Moonbats vs. Wingnuts

Today while reading the ravings of lunatics on the Yahoo Message Boards, I ran into the concept of Moonbats and Wingnuts. The Yahoo Message Boards are officially a place to comment about the different articles that appear on the Yahoo News area. In reality, it's a hostile, antisocial pit that gives hateful people who feel too constrained in normal social situations a chance to randomly spew their nonsensical, feeble, often racist and sexist "thoughts". Usually mixed in between these troll postings are intelligent people actually trying to have a conversation or share insightful thoughts, so that makes it worthwhile to read the boards. After a while you figure out how to avoid some of the troll postings by the signs such as all caps subject line, a racist or sexist subject line or profile name. Unfortunately, they change their names too often to try to memorize names.

So, in one of the postings, someone mentioned the terms moonbats and wingnuts. Looks like moonbat is what Conservatives call Liberals they don't agree with. Wingnuts is what Liberals call Conservatives they don't agree with. Of course, we all know that name calling is the best, most productive way to work to resolve differences and find a common ground to work together.

Moonbat aka A Loony Leftist

Moonbats think this website on the Ultimate Wingnut Challenge is funny and they look at the term as a badge of honor.

Wingnut aka Right Wing Nut

Wingnuts have the habit of picking apart an argument by bringing in utterly irrelevant details. They like to call themselves the Moral Majority even though they are in fact a niche market or a special interest group, just like everyone else.

The funny thing to me is the both sides use the same terms to describe each other like demagogue, agitator, fanatic, schismatic, inciter, inflamer, instigator, radical, dogmatist, revisionist, zealot and the worst, politician. It's like the ends of an ideological spectrum that touch in the black area.

Curving Spectrum with the ends that meet in the back.

Ideological Spectrum Sample