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

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

of course they're crazy. but I wouldn't use organizationally crazy to mean wingnut, I'd use sectarian. Wingnuts may develop followers, but I think of them as more the Lone Wolf type.

[dirtylibrarian.livejournal.com]

Oh but they love the public library!

[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.

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.

Re: See, but this was my exact question...

[lapsed.livejournal.com]

Be careful what you say about my house!

Some of them even fit Gzola's definition above, or at least the first bit of it. The self-identification is intentionally ironic, even if true, based on the perception of how most of the world views their politics. But even they recognize this whole class of other 'real wingnuts' who have gone so far as to be socially non-functional.