On Oct 9, 2007, at 11:29 AM, Lenin's Tomb wrote:
> Counterfactual, though? Such a grubby word, such a grubby idea:
> almost
> always used for reactionary, dystopian purposes - it would almost
> always
> have been worse had things been otherwise.
Yeah, I know you've got an English litterateur's sense of language, but that doesn't make it a bad or useless word. Sometimes concepts from social science and even, gasp, econometrics can help one think clearly. And there's nothing grubby or reactionary about it. In this case, I was trying to figure out what alternative universe you were writing from.
> Suppose the feminist movement
> had been more fully revolutionary; suppose the 1960s generation was
> more
> oriented to the working class and less inclined to political
> adventurism;
> suppose most of the radicals had not been persuaded of the
> possibility of an
> anti-racist, anti-sexist, non-imperialist, liberal capitalism -
> well, I
> think we'd be in much better shape.
Yeah we would be. But that's not the way it happened. We make history, etc.
Doug