Wingnuts are go!

[gordonzola]

OK folks, it’s definition time. Who would like to posit a definition for "wingnut" as it applies to a certain type of politico?

Here’s mine:

Wingnut: A person who has their mental health issues so intertwined with their "politics" that to them there is no difference. Paranoia, conspiracy theory, and poor social skills are necessary traits. In addition, ineffectiveness and failure are usually treated as signs that the Revolution is somehow coming closer to happening. The term originated in People’s Park, Berkeley, California and is usually used by slightly embarrassed anarchists and anti-authoritarians to distance themselves from "wingnut’ politics and activists who may also identify with those terms.

Sample sentence: Did you see the wingnuts protesting the "execution" of Rosebud Denovo when the cops shot her for breaking into the chancellor’s home with a machete?

Please feel free to add your own definitions or ask if someone you know fits the definition.

Comments

[lapsed.livejournal.com]

Q: Why doesn't Berkeley fly off into outer space?
A: Because there's a Wingnut on every corner.

You've been reading Slingshot again haven't you?

Rosebud is probably about as good of an example as one could give. A close second would be those people who say James Rector died for Peoples Park, but really it's the same wingnuts. Heh, I live with enough of them. The only problem I have with your definition is that many of the wingnuts have very subtle mental health issues and some are even highly functional and/or active (my housemates being good examples).

I think we also have a certain level of ironic wingnutism over here as well, which probably does the hardcore wingnuts no good, since a sure sign of wingnutism is an absolute inability to recognize sarcasm or irony in others.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I think this is right. It's someone who is over your level of "extreme," whatever that level happens to be. It's no more definable than the distinction between porn and erotica.

[twoeggbreakfast.livejournal.com]

i'm from florida. and that's how we used the term wingnut when i lived there.

[jactitation.livejournal.com]

Ahem. You were the one who brought up the Trots--an organized level of extreme. And see, I disagree. One need not be a lone wolf to be a wingnut. In fact, it is much more difficult to deal with the more organized wingnuts (oh god, memories of the Sparts counter-protesting our US out of El Salvador marches are flooding back--there was some precise thing we protesters were missing about it, that it wasn't quite imperialism, and I just took one look at them and thought, Wingnuts!) than with the individual variety who can be asked to formulate a question or shut up.

But I stand corrected on the British. Or else my friends were quickly picking up my lingo and I didn't realize it.

[lapsed.livejournal.com]

If anyone wants to see a Berkeley Wingnut in action, you can't get much better than Craig Stehr.

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

Furedi is his real name, Richards was nom de bolchevisme.

[odelenu.livejournal.com]

Ha! I know the RCP rather too well, I was a member back in the 80s. Not to be confused with the especially scary american version of the RCP.

[andypop.livejournal.com]

Now that is interesting.

I had a friend who'd been a member. She left and was hounded for it by her former friends in the party. It was very like a cult. I always found their recruitment techniques very cult-like, too.

Later on I was in a pro-choice group with a bunch of RCPers who, interestingly, initially made out they weren't in the party. They behaved towards me in exactly the same way as the Christian group which recruited me for a while when I was 11 or 12.

[odelenu.livejournal.com]

Ann and Frank are husband and wife. I ran into them a few years ago at SFO airport, when I was picking up a friend of mine who also used to be involved in the RCP. It was a really tripy moment.
I don't know Ann really well, though I met her first about 22 years ago. She was very opinionated then and I always appreciated her for that. She stood up in a room full of politically heavy weight guys and gave them hell AND she was right on the money. I know she has not always been popular, but I have been a fan even when I a disagreed.

[odelenu.livejournal.com]

That is terrible behaviour. That kind of shit gave them a bad name. Who was your friend, was she a member in the 80s, or later? The party was small and everyone pretty much knew everyone else.

[chitinous.livejournal.com]

BITE YOUR TONGUE.

[andypop.livejournal.com]

she was right on the money

Yes, she knows her onions. She has been prominent in pro-choice campaigns & is often asked for a quote by the national press, and she always gives the right quote, makes the right point.

But I have never trusted her. I remember, for example, going to a talk by a veteran pro-choice campaigner and watching her carefully but forcefully take it over, as if it was her everyone had come to listen to.

It's this that defines the RCP for me - they've always been one of those groups that's more interested in winning arguments than in genuine discourse (contrary to their late adoption of the 'ban nothing, question everything' slogan). It's an authoritarian impulse which is what I feel destroyed the British left in the 80s.

It's good that Ann knows what she's talking about when the media contact her, but there are people much more deserving of being in that position.

[odelenu.livejournal.com]

But I sure did have a good giggle over it ;-)

[andypop.livejournal.com]

She was just a teenager at the time. This would be around 1989, probably. She won't talk about it now - it was a really traumatic experience for her.

very well done

[chitinous.livejournal.com]

What a jackass.

[walktheplank.livejournal.com]

The Minnehaha Free State attracted a fair number of wingnuts (of both the homeless-by-choice and white punks flirting with Native spirituality variety). Most famous among these were "Agent Pecan" aka Bob Greenberg (the pie throwing man who almost singlehandedly managed to kill public support for the movement) and Kenneth Carl Crawford III, a carnie wanted for double murder.

Classic example of wingnut behavior: The Free State's ban on menstruating women walking among the "sacred trees."

[lapsed.livejournal.com]

When we encounter someone really out of it at a political meeting, we commonly roll our eyes and twirl a finger in the air (like the sign for crazy, but pointed straight up). It sort of looks like a wingnut being spun loose. I don't think it was ever so andvanced as to be derived from political wings. More likely someone said "Oh man, that lady? She's a nut!" and someone else replied "She's a WINGnut" just meaing to be funny.

I can think of some Berkeley/Oakland wingnuts that don't fit to the 'extreme' end of the political spectrum (though maybe they fit to the oddball end of the mainstream). The people with the UN flags that show up at every anti-war protest, for example.

[walktheplank.livejournal.com]

From Wikipedia:

"Wingnut" is a common, mildly derogatory term for a person who holds and professes right-wing political beliefs, especially in the context of internet message boards, blogs, mailing lists, or newsgroups.

The term is most likely a truncation of 'right-wing nut.'"

[lapsed.livejournal.com]

I take it back. I did a literature search for "wing nut" and came up with a 1983 editorial in The Nation "..right wing nut cases". I can easily see Right/Left wing nut case turning into wingnut.

[lapsed.livejournal.com]

It's going to depend on when you mean by "Peoples Park" if you mean the '60s I'm beat, but if you mean the Volleyball Riots I can just squeeze in there:

July 19, 1991 - The Ottawa Citizen

Headline reads "Kealey yells his way from wing nut to hero"

Also contains this gem: "Most of those who hadn't dismissed him as a wing-nut had come to regard Kealey as the mascot of the Great Canadian Revolution."

[odelenu.livejournal.com]

Yeah I had already left at that point. The thug element was really high at the end of the 80s. I too was traumatised by the actions of some of the members and was very mistrustful of the general membership for a long time.

pc wing nuts

[raptis.livejournal.com]

Hey andypopI am old enough to remember that too. In fact in 1983 a young maeve66, who I had met that summer on a 100s of miles Youth CND march around US bases, sent me a badge which said 'Politically Correct'. It was a prized possession displayed from time to time for taking the piss. It makes me feel weak to hear the Daily Mail style rants against it now --- it was always a fucking joke - except among a few, er, wingnuts.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

he is totally my fave current wingnut!!! we should make baseball cards of them to keep 'em straight.

the DMV!!

[(Anonymous)]

anarqueso wrote: How about "some guy who crashes a workshop to tell a bunch of strangers about the connection between Jesus, Gandhi, my shirt, and the eschewing of animal flesh, unions, and the DMV?"

Oh shit, I forgot about the DMV!! *That's* what finally set off my Wingnut Bell. The fucking DMV! I mean, animal flesh blah blah, Gandhi, fire, blah blah, usurers, blah blah....DMV! Ding! ding! wingnut! (as opposed to Religio-spiritual Nut or Anti-Semitic Nut or Vegetarian Nut). I'm not sure why this did it, I mean we all hate the DMV. But you're suffering a serious misperception of scale, not to mention causality, when you're lumping the DMV in there.

And that, to me, is the hallmark of wingnuts. Not just the misplaced blame or inflamed passions, but the problem of scale. Conflation of the unearthly with the inconsequentially mundane, confusion of symptom with cause. Gandhi and the DMV. Hamburgers and usurers.

- Melissa

See, but this was my exact question...

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

which actually sort of began this definitional frenzy -- would a Spart be a wingnut, or would only a wacky ardently individual anarchist (or the tee-shirt despising/christian/antiDMV dude) count as such? This all just makes me more wildly curious than ever. There is an anarchist household which (I think) functions more or less as an affinity group and calls itself for DASW purposes, the wingnuts -- affectionately, I have thought.

Oh, and this has no place in this comment, but I'm too lazy to go back, so I must get in my sectarian digs HERE -- the completely Trot bound nature of the British far left was ASTONISHING to me when I lived there in '86. Even though I had been carefully inoculated agaist Maoism as a child, at least I KNEW that there were other tendencies than Trotskyism, growing up in the States (let's not get into how odd it is to grow up knowing there is a tendency called Trotskyism, and knowing exactly which micro variant of it is RIGHT, goddamnit). In Britain -- nothing. Nothing but Trots and the CP as far as the eye could see... except a handful of Albanians, I think. Who at least sang the right version of the Internationale -- sorry, raptis, darling.