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Liberal Movement

From dKosopedia

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Liberal Movement

Welcome to the Liberal Movement area of DKosopedia. This area is designed to help the DailyKos community of liberals and progressives plan how to take political action. Please see our Liberal Movement Strategy page for a description of how you can use this space to plan and take action to support your goals.

Planning

Planning consists of establishing goals, working out the policies to achieve those goals, creating conceptual frames that will support the goals, and setting up the political campaigns that are needed to reach the goals. Once planning is completed, you put the results into action in the Action section, below.

Goals

The objective of the Liberal Movement section is to provide a place for the Daily Kos community to build its own action network, with the ultimate goal of establishing a power base of political thinking and action that provides ongoing political progress.

Policies

Use this page to register your campaigns. A “campaign” is a process for reaching one or more liberal/progressive goals. It should not center on a particular candidate, although one or more candidates may be discussed in the campaign.

Each campaign should start with a discussion round, where others are invited to comment and participate. This round should last from one week to three months, allowing enough time for many people to comment, write their own diaries, and provide feedback. At the end of the round, create a page in the Actions section that summarizes the findings of the round and guides people who want to take action.

The resulting actions should fall into one or more of these three categories: elections, legislation or public opinion. For example, as a result of discussions during the discussion round, it may be obvious that you need to get a specific kind of candidate elected to a specific office. You would put up a page in the Elections section stating this and how you plan to go about it. On that page, you would invite participants to examine candidates for that office in terms of the goal, select the proper candidate, and assist them in getting elected. Other types of actions may be to get particular wording written into law or to make a specific thought process or concept widely distributed to the public.

If you have ideas on how to frame your issue, then look at the Forward Framing pages to see if this is part of an established liberal frame. You may want to link to the page describing that frame or adopt its language. If you don’t see a frame to use, but want to add one or alter an existing one, then you should set up a framing round using the instructions on the Framing page.

If you know facts that can support your campaign (or other campaigns), then you can enter the facts in the Reference section. If you know of other resources on the Internet that support your campaign (or others), then add a link in the Resources section to that resource, as well as linking on your campaign page, so that others can access the same resource.

Frames

A key factor in the success of any political action is how it is framed in the minds of the public. Proper framing is very important to the success of any political action because mental frames make certain kinds of thinking easier than others. In general, don’t operate within political frames developed by the opposition and don’t pick frames at random. Make a deliberate effort to select the frames that will put your action at an advantage and do your best to activate those frames in the mind of the public.

We call the process of developing and promoting liberal/progressive frames Forward Framing. See Framing for an explanation of framing in general and how the framing process works within DKosopedia.

Persuasion and Common Knowledge

Frames are not enough to persuade people to take action. In order to get people to work with you for a goal, you need to present an argument that explains why they should. This argument can be logical, emotional, moral, or any combination, but however it is put together it will rest on assertions and reach conclusions. That is, the structure of the argument will be logical, even if the appeal is emotional.

Assertions can be common observations (things that most people can directly observe for themselves) or authoritative assertions (things that people are called on to believe because some recognized authority makes the assertion). “The sun rises in the east” is a common observation. “All atoms have a nucleus” is an authoritative assertion.

Who are the people and groups that the Daily Kos community accepts as “authoritative”? This is the subject of the Authorities section in the “Reference” section. You can assert that a person or group is an authority by adding them to this section. Use the “Discussion” tab of this page to reconcile any disagreements.

The Daily Kos community is supposed to be “fact-based.” Are assertions facts?

We distinguish between assertions and facts because a fact is a statement of something that’s true. To know that something is true we would have to have ultimate knowledge of reality, the reality that is causing what we perceive. Philosophically, it’s hard to establish that we know this reality since we seem to always get our knowledge through our senses. In order to assert that we know reality through our senses, it turns out that we have to make a lot of assumptions about our senses and how they operate. (There is a theory called “natural knowing” that asserts that we can know reality directly, but we don’t plan to use that theory here.)

Whenever someone bases an argument on an assertion that something is true, then they should establish the source of that assertion. They can do that in two ways. One way is to put in a link to a Web page that presents the evidence for that assertion. The other way is to create a “fact” page here and refer to it.

Campaigns

If you wish to coordinate a discussion round on a proposed Liberal Movement action, then you should first write a diary announcing the round. When you publish your diary, you should register it in this section by adding an entry with a link to your diary. Please use the following section to register your diary:

Proposal Rounds

1 Eliminating Orwellian Names for Federal Legislation

30 March 2007

Establishing Diary: Renaming Acts of Congress by Liberal Thinking.

Templates for Proposal Rounds

Use the following template to establish a round.

{Next sequence number} {Description of the round}
{Target date to close the round}
Establishing Diary: {Put reference to the diary establishing the round here}[{copy of URL to diary} {title of diary}] by {author of diary}.

If you want to register a diary that comments on a proposed action, copy the following template into the section on the round, edit it to describe your diary, and then link to it.

====Diaries commenting on proposed action====
Authors commenting on the proposed action add references to their diaries to the list below.
* [{copy of URL to diary} {title of diary}] by {author of diary}.

Reference

This area provides a basis for discussion by centralizing links to facts, authorities and resources, which allows them to be re-used.

Facts

This page contains links to established facts. You can add to the list of established facts by creating pages in the categories “Political Facts” and “General Facts,” below.

Facts should be well-contained statements presented as verifiable propositions. A proposition is a statement that is either true or false. Putting a statement in a fact page within the repository asserts that the statement is true. Any evidence that it is true should be stated, and a link to any page that can be referenced in support of the truth of the proposition should be added. Generally, facts come from the scientific method or direct observation.

In this, you might want to link to an authority or a resource listed on one of the other Liberal Movement pages. You can go to those pages to see if there is an existing link. If you find one, you can copy it from that page. If not, you might want to establish the link there and copy it, so that others can use it. (Go to the edit tab and get the wikitext for the link to paste in. This saves typing and will get the formatting correct. You have to be logged in to DKosopedia to edit.) Use the following format for fact pages, replacing the text in braces with your own.

={Title}=
==Proposition==
{Statement that can be true or false.}
==Authorities==
* {Put reference to any authority here using the following format:}[{copy of URL to authority page} {title of authority}] {description of authority}.
==Resources==
* {Put reference to any resources with more information about the fact here using the following format:}[{copy of URL to resource page} {title of resource }] {description of resource }.
Category:Fact

Political Facts

{First political fact link goes here.}

General Facts

{First general fact link goes here.}

Authorities

This section contains links to authoritative groups or works that can be used freely to support assertions of fact. Please add references that support empirical knowledge or well-reasoned assertions based on observation and/or experiment, or that reference standards bodies.

Primary Authorities

Standards Bodies

Disclaimer

Inclusion on this page does not constitute an official endorsement of any particular company or group.

Resources

This section contains links to groups and other resources that support the goals of the liberal movement. Please add references to such groups.

Groups

For information on the Democratic Party, see the Democratic Party section of DKosopedia.

General Resources

{First general resource goes here.}

Action

Summarize your findings here and guide people who want to take action. You can do that by establishing a page that facilitates others in taking action and registering it here.

Elections

{First election action goes here.}

Legislation

{First legislation action goes here.}

Public Opinion

{First public opinion action goes here.}

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This page was last modified 03:55, 16 March 2007 by Rich Wingerter. Content is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.


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