4 thoughts on “More Red Blue”

1. Stephen Cole - July 14, 2004 at 11:39 am

   I love barbecue, can’t stand sushi, drive an SUV, admire hybrids, listen to country music sometimes and hip-hop/pop music others, go to chruch but believe in the spirituality of life, I believe in being fiscally prudent, but acknowledge that services don’t pay for themselves. I am neither red nor blue. I am purple. Being purple also means that stereotypes are bad things. (In general.)
2. Kris - July 14, 2004 at 1:22 pm

   I like barbecue and sushi, can’t stand hip-hop, but like rock and country, am not spiritual at all, think that SUV’s are pernicious, even though some of my best friends drive them. I think that the use of stereotypes to discriminate is a bad thing, but that stereotypes exist because we can’t get all the info about somebody before we make some kind of judgment about them. So we use visual and environmental clues and compare them to our “mental models”. I was using the red/blue thing to explain why I feel more at home at contra dances, even though I like the activity of square dancing better (a little bit…if I had to choose forever between contra and MWSD, I’d probably choose MWSD, but I hope I never have to make that choice). Is everybody at a square dance “red”? Nope, probably not. Are all contra dancers “blue”? Nope. But might the red/blue distinction provide some insight into why the two groups don’t work together, since the dance forms are related? Maybe.
3. Heiner Fischle - September 9, 2004 at 5:28 pm

   Sorry, would someone care to enlighten me what “red” and “blue” means in this context?
   Heiner Fischle
   Hannover, Germany
4. Kris - September 12, 2004 at 12:41 pm

   It’s shorthand for a political/cultural division in the U.S. Check out the link to the Christian Science Monitor in the first article. Here’s a sample

   The “red-blue divide,” as it has come to be known, entered public consciousness in the 2000 election, when the nation split down the middle between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The color-coded electoral map told a blunt geographic tale: Mr. Bush’s red swept across the South, the Great Plains, and most of the Rocky Mountain West, while Mr. Gore’s blue covered almost all of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the West Coast. The dramatic results recast the United States as a bipolar, “50-50 nation,” in which where one lived translated into differences in culture, values – and partisan allegiance.