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Para Bellum Labs Will Attempt To Make the RNC a Political-Analytics Player
Nerval's Lobster writes "President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign relied on a sophisticated data-analytics platform that allowed organizers and volunteers to precisely target potential donors and voters. The centerpiece of that effort was Project Narwhal, which brought voter information—steadily accumulated since Obama's 2008 campaign—onto a single platform accessible to a growing number of campaign-related apps. The GOP has only a few short years to prepare for the next Presidential election cycle, and the party is scrambling to build an analytics system capable of competing against whatever the Democrats deploy onto the field of battle. To that end, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has launched Para Bellum Labs, modeled after a startup, to produce digital platforms for election analytics and voter engagement. Is this a genuine attempt to infuse the GOP's infrastructure with data science, or merely an attempt to show that the organization hasn't fallen behind the Democratic Party when it comes to analytics? Certainly the "Welcome to Para Bellum Labs" video posted by the RNC gives the impression of a huge office staffed with data scientists and programmers. However, the creation of a muscular digital ecosystem hinges on far more than building a couple of apps. Whatever the GOP rolls out, it'll face a tough opponent in the Democratic opposition, which will almost certainly emulate the robust IT infrastructure that the Obama campaign instituted in 2012 (not to mention Obama's massive voter and donor datasets). From that perspective, Para Bellum Labs might face the toughest job in politics."
I know that 'Orca' pretty much sucked in the most hilarious ways possible, so I can understand wanting to ditch that name, and maybe cetacean-based names in general; but isn't 'Para Bellum Labs' kind of pitiful-IT-violence-nerd at best and creepy at worst?
While the Republicans probably have a lot of catching up to do in the tech department, they're still clueless as to why they are losing in the political arena, and it has nothing to do with tech. They've long since given up their founding principles of being pro-liberty (remember, most Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act) and internationally cautious and have instead become a hangout for corrupt Beltway extortionists and moonbat crazies in recent decades. When they do offer a political position, it's about 75 percent of what the Democrats offer, so what's the point of supporting them? Finally, dislike of government is a prominent Republican theme, but they've never seen a defense program they didn't like (by and large). All that adds up to a brand which is more damaged than New Coke and would take a cold, hard look in the mirror before it can ever expect to be resurrected, which they are not capable of doing. In ten years, the GOP will have largely gone the way of the Whigs, maybe winning some local elections, but increasingly irrelevant on the national scene.
Hmmm. What message are they giving here?
Parabellum, n
Definition: a type of semiautomatic pistol or machine-gun; also called Luger, also written parabellum
Etymology: Latin 'for war'
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It would be an appropriate name if it were anti bellum, since nixon's southern strategy explains the disfunction of the GOP today. Para Bellum means "ultimate warfare".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
anti-bellum would be "against war," which would be a good name for a pacifist party, but not so good for the Republicans, who are in general a pro-military, pro-war organization.
You're thinking "antebellum," before the war; in the U.S., usually referring (with nostalgia) to the slave-holding south before the Civil War.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If Republicans wanted to win the last election, they wouldn't have picked Romney as their candidate. Either they had no idea that their own supporters would rather stay home than hold their noses and vote for him (and you didn't need fancy analytic software for that, just common sense), or they intentionally gave Obama the win.
They keep babbling about needing to do a better job of getting their message out, and using technology like Obama did to spread their message. Well, bullshit, we heard their message and said "no". No to bigotry against gays, no to the notion that a single cell can be a human being with a soul and consciousness, no to pushing the lie they call "creation science" into the classroom, no to lying to rape victims about the mechanism by which emergency contraception prevents pregnancy, no to all the anti-intellectual garbage that springs from twisted wacko interpretations of the old testament.
But I guess they're not hearing what the voters said, and so it's going to take them using technology better, and suffering another spectacular loss, to start accepting the idea that the problem is the message, not lack of effectiveness in communicating it.
Sigh. You see, I really would like a president who understands the limits of the ability of the government to fix all problems with massive spending, and the negative side effects of massive new spending, and who would strike (in my opinion obviously) a better balance. But as long as the republicans keep nominating candidates who toe the anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-intellectual line drawn by the party hard-liners, I will keep voting for the democrats.
From what I remember, the Romney campaign ignored their own polls that said they were losing. How would improving the data help when you won't pay any attention to it?
That statement speaks volumes about what is wrong about the electoral system, and US politics in general. It's all about winning and consolidating power. Few people are really interested in the process of governance. Jesus H. Christ, where are the adults?!
That does raise some big questions. Assuming that the DNC and the Obama campaign intentionally hired the most sophisticated data-gatherer/number-crunchers available, you would think that they understood what separates excellence from incompetence in technology. So why did they hire not just an incompetent company to handle Obamacare but a company with a history of incompetence? There are several possibilities. One, there was some old-boy networking going on and that company paid off key people to get the contract. Two, they're really not as savvy at picking tech companies and they merely think that all that analytics was what won the election when it may have been nothing more than a group of voters wanting to be part of history by voting for the first black president or even more basic as "I've had enough of Republicans" Or three, the thing was botched intentionally so as to have yet another excuse to push for single-payer health insurance.
Make sure you are using TIN foil. The aluminum foil does nothing.
Try this one:
4: Obama and his close advisors had great leeway in steering the technology direction for his campaign, but everything about Obamacare has been rolled out by the sausage grinder that is our government. (God bless the US of f'n A!!!))
He is the President, not the deus ex machina.
Of the 52 Dixiecrats, 50 went back to the DNC, 1 to the GOP, 1 independent. Some years later 1 more went to the GOP.
Not sure why you feel the need to lie. The DNC has ALWAYS been the party that welcomes racists, from back in the 1850s to today. Robert Byrd died a Democrat, Al Gore Sr died a Democrat, and so on. The overwhelming majority who voted no on the Civil Rights Act died life long Democrats. There is a LONG history of racism in the DNC and support for the KKK in that party, no such thing exists for the GOP except in your own head.
i hate to break it to you, but politics was emotional, is emotional, and always will be emotional. the adults you seek never existed and never will. the only truth here is you fail to understand the ugly emotional game called politics. we're human beings, not robots
please don't shoot the messenger
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Our problem is lazy citizens looking for money > hardworking skilled people. We are now outnumbered. It took a while to get here. It's going to take a while to get out. Unfortunately I don't think it's going to happen in our lifetime.
Who said anything about robots? You seem to entirely misconstrue the meaning of my original statement: being an adult involves having strong emotional reactions but it also means having the self-control and maturity to manage these emotions in a constructive manner. Being an adult means putting aside petty grievances and personal grudges to try and achieve something for the common good. Being an adult means that I no longer act nor think like a child and think it's all about me, me, me because even the staunchest libertarian will be forced to agree that even personal self-interest is sometimes best served through cooperation and not the miserable and petty one-upmanship that passes for political discourse in this day and age.
This political system is such an utter disgrace. Those who merely respond "that's just the way it is" are either too jaded or are utterly lacking in imagination to envision something better. And if you say it can never get better then I say: fine, but at least admit you are a nihilist and ascribe to no particular ethos, that the world merely is, that events merely are, that there are no moral categories, and that we are merely specks of flesh aimlessly wandering on a much bigger speck of rock, all of it soon extinguished and forever passing out of memory.
The Republican party wants to play in the real world again? Someone order a truck-load of red pills...
the point is you want politics to be something it never was and never will be
it's *politics*, not polite academic debate society
all of the ugliness in politics you dislike is the whole point of politics
all you are telling me here is you don't understand the subject matter. you can't just wave a magic wand and make people behave like robots. of course people aren't robots. but they behave like feral beasts in politics. of course people aren't feral beasts either. but in POLITICS they are
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Let's see. The RNC and it's friends want to teach Creationism as part of Science. They want to ignore mountains of data on Global Climate Change. They "unscewed" the polls last time around to believe they were going to win -- when their candidate was the most data driven businessman they could find. The economic evidence for austerity based changes or New Keynesian show the Keynesians have been much more accurate in predictions about things like inflation rates and GDP growth. We could go on and on. There's a reason that people say facts (or data) have a well known liberal bias. Someone who's really good with data is going to have to have some strange reasons to be a Republican. It will be hard for the Republicans to assemble a good team, knowing that they'll have to work for people that want to ignore what they have to say.
What's the point this time around? They'll get 80% of the vote if they oppose Obamacare and domestic spying.
I would have thought GOP would have preferred the name "Ante bellum" to be consistent with their views. (I mean present day GoP's views, not the views of GOP during antebellum era).
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
(Quoting from Ask.com) The term 'parabellum' refers to a type of semiautomatic pistol or machine-gun which is also known as Luger. The name was derived from a Latin saying which means ''if you wish for peace, prepare for war''.
So: we've got the threat of war, the name of a gun, and the fact that "antebellum" -- a term which is basically synonymous with the pre-Civil-War South -- might be appealing for exactly the reason you give. Sounds like a pretty good name choice for an RNC project.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
where the Republicans really are, and esp. the "Tea Party"... given the phrase ante bellum, and that Sen Cruz and Ms. Palin showed up during the Shutdown in front of the White House with a Confederate flag.
NeoConfederates, and this is the South (and my gorge) rising again.
And if you're reading or posting here, odds are you're not a millionaire, and if you're for them, there's a name for you: "sucker" (along with racist, bigot, and wouldn't know "enlightened self-interest" if it hit them with a semi).
mark
If nothing else, the far right are experts in convincing themselves of their own narratives.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
They are about trying to keep a balanced budget.
In the last 40 years, the budget has been balanced 5 times. EVERY TIME BY DEMOCRATS. The score is 5-0.
.
Why do you buy into the rhetoric? People should be known for their behavior. The GOP has a long history of blowing up the budget through a combination of reckless spending and reckless tax cuts. It's just history.
Even the modern Tea Party doesn't really care about balancing the budget, because it could be done a reinstating taxes on the top 1%, and modest reforms to the tax code in general. And modest spending cuts. Incremental, minimal effect on society. Balanced. If you don't support that which will work, and that which is achievable, then you yourself do not support balanced budgets.
The most important rule in American politics is that when some politician, D or R, talks about balancing the budget, then they are actually talking about something else. If you want to really know what the GOP believes is far more important than balancing the budget, then you should know
Cue motivated reasoning.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The Democrats claim to have used bits and pieces of data gathered over many years to feed a massive Obama-centric data processing engine for his re-election. I don't buy it. With the confirmed revelations of NSA, FBI and the IRS snooping into the personal information of Americans, its much more likely that the information feed wasn't from legal and open sources. Obama was re-elected with illegally gathered government spying. Project Narwhal was, at best, a cover story.
I hope that when they're computing pie charts, that they use 3.0 as the constant for PI, as their bible commands.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Paramecia live in aquatic environments, usually in stagnant, warm water. The paramecium evidently has some sense of movement because it responds when it bumps into something.