openDemocracy: Kazakhstan: a showcase for shrinking civic space

Little noticed by the international community, Kazakhstan has become a model case for the global double trend of rising authoritarianism and shrinking civic space. While state pressure has grown continuously since the mid-1990s, the crackdown on civil society has intensified over the last year amid mounting economic hardship.

Like other post-Soviet regimes, the Kazakh leadership uses a myriad combination of tools to squeeze civil society. Legal and practical forms of repression are compounded by increasing restrictions to independent funding, gradually suffocating independent thinking and activism in Kazakh society. The west should open its eyes to the shrinking space in Kazakhstan and do more to support independent civil society as a counter-weight to the increasing state monopolisation of power. [...]

According to estimates by the human rights NGO International Legal Initiative Public Foundation, more than 1,000 people were arrested in the biggest city, Almaty, with hundreds more in the capital Astana and many more across the rest of the country. Citizens were protesting not only the new changes to the Land Code, which would allow the sale of land to foreigners, but deep-rooted social and economic problems – unemployment, lack of housing, lack of quality education and poor access to healthcare and medicines. Underlying all these issues is a growing distrust of state power and fear among the population that Kazakhstan’s independence could be lost to systemic corruption. [...]

One symptom of consistent state monopolisation in all spheres is the continual absence of a free market economy. Today, 80% of Kazakhstan’s economy is under state control in various forms (state-owned enterprises, quasi-public sector holdings, joint-stock companies, private companies reliant on the public sector for tenders and contracts etc.). At the same time, corruption has become systemic and is threatening the national interests of the country. The crisis that hit the Kazakh economy with the fall in oil prices has intensified protest moods in a society where 28%, or 2.5m people, are either self-employed or lack stable jobs and incomes. [...]

Beyond organisational restrictions, in the criminal sphere, leaders of public associations are treated on a par with leaders of criminal groups under Kazakh laws intended to address terrorism and extremism. The minimum term of punishment under such law is 10 years imprisonment. Crimes deemed to be “extremist” in nature extends to vague activity such as “the incitement of social discord”. In the absence of a clear definition, the premise of “social discord” allows the judicial system to punish public figures and activists merely for criticising the authorities. 

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Scientific American: The Other Reason to Shift away from Coal: Air Pollution that Kills Thousands Every Year

But there is another, equally important argument for transitioning to clean fuels. Tens of thousands of Americans die every year from old-fashioned air pollution, generated by electric power plants that burn fossil fuels. Estimates vary, but between 7,500 and 52,000 people in the United States meet early deaths because of small particles resulting from power plant emissions. That’s huge. It is roughly comparable to the 40,000 people that died in car crashes in 2016.

In a recent research study with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon, I analyzed how human health and the environment would be affected if all coal-fired power plants in the United States switched to natural gas—an extension of a trend that is already underway. We found that such a shift would have tremendous positive effects on human health in America. We estimate that low natural gas prices and state policies that move utilities away from coal are savings tens of thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars each year. [...]

The researchers measured pollution in detail. After adjusting for factors like smoking, they found that the death rate was 26 percent higher in the most polluted cities than in the cleanest ones. They wrote, “Air pollution was positively associated with death from lung cancer and cardiopulmonary disease …. Mortality was most strongly associated with air pollution with fine particulates, including sulfates.” Fine particulate pollution is a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets, many times smaller than a human hair.

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Motherboard: Two Dudes Wrote a Fake Penis Study and Got It Published to Slam Gender Research

The 3,000-word "paper" is dense and winding, and argues that the penis is better thought of a social construct than an actual anatomical body part. It goes on to state that if we shift our societal understanding of the penis, we could better combat climate change. [...]

It this feels like it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, that's because it wasn't supposed to. The authors Peter Boyle and Jamie Lindsay were actually pseudonyms for Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, two skeptic, atheist, shitdisturbers with backgrounds in philosophy and mathematics, respectively.

After publication Boghossian and Lindsay published a confessional in Skeptic magazine stating that they intentionally wrote a barely-coherent argument in an effort to bring a critical lens to both pay-to-publish journals and the field of gender studies. [...]

But other scientists have come to the defense of the field of gender studies, pointing out that flawed, weak, or incorrect papers get published in practically all disciplines, including medicine and math. The journal in question also isn't as well-regarded as Boghossian and Lindsay claimed, meaning the larger issue may lie with predatory, pay-for-publication, open access journals which charge authors a fee to publish material, creative a clear conflict of interest. This problem has long been identified and expands far beyond gender or social sciences.

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Vox: What happens when you treat health care like a soap opera

Cable news treated a major health care vote like an episode of House of Cards. That kind of coverage might make for entertaining television, but it badly warps the way viewers at home understand what's at stake in the fight over health care.

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