[COFF] [TUHS] Wikipedia anecdotes - LLM generalizations [was On the unreliability of LLM-based search results (was: Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum)

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, May 29, 2025 at 8:23 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 5:16 PM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen at sdaoden.eu> wrote:
>>
>> This entire thing was then removed with the words "Here it smells
>> like red socks", referring to a decade old (around Y2K) right-wing
>> aka republican propaganda tour against "red socks".  (In Germany
>> left wing is red, right wing is black/blue.)
>
>
> Red was also traditionally considered the color of the left wing, especially Communism, here in the US.  During the 1950s the start of the Cold War led to a lot of fear of pro-Soviet Communists taking over Us government and private institutions.  This was known as the Red Scare.  The slogan among the most militant anti-Communists was "better dead than Red".
>
> Somehow this color scheme got switched around  in the current liberal vs. conservative ideological divide.  Red is now the color of the right wing and Blue is the color of the left wing.  I don't know why that change happened.

TV Coverage. In the 76 election, some networks used blue/red and
others used red/blue. This cause a lot of confusion on election night,
so they got together and decided on red - GOP, blue Dem, likely in an
anti-nod to communism. Everybody know the GOP wasn't communists, but
they liked to occasionally lob that attack at the democrats. By having
red GOP / blue Dem, the networks made a conscious choice to not
reinforce the GOP charge...

Warner