A Lovely Turn of Phrase...

"The Hysterical Subjunctive:" I love the phrase.

Read this here.

This term was coined by P H Borcherdsm in: 1999 Eur. J. Phys. 20 357-364, for an article called "Science or Anti-Science?", which reviewed the hysteria generated by the anti-fluoridation advocates.

In grammar, the subjunctive is used as a verb mood in a dependent clause to express wishes, commands, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or statements that are contrary to fact at present.

The hysterical subjunctive takes that one step further, demanding, insisting upon a course of action taken with no basis, with no clear goals, but taken on the basis of unmanageable fear, of emotional excess.

The drama queens of the left loved the chiliastic mood of the doom-and-destruction greens and when the two merged we got the Watermelon People, green on the outside, red on the inside.

A perfect marriage for an ideology disgraced by the murder, literally, of hundreds of millions world-wide, disgraced by the utter failure of its economic tenets to feed and clothe its subjects, let alone bury their competitors. A perfect marriage for those who despised industry, who were romanticists and believers of Rousseau and his belief in the uncorrupted morals of man in his natural state, that man in his wild state was innately good and it was civilization that corrupted.

But a fatally flawed one, dependent on deliberate lies: the story is simply too good for it not to be the case. The useful idiots - Lenin never said this, but rather "utter buffoon", "чрезвычайный простак" - were more than happy to trust the experts, the noble scientists who were beyond reproach and the closest thing to the savior of the world that you can find outside of established religions, showing the way to a brighter, nobler, cleaner and greener future, to be built on the destruction of modern capitalism.

Fundamentally, at the end of the day, we could reduce the difference to this: as Philip Stott put it, it's the choice between Turnip Wine and Single Malt Scotch.


The hysterical subjunctive indeed.