Republicans are the workers

I don't think it is a big stretch to say that only the workers would buy an extended-cab pickup truck and those are the vehicles most seen in Republican neighborhoods.  The idea that the car you buy tells you about the person is an old one.  I think we have all heard that a man who drives a big, ostentaatious car is small somewhere else.  And in my observation, short men almost always drive big cars. And in her classic book "Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour", anthropologist Kate Fox gives a very detailed account of what cars the various social classes in England drive.  So the report below sounds pretty informative to me.


In a paper published earlier this year, Stanford computer scientist Timnit Gebru wrote about how neighborhoods can be evaluated by the makes and models of the cars parked in their driveways. The paper appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and it's an interesting read.

By analyzing the images already available as part of Google Street Views, the research team was able to identify which neighborhoods were Republican and which were Democrat as well as many other characteristics.

It determined that in those areas where the number of sedans is higher than pickup trucks, there’s an 88 percent chance of the district voting Democratic. Where there are more pickup trucks, there’s an 82 percent chance it’s a Republican-voting district.

The project devised an automated methodology that estimated the social characteristics of regions covering 200 U.S. cities based on analyzing 50 million images from Street Views. The images were originally created by Google sending cars through every neighborhood in the country, capturing images that are then displayed and accessed on Google Maps. Their automated process took two weeks, compared to 15 years if the images had been analyzed by hand.

The automated process to analyze the images was accomplished using computers and artificial intelligence software called “convolutional neural networks” that learned to recognize the vehicles by identifying unique features on each. That allows the computer to identify the make and model, year, value, and fuel efficiency of the vehicle.

To characterize the automobiles, they hired Amazon Turk workers to develop a library of car images from Edmunds.com, Cars.com, and Craig’s List. Their data came up with 2,657 visually distinctive categories, covering cars found in the U.S. since 1990.

So, what else did their analysis show from the automobile information? They came to the following conclusions, as quoted from the report:

Hondas and Toyotas most strongly indicate an Asian neighborhood.
Chryslers, Buicks and Oldsmobiles “are positively associated with African-American neighborhoods.”

Pickup trucks and Volkswagens are associated with white neighborhoods.

Sedans are most associated with Democratic voter precincts; Republican-leaning precincts are most associated with extended-cab pickup trucks.

The researchers noted how this process could be a supplement or even a substitute for the way census data is now acquired because they found good agreement between their findings and those from the manual surveys.

They also noted that the U.S. spends more than $250 million each year on the American Community Survey (ACS) that sends workers door-to-door to interview the residents in each home in order to gather statistics relating to race, gender, education, occupation, and more. The Census Bureau conducts their survey once every 10 years. While both are more accurate, they each take a long time to analyze and don't pick up recent trends.

While a fascinating discovery, it will require a leap of faith and more validation for us to believe we are what we drive.

SOURCE

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More on Giovanni Gentile

Dinesh D'Souza breaks down the socialist history of fascism for Prager University.
   
“He’s a fascist!” For decades, this has been a favorite smear of the left, aimed at those on the right. Every Republican president — for that matter, virtually every Republican — since the 1970s has been called a fascist; now, more than ever.

This label is based on the idea that fascism is a phenomenon of the political right. The left says it is, and some self-styled white supremacists and neo-Nazis embrace the label.

But are they correct?  To answer this question, we have to ask what fascism really means: What is its underlying ideology? Where does it even come from?

These are not easy questions to answer. We know the name of the philosopher of capitalism: Adam Smith. We know the name of the philosopher of Marxism: Karl Marx. But who’s the philosopher of fascism?

Yes — exactly. You don’t know. Don’t feel bad. Almost no one knows. This is not because he doesn’t exist, but because historians, most of whom are on the political left, had to erase him from history in order to avoid confronting fascism’s actual beliefs. So, let me introduce him to you. His name is Giovanni Gentile.

Born in 1875, he was one of the world’s most influential philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century. Gentile believed that there were two “diametrically opposed” types of democracy. One is liberal democracy, such as that of the United States, which Gentile dismisses as individualistic — too centered on liberty and personal rights — and therefore selfish. The other, the one Gentile recommends, is “true democracy,” in which individuals willingly subordinate themselves to the state.

Like his philosophical mentor, Karl Marx, Gentile wanted to create a community that resembles the family, a community where we are “all in this together.” It’s easy to see the attraction of this idea. Indeed, it remains a common rhetorical theme of the left.

For example, at the 1984 convention of the Democratic Party, the governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, likened America to an extended family where, through the government, people all take care of each other.

Nothing’s changed. Thirty years later, a slogan of the 2012 Democratic Party convention was, “The government is the only thing we all belong to.” They might as well have been quoting Gentile.

Now, remember, Gentile was a man of the left. He was a committed socialist. For Gentile, fascism is a form of socialism — indeed, its most workable form. While the socialism of Marx mobilizes people on the basis of class, fascism mobilizes people by appealing to their national identity as well as their class. Fascists are socialists with a national identity. German Fascists in the 1930s were called Nazis — basically a contraction of the term “national socialist.”

For Gentile, all private action should be oriented to serve society; there is no distinction between the private interest and the public interest. Correctly understood, the two are identical. And who is the administrative arm of the society? It’s none other than the state. Consequently, to submit to society is to submit to the state — not just in economic matters, but in all matters. Since everything is political, the state gets to tell everyone how to think and what to do.

It was another Italian, Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943, who turned Gentile’s words into action. In his Dottrina del Fascismo, one of the doctrinal statements of early fascism, Mussolini wrote, “All is in the state and nothing human exists or has value outside the state.” He was merely paraphrasing Gentile.

The Italian philosopher is now lost in obscurity, but his philosophy could not be more relevant because it closely parallels that of the modern left. Gentile’s work speaks directly to progressives who champion the centralized state. Here in America, the left has vastly expanded state control over the private sector, from healthcare to banking; from education to energy. This state-directed capitalism is precisely what German and Italian fascists implemented in the 1930s.

Leftists can’t acknowledge their man, Gentile, because that would undermine their attempt to bind conservatism to fascism. Conservatism wants small government so that individual liberty can flourish. The left, like Gentile, wants the opposite: to place the resources of the individual and industry in the service of a centralized state. To acknowledge Gentile is to acknowledge that fascism bears a deep kinship to the ideology of today’s left. So, they will keep Gentile where they’ve got him: dead, buried, and forgotten.

But we should remember, or the ghost of fascism will continue to haunt us.

SOURCE

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California Still Trashing Workers’ Rights

The California Supreme Court has ruled that the state can impose a contract on employers, in the style of Don Corleone, a deal they can’t refuse. News stories hailed the unanimous ruling as a victory for “farmworkers” but it isn’t. The case deals with Gerawan Farming, a fruit grower in Fresno and Madera counties. A full 99 percent of their employees never voted for representation by the United Farm Workers union and many of the workers were not even born 1990 when the UFW contended to represent them. The UFW then disappeared from the scene but Gerawan still payed the highest wages in California agriculture.

Some 20 years later, the UFW had plunged to about 5,000 members, about the same number of workers Gerawan employs. The UFW demanded that Gerawan workers pay 3 percent of their wages to the union or lose their jobs. In 2013, the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board, all political appointees, oversaw an election. The Board then impounded the ballots, set aside the election and imposed a contract. “Nothing in today’s opinion prevents the employees’ ballots from being counted,” Gerawan said in a statement. “We believe that coerced contracts are constitutionally at odds with free choice.” Gerawan will appeal to the U.S. Supreme court but some realities are already evident.

The ALRB’s refusal to release the workers’ ballots from 2013 should come as no surprise in a state that refuses to release voter data to a federal probe of election fraud. Boards of political appointees imposing contracts is more akin to the Soviet collective farm system than a free agricultural and labor market. Only 16 percent of California workers are union members, so unions do not represent “labor” in any meaningful sense. Millennials may not be aware that United Farm Worker icons Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta derided migrant workers as “wetbacks” and “illegals” and deployed union goons to attack them.

SOURCE

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Republicans Win Historic Race… In Massachusetts

Don’t count the Republican Party out yet: a GOP candidate narrowly won a special election for a Senate seat in deep-blue Massachusetts.

Dean Tran will be the first Republican in recent memory to represent the uber-liberal Worcester-Middlesex in the Massachusetts State Senate.

Tran defeated Democrat Sue Chalifoux Zephir by 607 of the 15,627 votes cast. His strength mainly came from rural areas, as well as from his hometown of Fitchburg. Tran attributed his success to “visiting [voters] at their doorstep, and speaking to them on a personal level.”

The historic victory and celebratory atmosphere were on display as Tran entered his victory party at the local River Styx Brewery, the standing-room-only crowd began chanting: “G-O-P.”

SOURCE

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