Unexpected Conversations

They are nice. I was going to spend my lunch reading Foreign Affairs and a little bit of Time, and then maybe dicking around with some of the game session stuff I am writting but instead I ended up talking to my little buddy Ashley. Ashley is one of those people who despite having nothing in common with me we always end up talking pleasently for extended periods of time. Carla is another girl like that as is Chad.

I like people like that. I like lots of people. Things are nice. I suppose I should be sitting in a park somewhere protesting corporate inequality but whatever. I am not sure how that is going to work out. Speaking of that. Forrign Affairs is an amazing journal. Despite the fact that it comes out bi-monthly each article very much sets the tone of political discussion for those entire two months. Not in actual news articles but you'll see the issues they bring up in commentary colums, editorials, in essays in Harpers, all over the place. It is increadibly satisfying to me to see someone reffrence Forgeign Affairs in an article and then I can go back and check it out to see what exactly they are going on about. There are other journals but none seem to have the same impact as Foreign Affairs. I think it is neat that in a world with a 24 hour news cycle our commentary is still dominated by a bi-monthly publication. I also think it is a testitment to the quality of the articles that you can find in the magazine. I've read the scholarly works of Tony Blair and Hiliary Clinton and I remain convinced that she would of made a better president, especially when you look at the work she has been doing with the current administration.

I say all this because the cover story is a an article about the nature of America's Inequality and Social Decline. I have never read such a furiously scathing article before in my life. Most of the articles in FA can only charitably be called boring. They are dry, stuffy, acedemic affairs that are meant for a specialized audience and not mass consumption. I like reading them but they definityl lack the vim and verve of some of the things you'll read in Harpers. This article though, holy shit. It is still stuffy and kinda boring but it is fueled by this sort of slow burning fury that makes you wanna go put a brick through a window.

It doesn't talk so much about the actual mechanic of the unfairness or blah blah blah. Okay we get it executives are makeing 400 times more than their lowest paid employees. Instead he talks about the changes in culture that have happened that make this sort of behaviour permissable. Back in the 70s things weren't great. Lets not get all nostalgic here things pretty much sucked, especially if you were a women or black. BUT this sort of behaviour didn't happen in upper level buisness. Why? Because it wasn't something you did. It was taboo. Simple as that. There didn't need to be laws and regulations because these people saw their power and possition as a responcibility not a right.

I found the whole thing to be very interesting and for me it hit this increadibly chord. So many of the older generation have this radically different view of corporations that seem to be quite frankly removed from reality. It is because they weren't like that then. They are now though. Oh well my lunch has come to an end and I don't really want to get into it on this topic. I am not sure why though. I'll ponder it a little bit. I definitily think it has something to do with me being in gaming writing mode which is a very different frame of mind. FOr example this post was supposed to be about persistant background elements in gaming as a new way to do random encounters. Not this. Funny how that happens eh?