🧠 Extrasensory Perception in New Orleans

07 Jan, 2025

Psychics have an extra-sensory perception. This need not be supernatural, nor innate. Outside the most intimate direct relationships, you cannot connect directly to someone's psyche, but you can attune to the vibrational web of machinery that you both reside in. Sometimes this will help you understand one person, often it'll help you understand many.

Probabilistically, one person is unlikely to be unique and understanding them will help you understand what drives many. Take a random person and you are likely to learn a lot about their archetype, their media consumption and the pool of people that have been trained to behave and think like them through sociogenic pressure, algorithms and parallel evolution of emergent machinic processes.

The New Orleans Attack

This section of CNN's breaking news reporting works as a microcosmic Psychic case study. It could be dismissed as the product of one overworked news writer, but could just as easily be interpreted as the cultural pressures on one overworked news writer representing a greater whole.

Two details that seem utterly irrelevant to the overall story placed next to each other. First some background, then we'll come back to the story.

Right-Wing Conspiracism

The far right prides itself on distributing conspiratorial propaganda that explicitly forms connections between disparate systems. Literally just today they think a synthetic fog is going to give them bird flu and kill 6 billion people in time for WEF depopulation projections.

This has to be explicit in right wing media distribution due to an internal conflict: ultimately they have countercultural aesthetics but support status-quo hierarchical systems. They want to "go back" to a structure that for the most part continues to exist today, and they do not have the ideological infrastructure to critique systems automatically without having explicit chains of prebaked logical leaps and misinformation to fall back on. They will criticize vaccinations and big pharma but this will remain isolated from broader critiques of capital, for example.

As you go further right, eventually all roads lead to antisemitic connection-forming, then it's Jews all the way down. I don't believe this interferes with the above analysis, more on that later.

The Left

Socialists have tended to be sneakier. Their misinformation is distributed on the basis that you are operating under a mindset of systemic suspicion, that you have the ideological infrastructure to make connections and you'll proactively interpret subtext. This makes fact-checking socialist misinformation much more difficult. An article by a socialist can contain nothing but straightforward facts, aligned seemingly at random into one article, with the goal by the writer to have the viewer form (plausibly-deniable) misinformed connections in their own head as they read.

Unfortunately we see this prominently in Israel-Palestine discourse. You may have encountered a leftist article that goes something like this:

X Politician has yet to declare that Palestinians are being genocided!

X Politician went to Israel in 2013.

X Politician's party received $15 million in funding from Y Organization in 2022.

Y Organization has also funded a party in Israel in 2017.

X Politician's wife once called Israel "A beautiful country"

X Politician once visited Auschwitz in 2019 and said "The Jewish people must be forever protected"

All of these are indisputable facts. The factcheckers will rate the whole article as absolutely true, and give the organizations writing it high truthfulness scores. This is because the commentary is subtextual, plausibly deniable and you are expected to form the connections yourself.

With passing understanding of leftist convention anyone would understand this article to be implying that Politican X is bought and paid for by Israeli interests, is backing Israel's genocide and desires a Jewish ethnostate, hence their signal supporting a genocide (by not declaring it one, thus "denying" it). This understanding could easily be disavowed and denied by anyone seeking to defend it by referring to its innocent factual content, utterly disregarding any implied truth or connections. This is materially different from the right-wing style of antisemitism.¹

Those not versed in the background would likely be confused and ignore the messaging. The signal wasn't for them and passes by without scrutiny, they were unattuned to the frequency.

If you don't understand why something is relevant, you have likely missed a connection signal intended for someone else, but there is likely a connection

Liberals

Now we come to the centre. Liberalism ingests its enemies, subsumes its critiques and repurposes them as internal profit-controlled opposition. It is committed to maintaining a liberal convention of establishment facts, a single source of truth dictated by institutions of academics, government agencies and expert punditry. Centrism has the largest market cap, able to appeal to both sides where necessary, so how does a mainstream centrist institution report on this story.

We finally come to this section of CNN's breaking news reporting. The story is ongoing, but the eventual outcome of the story is irrelevant to this discussion. I'm interested in the style of reporting breaking news incidents like this, not the facts of the incident.²

Two facts appear here, the language is extremely important, first:

LGBTQ parties featuring dancing and drag cabaret were taking place elsewhere on Bourbon Street, the heart of the city’s gay community – just blocks from where the incident took place.

Reading this article textually, this tangent makes absolutely no sense. Why have we pivoted from broad background to highlighting the proximity of the gay community here? The subtextual implication is that this could have been a targeted attack on the cultural left faction. The left can now quote a mainstream CNN piece with an assemblage of factual information that creates the implications we discussed earlier, from a source of high factuality and even a centrist bias. "Even the liberal media is saying this was an attack on the left-coded faction!"

The mainstream media serves the aims of the cultural left and both benefit from the distribution. This is unlikely to be a conscious process on either part, more likely an unconscious dynamic system of writers attempting to parse limited information through the lens of their own understanding of the world. That understanding is heavily informed by unhinged online factionalism, and so all violent attacks become factional, instantly. Inherently. All events must be translated into the culture war immediately, because it'll happen anyway, and so in the interest of maintaining the non-ideological bias, the mainstream media serves both factions.

We come to the next quote, much the same:

Many celebrations had been aimed at college football fans descending on the city for the Allstate Sugar Bowl, which is scheduled to take place Wednesday — including a parade that had taken place Tuesday.

Again this is textually bizarre backgrounding, and strangely placed right after the LGBTQ section. There's one read that makes connective sense to me:

A violent attack has happened, given everything is factional, this violence must also be factional. We currently do not know the faction responsible, so here are two guesses based on potential victim demographics: Some left-coded gays were nearby, so it could have been an insane right winger, and some right-coded college football fans were nearby, so it could have been an insane left winger.

Most importantly, this messaging superficially benefits cultural signalling on all sides, it appeals to everyone. The right and left will both read this as an attack on their faction by their violent extremist enemies, and liberals will read this as escalating factional violence reinforcing their view that moderation is virtuous. As always, however, this benefits the right-wing more than the left by flattening the violence from both sides into equivalence. Leftists tend not to believe that terrorist attacks are practical means to achieve their goals, because their goals are complicated, long-term and systemic.

Terrorist attacks do serve right wing goals better, because they are simple, near-sighted and individualised. Scare the gays back into the closet so they stop corrupting our kids. Demonstrate that the real silent majority does not accept being overrun by woke culture. Kill a few dozen LGBTQ people to prevent them molesting a few hundred children. But the desire for virtuous moderation prompts liberal institutions to treat all extremist attacks on the status quo as equally dangerous and violent, benefitting the right, suppressing the left and achieving their moderate ends.

This analysis isn't revelatory, I'm stating the obvious, but making this subtext explicit is a helpful case study in sociopsychic attunement. There is deep meaning available in shallow texts to those with ESP and the willingness to use it. There is a psychic web of sociogenic machinery driving our behaviours and to recognise it is to weaponise it. At least, this turns coercive sociogenic pressures into translucent systems you can opt into with informed consent, though hopefully more nuanced understanding prompts more productive and meaningful action. Avoid deindividuation by factionalism, instead freely and knowingly join systems pragmatically useful to your cause whether or not they appeal to your sensibilities.

Footnotes