Para Bellum Labs Will Attempt To Make the RNC a Political-Analytics Player 212
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."
Re:Parabellum (Score:2, Informative)
You're one of those Gawker readers who doesn't fact check anything, do you?
"Para Bellum" it is not *defined* as a semi-automatic pistol (the P08 Luger) or a machine gun (the Parabellum MG14, which doesn't even fire 9x19 Parabellum), the name just happens to have been applied to those weapons. "Para Bellum" doesn't simply translate as "War", it translates as "Prepare for War". It comes from the Latin phrase "Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum", which translates as, "If you desire Peace, prepare for War".
Re:Beyond War? (Score:3, Informative)
You're looking for "antebellum", which is used to differentiate the American South in the pre-Civil War period from that of later times. It is a homophone of "anti-bellum" but has an entirely different meaning.
Re:Beyond War? (Score:5, Informative)
DNC has history of racism, not GOP (Score:2, Informative)
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.