Controlled opposition in media: a discussion thread ( conspiracy )

submitted by deathcomesilent

For those unfamiliar with he concept of controlled opposition, here is a decent explanation I found (on urban dictionary of all places). " The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves. " -Vladimir Lenin

It is important to understand that the concept of controlled opposition applies to both cyberspace and realspace.

A realspace example might be: a protest that is designed to polarize people, and ultimately, to fall short of the group's goals.

A cyberspace example might be: a news program that questions the establishment to a point, but pulls punches on the issues that really matter.

I'd like to talk about the media/cyberspace category. Obviously the mainstream media fits into this category, but I'm far more interested in the smaller outlets that falsely portray themselves as the voice of the free-thinker.

What outlets do you believe to be controlled opposition, and why do you think so?

dspfoisdafodsi

Politics is economy, let's just first get that out of the way, the goal of each political entity, be it a voter or a party, is preservation or improvement of their current economic situation. Values are great but they have long deserted politics.

Back when people understood that, they grouped into economically interested parties. The poors on the left, the wealthy on the right. Eventually, the wealthy realized they could just place pawns at the head of the poors. And to prevent the poors from realizing, a mental separation between politics and economy had to be created.

New minor issues (if at all) were conflated into major ones, issues that had no economic aspect to them. Suddenly, a wealthy woman and a poor woman (what are originally completely antagonist political entities, zero political connivance... you can do the same thing with a wealthy homosexual and a poor one...) are joining together in a conjoint fight against man, family, religion... you get the idea, anything but capital, and after everything is said and done, the poor woman might be happy about winning a fake political fight, but she is still getting fucked over by the wealthy one.

The first line of defense of this real space mental prison where the poors take it forever is the cyberspace sjw army.

deathcomesilent

Thanks for taking the time to type that out, I couldn't agree more.

BeatlejuiceX

Neocons crush all opposition.

Drenki

At this point, I am pretty sure the entire Republican party has been compromised and should be considered controlled opposition. Even the Tea Party element was colonized and denatured, but that was early on and pretty easy.

By all accounts Trump seems to be on the outside at this point, the media waste no opportunity to criticize him, but at the same time, they give him plenty of press. So hard to tell for sure. Attacks on him seem real enough.

Empire_of_the_mind

It's almost impossible for actual dissenting voices in the US to get on corporate TV news, so clearly most commentators are "safe" opposition in those cases.

Chomsky, for example, is straight-up banned from US tv.

Drenki

I thought Chomsky was the guy that invented the whole concept of Social Justice? Have I been living a lie?

Empire_of_the_mind

Yes, wherever you read that was lying to you. Chomsky is known for two things - 1. He's a very important Linguist with some key research on language. This is why he's got a cush gig at MIT he can't be fired from. 2. - He's an enormously effective critic of US foreign policy, and he backs it up. He's been doing this since the 1950's.

Chomsky is a legend of your times and you should get familiar. http://www.chomsky.info has a ton of links to free talks, articles, etc. He's not out to make money and does an enormous number of appearances. He's known throughout the world, has movies made about him, is extraordinarily reasonable, and he's basically not allowed on TV in America because he wrecks that shit.

deathcomesilent

The most notable example I can think of is HBO's John Oliver. I really like the guy, but its pretty clear that there are some things he (or HBO) wont touch on.