It's almost like it's the conspiracy theorist's dialect, where it's information- and reference-dense but transmission-poor, because all conspiracy theorists in one group speak the lingo so they all understand the random words scattered about.
It's coherent, just uses way too many references for outsiders to understand. Maybe you're right, though, thanks for clarifying!
Also, while Manson was a motherfucker with self-defeating crazy plans, he was a sufficiently convincing motherfucker who convinced a dozen or so people to dedicate their lives to his self-defeating crazy plans. They had significant internal consistency; they were just based on objectively false beliefs about the world. (He did get worse over time, though.) But all beliefs about the world are objectively false; it's just a matter of degree and consequences.
① Language use is an ingroup signifier, and by writing like this, they are identifying themselves as the sort of person who knows Putin's career began in the КГБ; knows that the Rasputitsa foiled Napoleon, the Mongols, and Hitler; has read enough of Thucydides to know what arguments the Athenians used to justify mass-murdering the Melians; and doesn't particularly care about capitalization, punctuation, spelling, or grammar. Perhaps on rereading the comment thread they feel self-satisfaction in the contrast between their knowledge and my floundering ignorance, or perhaps they are hoping to signal to other people who share their background. Moreover, this sort of shibboleth is a fairly reliable signal; outgroup members who attempt to imitate the ingroup will invariably slip up and use the wrong punctuation mark or something.
② By referencing bits of common knowledge rather than explaining each one, they can lay out their theory of the causality of these geopolitical events in three lines rather than six paragraphs. This is both less effort to write and, for their ingroup audience, less effort to read.
In both cases a necessary condition is lack of interest in communicating with the outgroup.
I just did something similar (though, I hope, less extreme) in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30505214. I figure that if someone doesn't know what CNG, Fischer–Tropsch, Teamster OOs, Jet A-1, fleet organizations, bunker fuel, etc., are, they can google them; if I tried to explain them it would just get in the way of understanding my already overlong sentences with too many nested clauses which frequently overflow the stacks of the brains of the humans.
I don't know who (s)he is, but I know this "communication style" and it's also my preferred default way of communicating when I don't have to talk with people I don't share much context or to whom I may want to sell/advocate something :|
It's about being dense and DRY while still saying a lot by painting a rich and nuanced context. Sure, it might be more prevalent amongst conspiracy theory people, but it's not a hallmark of them. Professionals like eg. surgeons also use dense jargon + funny-ish allegories and references when talking to each other.
It's basically like writing Perl, or dense Haskell, but for human2human communication... there's a beauty to it :)
> It's basically like writing Perl, or dense Haskell, but for human2human communication... there's a beauty to it :)
Sure, it's great when you're in a room of people who you know share your jargon, that's why jargon exists. I wouldn't bat an eyelid if someone here talked about AES or LTV or conversions or funnels, but I bet that very few people here understood what the GP was talking about.
> transmission-poor
You're insulting their communication skill, but some (I'd say possibly many) people actually enjoy reading/listening to this kind of communication. I actually really enjoyed it and found it funny and witty, and satisfying especially because it made me google for ~30sec to find out about Thucydides and Melos to be able to decode "old Melian", and then more to solve the puzzle of the "Piper" - although native Enlish speakers are more familiar with the The Pied Piper of Hamelin I'd guess or at least with the "pay the piper" expression.
I actually find regular low-density conversations excruciatingly boring so tuning the density way up and sprinkling some puzzles in there improves my ability to focus and not tune out as I do in many conversations. It's a form of communications that helps AHDHed-techno-creatives like us follow and enjoy conversation and reading more actually, not transmission-poor but on the contrary more like transmission-enhanced, but probably only for a subset of people with brains wired a particular way. (Now that I think about it, even the sci-fi literature that I enjoy reading, eg. Charlie Stross, Vernor Vinge is a bit like this comment, although way more diluted probably to appeal to a greater audience... and yeah, I guess conspiracy theories are the lower end trash version of "sci-fi appealing to ADHDed-techno-creatives", so it kind of makes sense.)
...come to think about it, I'd pay an arm and leg for access to a news outlet that would summarize latest news in this writing or talking style + a subtle injection of dark humor into it, and I'm probably not the only one! ...I imagine it with a Tom Lehrer background intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs :)
I'm curious what you think of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504506, though I also don't think stavros was insulting them.
I'd guess that schizoid personality types may be attracted to dense and reference-rich language. And these very same types would be attracted to conspiracy theories due to their desire to belong, just as it's known they're attracted to esotericism.
Overall I think the jargon and in-group signaling is real, but there's more to it, this compression-rich and high-connectivity thinking and communication mode is distinct, doesn't need to be about group signaling etc., and conspiracy theorists and other such groups are just what happens when this mode of thinking goes wrong, it's the pathological variation.