Goochland Democratic Committee

GOOCHLAND DEMOCRATIC COMMITTEE UPCOMING MEETINGS

Upcoming Regular Meetings:

August Meeting - August 23rd, 6:30pm, Goochland Library

Membership Contribution/Donation click button below:

Google Membership Form: Everyone looking to become a member or renew their membership must fill out the GDC Membership Application below:

A Beginner’s Guide to Twitter

Twitter is not Facebook. Twitter is where news is broken, links are shared, and memes are born. It is a place you can chat with friends, but unlike Facebook, Twitter is public. The more people you follow, and the more followers you have, the wider your reach. There are an estimated 330 million Twitter accounts in the world.

Tweets are limited to 280 characters. Your tweet can also contain links, photos, GIFs, or even videos.

Let’s Get Started.

Set up an account. Go to Twitter.com or download the app and sign up. The “full name” you choose will be your display name. It doesn’t have to be your real name. You can remain anonymous if you want. Next, pick a username you like. It will be your “handle” and people can reach you by typing @ in front of it in a tweet.
Enter your phone number. Very important in case you ever lose access to your account.
Pick an avatar. Highly recommend you put an actual photo of yourself ,especially when new, as you don’t want to be mistaken for a bot.
Write a bio. You will be limited in characters so be brief. You want people to get a sense of who you are, what you are interested in.
Finish your profile with a background image – this will appear at the top of your Twitter page.

Join the Community

Twitter is not about friending – it is all about following and being followed. Start out following people you know or news outlets or well-known celebrities you admire. Go directly to the page of the person you want to follow and see all they’ve tweeted.

Say something. Add a # to a subject so others can find it. Read your tweet carefully before posting. You can’t go back and edit but you can go back and delete it. Reply to others.

If you appreciate a tweet, then like it! If you want others who follow you to see it, retweet it.

Turn on your notifications you can keep track of your favorite people and news outlets.

Privacy

Everything on Twitter is public by default, but you can turn on a setting to set your account to private.    Only the people who you’ve given permission to follow you will see your tweets.    This will greatly limit your Twitter experience in my opinion.

Protect Yourself

You don’t have to put up with bullies or harassment. Twitter allows you to mute or block anyone who is bothering you. If you think someone is violating Twitter standards, you can report them and Twitter will shut them down if it is serious enough.

Do not follow or be followed by a bot. A bot is an automated account posing as a real person. They have a huge presence on Twitter and number in the millions. They are used to harass other users or attack a message or article. There are many articles on the web on how to spot a bot. Read “#BotSpot: Twelve Ways to Spot a Bot“. If an account is anonymous with little personal information, do not follow it.

Suggested Accounts to Follow

Goochland Democrats @goochlandvadems

Any account that @goochlandvadems is following

Sukie   @froggybottompnd

Lingo and Slang to Help You Stay “Woke”

Woke – living in a state of awareness of current events . What happened to all of us when Trump was elected.
Trolls – actual people who are harassing you. Not to be confused with bots.
DM – direct private message between two Twitter users.
Meme – Photos or political cartoons that are shared on Tweets to drive home a point. Often humorous or sarcastic.
GIF – Graphic Interchange Format. A format for image files that supports both animated and static images.
Feed – Your twitter feed or timeline is any list of tweets that constantly updates when someone you follow tweets.

DOWNLOAD OUR MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION HERE OR YOU CAN DOWNLOAD FROM OUR "ABOUT US" TAB.

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THE GOOCHLAND DEMOCRATIC COMMITTEE
GOOCHLAND COUNTY, VIRGINIA

OUR PURPOSE:

To support the values and principles of the Virginia and National Democratic Parties.

GET INVOLVED:

We welcome you to join us at general meetings, signup to become a member, and volunteer at events.

To receive more information and be added to our email newsletter, complete and submit the following membership application and send to GDCVirginia@gmail.com.

Click to set custom HTML

HOW TO ENGAGE IN BETTER POLITICAL CONVERSATIONS

To recap key points from video at upper right:

Polarization is getting worse in our country, that the divide between the left and the right is as bad as it's been in really any of our lifetimes
Most alarming of all of it is seeing this rising animosity on both sides. Liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, more and more they just don't like one another. You see it in many different ways. They don't want to befriend one another. They don't want to date one another. If they do, if they find out, they find each other less attractive, and they more and more don't want their children to marry someone who supports the other party, a particularly shocking statistic.
Empathy and respect. If you think about it, it's the very least that we owe our fellow citizens.
Liberals tend to endorse values like equality and fairness and care and protection from harm more than conservatives do.
And conservatives tend to endorse values like loyalty, patriotism, respect for authority and moral purity more than liberals do.
Maybe this moral divide might be helpful for understanding how it is that liberals and conservatives talk to one another and why they so often seem to talk past one another when they do.
So what would work better? Well, we believe it's a technique that we call moral reframing, and we've studied it in a series of experiments.
Liberals are on board for environmental protection. Conservatives, however, were significantly more supportive of progressive environmental policies and environmental protection if they had read the moral purity essay than if they read one of the other two essays. We even found that conservatives who read the moral purity essay were significantly more likely to say that they believed in global warming and were concerned about global warming, even though this essay didn't even mention global warming. That's just a related environmental issue. But that's how robust this moral reframing effect was.
If you want to move liberals to the right on conservative policy issues like military spending and making English the official language of the US, you're going to be more persuasive if you tie those conservative policy issues to liberal moral values like equality and fairness.
All these studies have the same clear message: if you want to persuade someone on some policy, it's helpful to connect that policy to their underlying moral values.
Empathy and respect. If you think about it, it's the very least that we owe our fellow citizens.

Robb Willer is a professor of sociology, psychology and organizational behavior at Stanford University. He studies the role of morality in politics. His research shows how moral values, typically a source of ideological division, can also be used to bring people together. His political research has investigated various topics, including economic inequality, racial prejudice, masculine overcompensation and Americans' views of climate change.

Willer has won numerous awards for his teaching and research, including the Golden Apple Teaching Award, the only award given by UC-Berkeley’s student body. Willer's class, "Self and Society," was the highest enrollment class at UC-Berkeley. His consulting clients have included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the Last Resort Exoneration Project and the Department of Justice.
Willer's writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post, including his op-eds "The Secret to Political Persuasion" and "Is the Environment a Moral Cause?"
Willer received a Ph.D from Cornell University and a BA from the University of Iowa. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a dishwasher, construction worker, mover, line cook and union organizer.

Thanks to Margaret Reynolds for letting us know about this great TED Talk.

CONTACT

The Goochland Democratic Committee
PO Box 125, Goochland, Virginia 23063
Email: GDCVirginia@gmail.com
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