PZ Myers Just Slays Me

Update: PandaAmanda gutted the cretin with an ice cream scoop. Ha ha! That was loads of fun to read.

---

I just finished reading PZ Myers' hosting at Pharyngula of The Eighth Skeptic's Circle. The post itself was very interesting and informative, as I knew it would be.

What really amused me was the cretin who trolled his comments. I've had my own personal run-ins with this particular cretin, who engages in ad hominem attacks, baseless claims without any valid resource material to back them up, and loads of logic fallacies. I was a favorite target of his for a couple of years, before he started his blog. He came after me on my blog before, and I just laughed. He trolls to disrupt blogs, mailing lists, and bulletin boards. He also trolls to attract people to his blog. PZ figured him out real fast. He asked commenters to ignore him, but not until after he filleted him with a butter knife. I won't name him or link to him. Why give him the attention he craves? Just go to the Skeptic's Circle link. You'll figure out who it is right away.

One thing this guy claimed is that women and men earn about equal pay without stating the rest of the facts. That's a common lie told by anti-feminists, in particular the Independent Women's Forum. In fact, this guy cited IWF as his "source." That was laughable. I had to say something, since I was enjoying watching him getting keel-hauled so thoroughly. This is what I wrote:

I see you're enjoying yourself poking holes in RB's drivel, PZ (and everyone else here). I've known him for years, from his men's and fathers' rights nonsense. He's a gnat.

Check this out:

RB, citing the Independent Women's Forum (an anti-feminist group):

"A study of the gender wage gap conducted by economist June O' Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that women earn 98 percent of what men do when controlled for experience, education, and number of years on the job."

RB conveniently left out the fact that the 98% figure refers to recent college grads in low-paying, entry level jobs. These are people who have never married, with no children, and little job experience. In those kinds of jobs, women earn 98% of what men earn. As they progress in their careers, marry, and have children, women's wages drop to 76 cents to the man's dollar. This drop is due to both discrimination against women and women taking on the bulk of the responsibilities inherent in childrearing that men overall do not take on.

Here's my cite: "The Pay Gap - Causes, Consequences and Actions New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women" (Canada). This is a PDF file.

Excerpt:

Both sexes begin their careers with similar, low, earnings. It is after their mid-twenties that the gap progressively widens. Canadian women aged 15 to 24 who worked full-time full-year in 1994 earned $19,269, 90% of what men earn, while women aged 55 and over earned $26,000, 65% of what men earn. As women age, their earnings remain almost static.

Marital status is another, related, factor. Never-married (single but not necessary childless) women who work full-time earn 92% of what never-married men earn: both earn a relatively low wage. Never-married men, never-married women and married women all earn approximately the same (in Canada, $28-30,000; in N.B., $22-23,000 in full-time annual earnings), significantly less than married men (in Canada, $43,300; in N.B., about $37,000). Married men have higher average earnings than all other groups of men and women. No group of women, whether never-married, married, separated, young or old, earn as much as married men.

The relatively small population of never-married women aged 35 to 44 who work full-time full-year earn $32,200, which is 85% of what never-married men their age earn and 72% of what all men their age earn; never-married women aged 45 to 54 earn $36,000, which is 93% of what never-married men their age earn and 78% of what all men their age earn. Higher levels of education correlate with higher earnings for both men and women. Women with post-secondary qualifications have higher average earnings than other women, but they have lower earnings than similarly qualified men. Canadian women with university degrees who worked full-time full-year in 1994 earned $40,252 or 72% of what men earned.

(Never-married, therefore mostly young, women with university degrees who worked full-time full-year earned $38,871 or 95% of what their never-married male counterparts earned in 1994. Married university-educated females, an older group, earned 68% of what their male counterparts earned.) A study of one class of university graduates revealed that the women's earnings were slightly higher on average than the men's, but even for these highly educated workers, the gap widened progressively over time.

As usual, RB plays fast and loose with the facts.

Just for kicks, everyone check out this page - The Pig Page. Scroll down to get a photo and some choice flotsam from dear old RB.

Fathers' Rights - In Their Own Words

PZ said "huh?" to an entry by Dean from Dean's World. Specifically, the entry was by Trudy Schuett, of the anti-feminist DesertLight Journal. Here is what PZ had to say about that entry:

However, this article from Dean's World on Men's Issues and Stats has but one virtue: irony. Look at these opening lines in disbelief.

It seems the ignorance of feminists is not only alive and well, but growing at an astonishing rate. Or maybe it’s deliberate, this dissemination of obvious untruth. I vote for the deliberate, as I’ve never met a feminist or women’s shelter advocate yet who could hold an entire conversation without resorting to at least one fabrication.

If you must read further, watch the phony strawman go up in the second paragraph, too. Ouch.

Schuett had cited a bibliography by Martin Fiebert as "proof" that men and women are equally abusive. That bibliography has been making the rounds of men's rights web sites for aeons. What its supporters don't say is that most of the "research" cited in that bibliography utilized the Conflict Tactic Scales (CTS) in order to come to their conclusions. The CTS is rife with problems, the least of which is that they isolate individual physical "hits" between men and women in a relationship without taking the hits within the context of the abusive incident or abusive relationship. They also don't consider other, existing problems of domestic violence, such as emotional, mental, legal, and economic abuse. They don't consider sexual assault or rape in their tabulations. They don't consider the severity of a physical "hit," counting a slap as the same as a hard punch that leaves bruising or worse. Strauss, Gelles, and Steinmetz are the researchers who created the CTS. Gelles himself has said the following regarding the CTS and men's rights types who take them out of context in their drive to "prove" that men and women are equally abusive:

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE FACTOIDS
by Richard J. Gelles
University of Rhode Island Family Violence Research Program

[Excerpt]
MYTH: WOMEN ARE AS VIOLENT AS ARE MEN, AND
WOMEN INITIATE VIOLENCE AS OFTEN AS DO MEN.

"This factoid cites research by Murray Straus, Suzanne Steinmetz, and Richard Gelles, as well as a host of other self-report surveys. Those using this factoid tend to conveniently leave out the fact that Straus and his colleague's surveys as well as data collected from the National Crime Victimization Survey (Bureau of Justice Statistics) consistently find that no matter what the rate of violence or who initiates the violence, women are 7 to 10 times more likely to be injured in acts of intimate violence than are men."

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE:
NOT AN EVEN PLAYING FIELD
By Richard J. Gelles

"[S]elf-described battered husbands, men’s rights group members and some scholars maintain that there are significant numbers of battered men, that battered men are indeed a social problem worthy of attention and that there are as many male victims of violence as female. The last claim is a significant distortion of well-grounded research data."

[...]

"[W]hen we look at injuries resulting from violence involving male and female partners, it is categorically false to imply that there are the same number of "battered" men as there are battered women. Research shows that nearly 90 percent of battering victims are women and only about ten percent are men."

Despite the fact that nowhere with any validity is it believed that men and women are equally abusive, men's rights types still like to trot out that nonsense. I wasn't surprised to see the "men and women are equally abusive" crap (and Fiebert's bibliography) mentioned at DesertLight Journal. That's where I expect to see it. All I did was roll my eyes when I saw the name "Fiebert." I knew right away what it was.

I haven't entered the Skeptic's Circle yet with a post, but I may enter one this week, as soon as I learn what the topics are. I've been lax in entering posts for Tangled Bank. It's time for me to enter that one again.