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