An anonymous site enables even highly educated people to say "incorrect" things
As far as one can tell, it is realism that is being described as "toxic" below. Saying that men and women are born different and that blacks have a lower average IQ is pure reality but the Leftist elite have managed to demonize any mention of such things. So it is actually rather good that there is a place where people can describe reality freely
Anonymous comments with racist, sexist and abusive messages that were posted for years on a jobs-related website for economists originated from numerous leading US universities, according to research released Thursday.
Some economists have long condemned the website, Economics Job Market Rumors, for its toxic content.
The site, known by its acronym EJMR, is run by an anonymous individual and is not connected to a university or other institution.
That fact had fed speculation that those who posted hateful messages on it were mostly online cranks who might not be economists.
Yet the new research indicates that users of the website include individuals at top-tier colleges and universities, including Harvard, Stanford and the University of Chicago, and many others.
“Our analysis reveals that the users who post on EJMR are predominantly economists, including those working in the upper echelons of academia, government, and the private sector,” the paper concluded. It was written by Florian Ederer, a management professor at Boston University, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management, and Kyle Jensen, an associate dean at Yale.
“It’s not just a few bad apples,” Ederer said in a presentation Thursday at a conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. “It’s very, very widespread. And the toxicity is widespread.”
The revelations have provoked debate on social media among economists about privacy, free speech and online abuse.
Some economists, particularly women who have been attacked on the site, say they hope the revelations lead colleges and universities to investigate the postings.
Others have expressed concern that the research could lead to a “witch hunt” among those who posted on the site.
Speaking in an interview with The Associated Press, Goldsmith-Pinkham sought to dispel those concerns, saying the group does not plan on “releasing anything identifying” individuals.
Nearly 2,000 people watched a livestream of the paper’s presentation Thursday on YouTube.
That was far more than the 100 or so who watched other NBER presentations the same day, suggesting widespread interest in the topic among academic economists.
Some economists, particularly women who have been attacked on the site, say they hope the revelations lead colleges and universities to investigate the postings. Above, Harvard University.
The bigoted content on the website makes women and nonwhite economists often feel unwelcome in a profession that is already struggling to diversify, Goldsmith-Pinkham said.
Black Americans, for example, are more likely to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics or other social sciences than in economics.
“The idea that in an anonymous space, people behave in this way, it reflects pretty poorly on the profession,” Goldmsith-Pinkham said.
The researchers used publicly available data to determine the internet addresses for about two-thirds of the more than 7 million posts that have been made on the site since 2010.
They classified about 10% of those posts as “toxic” because of their racist or sexist content.
These posts included the use of racial slurs and assertions that women have smaller brains than men.
About 11% of the postings on EJMR, the researchers found, originated from among several hundred universities, including those they classified as the top 25 research universities.
On average, 13% of the posts from universities were considered toxic.
“Things were WAY better when women were focused on rearing children and feeding their husbands,” said one post highlighted by the researchers.
“The biggest enemies of America are: Blks,” read another.
The site has drawn criticism since at least 2017, when Alice Wu, an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote a paper highlighting the sexist nature of many of the postings on the site.
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Minimum Wage Laws Increase Homelessness, New Study Finds
One thing Lang Martinez said he learned after living on the streets of Ventura County, California , was that being homeless was worse than being in prison.
“It’s a different lifestyle. You think prison is bad? No. Prison’s got structure,” Martinez, a former Los Angeles gang member-turned-advocate against homelessness, recently told California Insider. “The streets got what they call rules of engagement.”
Though Martinez agrees with the conventional wisdom that mental illness and drug abuse are the primary catalysts for homelessness, new academic research suggests the picture is more complicated.
A fresh study out of University of California, San Francisco suggests that losing income is the single biggest driver of homelessness—ahead of mental illness, drug addiction, and other causes—the study authors say.
“I think it’s really important to note how [desperate] poor people are, and how much it is their poverty and the high housing costs that are leading to this crisis,” said Margot Kushel, a physician and leader of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, which conducted the study.
California is home to approximately 30% of the entire U.S. homeless population (115,491 people as of 2022 ), and some advocates expressed hope that the new research would “inform a statewide strategy” to combat the problem.
Separate research, however, suggests California’s own policies have exacerbated its homelessness epidemic, including a new paper written by University of California economist Seth J. Hill titled “ Minimum Wages and Homelessness ” published last month.
Utilizing data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other sources, Hill examined 100 cities from 2006-2019 to determine the relationship between wage floors and homelessness. The findings are bleak.
“Merging administrative data from HUD to state and local minimum wage laws suggests that minimum wages induce increases in homeless counts,” Hill writes. “When cities raise their minimum wage by 10%, relative homeless counts increase by three to four percent.”
Hill’s paper will not be the last word on the relationship between minimum wage laws and homelessness, but it provides yet more evidence of a stubborn reality minimum wage proponents often overlook: Minimum wage laws often harm the very people they are designed to help.
For decades, it was an all but universally accepted economic gospel that increases in the minimum wage came with adverse trade-offs. Many economists often pointed out these adverse consequences, including job losses, often fell on workers with the least skills and those who were the least valued.
“Among the effects of a minimum wage law, when it is effective, is that many unskilled and inexperienced workers are priced out of a job, when employers do not find them worth what the law specifies,” the economist Thomas Sowell once observed.
This is why even left-leaning publications such as the New York Times, until relatively recently, conceded that using minimum wage laws to combat poverty was an “old, honorable — and fundamentally flawed” idea because it would “price working poor people out of the job market.”
That minimum wage hikes increase unemployment was once hardly a debatable subject among economists, and even today a scouring of the literature shows that a “clear preponderance” of the scientific research shows a job-killing impact.
So in light of this evidence and the more recent UCSF findings, Hill’s conclusion should not surprise us.
“To the extent minimum wages cause disemployment of low skill-workers, the lost job can exacerbate existing economic insecurity and lessen ability to pay for housing,” he writes.
This finding is not just tragic but ironic. Politicians and wage-justice fundamentalists, who take pride in the idea they are fighting poverty by advocating for higher minimum wage laws, are not just costing countless lower-skilled workers jobs. They are actually pushing many of them into homelessness.
Again, this should not be a surprise. Decades ago, the economist Murray Rothbard famously observed the absurdity in the idea that banning jobs was a path to prosperity.
“Remember that the minimum wage law provides no jobs,” Rothbard wrote , “it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs are the inevitable result.”
This is not to say wage floors are the sole cause of homelessness, which is a subject as complicated as human beings. Lang Martinez is no doubt correct when he says substance abuse and mental illness play a significant role.
But these realities should not overshadow another truth: For many struggling people, a lower-paying job is not “exploitation.” It’s a lifeline.
https://blog.independent.org/2023/07/12/minimum-wage-increase-homelessness/
**************************************************"Barbie" runs on hatred of men
It's feminist fanaticism
Reviews from director Greta Gerwig’s live-action “Barbie” film are starting to come in, but unlike the doll that American girls have played with since 1959, they are anything but glowing.
I refused to take my daughter to see the film with a good, old-fashioned father’s “Maybe next week,” which is almost always a softer way of telling a child “no.”
But others have boldly gone to theaters, paid for tickets for the film and have done a lot of us a service by taking one for the team.
The consensus is that “Barbie” is every bit as “woke,” anti-man and pro-feminist as one might have predicted for such a Hollywood creation in the Year of Our Lord 2023.
A story about a diverse cast of Barbie dolls where the lead escapes a fictional paradise could never rely on plausibility in its story. It wouldn’t need to, if it simply made itself entertaining and perhaps avoided forcing a “trans woman” on its viewers.
No one complained that April’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” was unrealistic — like the game, it is a story of an Italian plumber designed by Japanese people who saves a princess from turtles.
But that story was fun, true to its subject matter, loyal to its fans and was the antithesis of “woke.”
According to film reviewer Christian Toto, “Barbie” had an opportunity to similarly cash in on its position as an institution, but took a predictable feminist route, spoiling all the fun.
Toto is a rational cinephile with a great eye for details and a nose for agendas, so his review was all I needed to read.
According to Toto, the film ultimately throws nostalgia and fun out the window for an opportunity to force its audience to hear an unrelenting message about “patriarchy.”
Toto was generous to a few individual performances and complimented some of the movie’s visual effects.
But he concluded, “Don’t let ‘Barbie’s’ dreamy, Day-Glo visuals fool you… This movie hates men so much it hurts.”
Toto added:
“Gerwig, along with [writing] collaborator Noah Baumbach, have an agenda to push that drains the joy from their creation time after time. And it starts from the opening minutes with a cringe-worthy close-up of the all-female Supreme Court (where’s Amy Coney Barrett?).
“Feminism! Empowerment! Down with the Patriarchy!”
Toto concluded the movie, which he said “runs on hate,” had numerous chances to become fun, but derailed itself every few moments when another character delivered a predictable speech with political undertones.
Writing for The New York Post, Johnny Oleksinksy also panned the 114-minute flick.
While awarding the film one star out of a possible four, Oleksinsky described “Barbie” as “an exhausting, spastic, self-absorbed and overwrought disappointment” that attacks consumerism and mentions the alleged fascism of its leading character.
Laughably, this film was produced while someone, somewhere at Mattel probably rubbed their hands together and thought of all the incoming sales.
Oleksinsky said the film’s numerous Ken dolls are all portrayed as imbeciles.
“If you’re hoping to experience a multiverse of unique, strong-personality Barbies, you’re better off going to Toys “R” Us after a few martinis,” the reviewer stated.
As Jack Posobiec, the film might be “the most anti-male film ever made.”
In short, “Barbie” is not a harmless children’s story about a doll every American girl either owned or was aware of while growing up.
The film is another “woke” propaganda engine that focuses more on the agenda of those who made it than potential box office returns.
That is the same mindset that has cost Disney an estimated $900 million over recent flops that insisted on forcing identity politics into stories that are supposed to be an escape for the moviegoing public, Marca reported.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/warning-barbie-not-harmless-nostalgia-agenda-runs-hate
*************************************************Bank licences at risk if UK customers dumped over views
Coutts is the prestige tentacle of NatWest Bank
British banks risk having their licences stripped from them if they dump customers because of their political views under a crackdown aimed at protecting freedom of speech.
The move by the British government to make the right to free speech a condition of banking permits follows a decision by Coutts – the bank of choice for the royal family – to close the accounts of Nigel Farage because his right-wing views did not “align with our values”.
In the wake of an uproar over Coutts’ treatment of the former leader of the UK Independence Party (Ukip), banks will also be required to give an “explicit” reason for closing accounts, and customers will have the right to appeal.
A government source told The Times that people’s right to express their views was sacrosanct. The source added that ministers believed “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and greater transparency would force banks to change their ways.
Coutts was condemned by ministers on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) for its decision to close Mr Farage’s accounts after an internal review referred to him as a “disingenuous grifter” whose views could be regarded as “xenophobic and racist”.
“This is wrong. No one should be barred from using basic services for their political views. Free speech is the cornerstone of our democracy,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said. Home Secretary Suella Braverman accused the banks of “politically biased dogma” bordering on “sinister”.
The BBC had reported Coutts closed Mr Farage’s accounts because he did not have enough money. However, a 40-page dossier obtained by Mr Farage from the bank states the decision was made because of his views.
The dossier included the minutes from a November 17, 2022, meeting when the Coutts wealth reputational committee settled on cancelling Mr Farage’s accounts.
“The committee did not think continuing to bank NF (Nigel Farage) was compatible with Coutts given his publicly stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation,” the report says. “While it is accepted that no criminal convictions have resulted, commentary and behaviours that do not align to the bank’s purposes and values have been demonstrated.”
Andrew Griffith, the economic secretary to the Treasury, has asked officials for advice on legislation to protect free speech, with the focus now on inserting those protections into banking licences.
“It would be of serious concern if financial services were being denied to anyone exercising their right to lawful free speech,” he said. “Businesses have the right to protect against reputational risks, eg criminal activity, but the privilege of a banking licence in a democracy should imply a duty not to ‘debank’ because you disagree with someone’s views.”
Mr Farage is threatening to take legal action against Coutts over claims his accounts were closed for financial reasons. He did not dispute that his finances fell below the Coutts threshold of £3m ($5.68m) in savings or £1m in loans or investment, but said that had not been an issue in the past.
Mr Farage told The Times that he had been informed that an individual at NatWest, which owns Coutts, was behind the briefing to the BBC. He said Dame Alison Rose, the chief executive of NatWest, had “questions to answer”.
“I am told that the briefing given to the BBC about my personal finances – and I question whether it was ethical or legal to do so – was given by NatWest,” he told The Times.
“This is not just about Coutts, this is about the whole banking group. Ultimately in any organisation the fish rots from the head down. Alison Rose has questions to answer.”
Mr Farage was one of the leaders of the Brexit campaign and on Thursday it emerged that Coutts’ managing director and head of private clients, Camilla Stowell, had pushed for Britain to remain in the EU and believed Brexit had damaged the economy.
Ms Stowell was asked last year whether there needed to be a “conversation in respect of Brexit” and the economy. She replied: “Personally, I was a Remainer. So I fear that, yes, we know that Brexit is having an impact.”
Mr Farage told London’s Daily Telegraph that it was unwise for a banking executive to reveal how they had voted in the EU referendum and that he believed the opinions expressed by Ms Stowell were reflected in the bank’s report on him.
“That report had a special kind of prejudice that you could only get from upper middle-class white living in London,” he said.
“It’s a twisted sense of priorities, it is absolutely metropolitan elite prejudice.”
Conservative MP David Davis said NatWest’s conduct “ought to jeopardise” its banking license and worry its 19 million customers. He also asked Mr Sunak to force every British bank to inform the government of all accounts cancelled for non-commercial reasons.
NatWest and the BBC declined to comment. Coutts issued a statement saying: “It is not Coutts’ policy to close accounts solely on the basis of legally held views. Decisions are not taken lightly and involve a number of factors, including commercial viability, reputational considerations and legal requirement.”
It added Mr Farage had been offered a NatWest account
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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