be older, and the Latin manuscripts made before the Vulgate are all demonstrably translations of the Greek rather than the proto-Masoretic---St. Jerome's translation work was more or less a revision. Then there's the New Testament, which was demonstrably written in Greek, not in Latin, so much of it more or less quotes the Greek than the Latin (I believe only the Johannine books quote the proto-Masoretic slightly more than the Greek---but, again, they never outright quote the Latin). And then there's just the matter of trusting the historical record, where we just know the Greek is older than the Vulgate by at least five hundred years, as they are claimed to have been made during the time of the Ptolemies, while St. Jerome definitely lived after the Emperor Constantine.

[rayheinrich]

Milo: You definitely have the more useful approach. I'm not sure why I headed into religious
texts as that's definitely not my strong point.

Rivernotch: Okay, I'm definitely impressed. I barely knew that there were some additional
books, texts that the Eastern Orthodox Church included in their Old Testament. You inspired
me to go back and read a little of the history, and the origin of the different sources which
you speak of. I never cease to be amazed by the complexity of human culture.

wasellajam: I approach using AI like I approach getting information from a highly intelligent
idiot savant who has access to a vast wealth of information, amazing search abilities, but tends to
insert a bit of logically sound, but fictional narrative from time to time. It's really a lot like doing
research where your sources provide useful information, but are a little unreliable. I usually find
that responding with "Are you sure about that? Would you search again using different sources
and see what you come up with?" does the trick. But using a different search engine works as well*.


*

Though if you're using Microsoft Copilot (It's my go to because it's really good at figuring out problems
with Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE) you should be aware that it's pretty much OpenAI's GPT-5/ChatGPT
with a different suit of clothes on. So for a real second source I usually use Gemini, and sometimes
Claude if I want a humongous, thoroughly annotated answer.

[wasellajam]

"Would you search again using different sources
and see what you come up with?" does the trick. But using a different search engine works as well*.

Now try again and do a better job.  

So impressed with you guys, your writing skills have me actually reading all these posts that I have pretty much no interest in. I doubt if I'll retain much of the detail but I'm enjoying it.

So, had to make my own coffee.