You must provide value to get what you want
More general framing:
Artha is the root of Dharma. (KAS 1.7)
In a political context, this means that to promote your “political views”, you must primarily create immense “secular value”.
DR is ofc a very cheap version of this, but this is the main way libs do propaganda:
https://x.com/TheEmissaryCo/status/1825416050600497480
creating (or more often capturing) institutions or doing work that create genuine, undeniable value – then “subliminally” passing political messages as a “side effect”.
RWs are too crude, too honest and explicit in their messaging.
Wikipedia doesn’t call itself “Liberalpedia”;
This is also a question of ambition. See also the difference between Indian & Chinese AI startups.
Indian companies will kang on creating “Indic AI” which nobody has reason to use. Chinese set out to just build a really good AI which strengthens their nation as a side-effect.
it says its mission is to “give everyone free access to the sum of all human knowledge” – and it actually achieves things to this end, to build credibility!
NYT, BBC don’t say their mission is to “provide a left-wing perspective on news”. They provide real value in terms of
providing information, make themselves needed, then just package propaganda with it.
By contrast RW attempts at building alt institutions will openly declare a partisan mission, then act surprised when people don’t trust them and Wikipedia doesn’t get replaced by “Conservapedia”
Even if your arguments are absolutely perfect, if what you do doesn’t provide any other value except partisan arguments that a neutral person doesn’t a priori care about – then nobody even has a reason to read it in the first place!
RWs always try to skip to the very last step: just crudely talking about how our leader is great, our religion is awesome, please vote and share the article now that you’re convinced. Where’s the build-up?
Actually reminds me of the advice my mom used to give me when I would get into fights over very random and autistic political issues at school – that you actually have to “be someone” first for your arguments to actually have an effect at scale, however good they may be.
We should think of political propaganda as more like entrpreneurship, or dating: you don’t just go and say I want to make a lot of profit, gimme money / I want s3x, gimme your body–
You have to first think about what value you can actually create, make yourself aesthetically
pleasing in terms of looks and personality, BVILD something people actually want, then in return get their attention to your politics.
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