Online RPGs affect players’ perceptions of reality. People who play a MMORPG think that assaults with weapons are more likely than those who don’t play. There’s the start of a discussion on whether the same might apply to positive ‘cultivation effects’ (which is apparently the appropriate jargon). The next question is whether you could rejig the rules of a game in light of this – and whether you should.

Today I’ve had my head in Russia. From time to time I’ve attempted to find some interesting Russian-language blogs, and I’ve more or less failed. Turns out the reason is that they’re all using Livejournal. Now the question is just how to find the fascinating LJs amongst the teenage breakups and blow-by-blow personal diaries.

Meanwhile, I’ve turned up some odd and interesting Russia-related bits in English. A Soviet cartoon character reinvented as an Olympic mascot Panic-buying of salt, because of fears that Ukraine would stop exporting salt to Russia. Nobody from the Ukrainian government actually said that, or anything close. Just some Russian official worried publicly about the possibility and – Wham! – salt prices go up twenty times.

And how did I not notice that there’s a new BBC documentary series about the role of the oligarchs in Russia?

Edit two minutes later: or rather, there

was

a documentary about oligarchs. It’s presumably finished in the three months since that article was written. Have to rewatch this film instead (the DVD arrived a couple of weeks ago, as part of my christmas bonus from work, and it’s sitting on the shelf for a rainy day).

Well, isn’t that nice. The mayor of Moscow has decided to ban Moscow Pride, which was due to happen for the first time this May.

The silver lining is the justifications given by the authorities. Leaving aside the nasty-but-predictable (“Russia is a multi-faith state and it is a known fact that all religions are against homosexuality”, “Love is supposed to be only between a man and a woman”), there is this wonderful comment by a deputy mayor who saw Paris Pride:

“All of them were wearing their swim-suits and some of them had false plastic tits, others had pictures on their butts. Moreover, for some reason, they were wearing rollerblades.”

Poofs we can cope with, but poofs on skates? That’s going to destroy our society!

From corpwatch, an excellent piece on the (mis)treatment of foreign workers employed by US contractors. The usual nastiness – people working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for $1.56 per hour, workers left without protection or even protective clothing, recruiters lying about which country people would be taken to.

But unlike with, say, mistretment in sweatshops, here the Filipino workers are working next to highly-paid US contractors. I wonder what impact this has on the Americans – I’d imagine it being pretty hard to avoid at least some uneasiness at being treated so much better than your colleagues.

Also, these Third Country Nationals are presumably being brought in because Americans don’t trust Iraqis. That is, any Iraqis working on a base are suspected suicide bombers in the making. So you give jobs to outsiders who won’t be trying to get the USA out of Iraq, and you leave Iraqis unemployed.

Just noticed a brilliant typo. In the middle of writing something about corruption in Iraq, I looked back at what I’d written, and read “the International Advisory and Monitoring Bard…”

[that should have been the

Board

; it’s a very dull, and mostly useless, committee that is supposed to keep track of money being spent in Iraq]

I like the idea of having a bard in charge of auditing. Perhaps we could have press conferences accompanied on the lute? committee meetings with choruses? reports in verse?

Local governments in Iraq are taking stands against the coalition: in Basra authorities have refused to work with the British, because of a video which shows Iraqis being beaten up by British troops. Then the governor of Karbala has “suspended all cooperation with US forces because of police dogs being used to search buildings.

What’s interesting is that this doesn’t look like a protest against the idea of the occupation, so much as a reaction to specific – and avoidable – abuses. There continues to be a democratic deficit, in that there is little way for Iraqis to feed their concerns to the US and UK governments and military commands. So you end up with this kind of fairly dramatic approach. It gets the job done, at least; even if they don’t change their behaviour, the coalition can’t claim not to know that certain things are unpopular.

I’ve not been paying much attention to Iraq lately, so perhaps I’ve missed similar cases.

You start reading about Iraq, and suddenly there’s a massive catastrophe sitting in front of you. The question is whether the destruction of the Askariya mosque is going to be catastrophic (Juan Cole says apocalyptic) or just very, very bad.

Naturally enough, people are calling for extra security at mosques. But the attack was carried out by men

in police uniforms

. Having police outside mosques isn’t going to reassure Shiites, when they suspect those ‘police’ could be about to blow the thing up.

If the police aren’t trusted enough to protect the mosques, then (yet again) the sectarian or party-based militias will step in. Al-Sadr is already on his way back to Iraq (he’d been touring the Middle East), and no doubt he’ll be taking the lead in this.

Good that somebody is paying attention to human rights abuses in the UK – America is too much of an easy target. The report from Amnesty is here, and here is the annual human rights report from the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (which says sane and anti-government things about Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition).

No, I haven’t yet read either. I’ll be doing that at work tonight.

How do you guess how bad the rioting is going to get after the Samarra bombing? I find myself doing mental calculations along the lines of ‘x killed on day one, double that, add in some reprisals over the next week….’. B of course I don’t have any real reason to double rather than triple, and in the end I’m just making up a number that feels about the right size.

But it wouldn’t be all that hard to make more serious estimates about the likely progression of unrest. There are any number of riots around the world triggered by some event or other, and the newspapers don’t do a bad job of reporting casualty numbers as they change. So you could get a good, quantitative, idea of how these things develop just by totalling up the figures. And shiny charts and graphs would be equally easy.

I suspect that if you did this, you’d find that certain types of unrest are very predictable. I also suspect that somebody, somewhere, has already done this; I just don’t know where you’d look to find their results.

With the latest installment of torture by US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, things are moving beyond the point where you can have a sane discussion. There’s yet another report on it, this one saying that at least 98 people have been killed in US-run jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, 34 because of homicide, 8-12 tortured to death. In several cases the people doing the killing were following orders from above.

And what does the US government say? They had an ex-white house lawyer onNewsnight, saying that it’s all OK, because torturing 10 people to death out of 100,000 prisoners isn’t all that bad a percentage, really.

It turns into nastily black comedy with an NGO person explaining how hard the medical examiners are making it to investigate what’s happening – “his ribcage was found in washington DC and part of his larynx in germany”. But the time I want to give up on life is when you hear people saying, almost casually, that somebody forced a detainee to jump to his death in the Tigris.

And I don’t know how to stop this – it’s already been reduced to the point where I can’t understand how anyone can defend it. If you tell somebody “they’re torturing people to death” and they don’t care, then where’s left for you to go?

Bonus from later in the programme: a montage to show the social change of the 60s – consisting entirely of shots of short-skirted legs. Miniskirts – that’s what social revolution is all about!