#also i think the engage models ARE slightly inaccurate but not as much as people are claiming

[fiery-emblems]

People going off about the Engage height chart again. I gotta admit part of the reason I like Soren a little taller is that it makes sense, but part of the reason is that so many people who are adamant about Soren being a "short king" seem to be doing it because of yaoi tropes and I kind of hate that.

Why do like 90% of ship arts just straight up portray Soren as a girl. Why is he suddenly a meek UwU soft boy?

[silvokrent]

RWBY Character Analysis: Pietro and Penny Polendina

Up until now I’ve been keeping quiet about my opinions on the newest volume, in no small part because my personal life has been one absurd setback after another, and I haven’t had the energy to engage in fandom meta. If you do want to know what my current opinion of RWBY is, go over to @itsclydebitches blog, search through her #rwby-recaps tag, and read every single one. At this point, her metas are basically an itemized list of all my grievances with the show. I highly recommend you check ’em out.

Or, if you don’t feel like reading several hours’ worth of recaps, then go find a sheet of paper, give yourself a papercut, and then squeeze a lemon into it. That should give you an accurate impression of my feelings.

In truth, I have a lot to say about the show, particularly how I think CRWBY has mishandled the plot, characters, tone, and intended message of their series. And while I enjoy dissecting RWBY with what amounts to mad scientist levels of glee, I think plenty of other folks have already discussed V7′s and V8′s various issues in greater depth and with far more eloquence. Any contribution I could theoretically make at this point would be somewhat redundant.

That being said, I’d like to talk about something that’s been bothering me for a while, which (to my knowledge) no one else in the fandom has brought up. (And feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.)

Today’s topic of concern is Pietro Polendina, and his relationship with Penny.

And because I’m absolutely certain this post is going to be controversial and summon anonymous armchair critics to fill my inbox with sweary claptrap, I may as well just come out and say it:

Pietro Polendina, as he’s currently portrayed in the show, is an inherently abusive parental figure.

Let me take a second to clarify that I don’t think it was RWBY’s intention to portray Pietro that way. Much like other aspects of the show, a lot of nuance is often lost when discussing the difference between intention versus implementation, or telling versus showing. It’s what happens when a writer tries to characterize a person one way, but in execution portrays them in an entirely different light. Compounding this problem is what feels like a series of rather myopic writing decisions that started as early as Volume 2, concerning Penny’s sense of agency, and how the canon would bear out the implications of an autonomous being grappling with her identity. It’s infuriating that the show has spent seven seasons staunchly refusing to ask any sort of ethical questions surrounding her existence, only to then—with minimal setup—give us Pietro’s “heartfelt” emotional breakdown when he has to choose between “saving” Penny or “sacrificing” her for the greater good.

Yeah, no thanks.

If we want to talk about why this moment read as hollow and insincere, we need to first make sure everyone’s on the same page.

Spoilers for V8.E5 - “Amity.” Let’s not waste any time.

In light of the newest episode and its—shall we say—questionable implications, I figured now was the best time to bring it up while the thoughts were still fresh in my mind. (Because nothing generates momentum quite like frothing-at-the-mouth rage.)

The first time we’re told anything about Pietro, it comes from an exchange between Penny and Ruby. From V2.E2 - “A Minor Hiccup.”

Penny: I've never been to another kingdom before. My father asked me not to venture out too far, but... You have to understand, my father loves me very much. He just worries a lot.

Ruby: Believe me, I know the feeling. But why not let us know you were okay?

Penny: I…was asked not to talk to you. Or Weiss. Or Blake. Or Yang. Anybody, really.

Ruby: Was your dad that upset?

Penny: No, it wasn’t my father.

The scene immediately diverts our attention to a public unveiling of the AK-200. A hologram of James Ironwood is presenting this newest model of Atlesian Knight to a crowd of enthusiastic spectators, along with the Atlesian Paladin, a piloted mech. During the demonstration, James informs his audience that Atlas’ military created them with the intent of removing people from the battlefield and mitigating casualties (presumably against Grimm).

Penny is quickly spotted by several soldiers, and flees. Ruby follows, and in the process the two are nearly hit by a truck. Penny’s display of strength draws a crowd and prompts her to retreat into an alley, where Ruby learns that Penny isn’t “a real girl.”

This scene continues in the next episode, “Painting the Town…”

Penny: Most girls are born, but I was made. I’m the world’s first synthetic person capable of generating an Aura. [Averts her gaze.] I’m not real…

After Ruby assures her that no, you don’t have to be organic in order to have personhood, Penny proceeds to hug her with slightly more force than necessary.

Ruby: [Muffled noise of pain.] I can see why your father would want to protect such a delicate flower!

Penny: [Releases Ruby.] Oh, he’s very sweet! My father’s the one that built me! I’m sure you would love him.

Ruby: Wow. He built you all by himself?

Penny: Well, almost! He had some help from Mr. Ironwood.

Ruby: The general? Wait, is that why those soldiers were after you?

Penny: They like to protect me, too!

Ruby: They don't think you can protect yourself?

Penny: They're not sure if I'm ready yet. One day, it will be my job to save the world, but I still have a lot left to learn. That's why my father let me come to the Vytal Festival. I want to see what it's like in the rest of the world, and test myself in the Tournament.

Their conversation is interrupted by the sound of the approaching soldiers from earlier. Despite Ruby’s protests, Penny proceeds to yeet her into the nearby dumpster, all while reassuring her that it’s to keep Ruby out of trouble, not her. When the soldiers arrive, they ask her if she’s okay, then proceed to lightly scold her for causing a scene. Penny’s told that her father “isn’t going to be happy about this,” and is then politely asked (not ordered; asked) to let them escort her back.

Let’s take a second to break down these events.

When these two episodes first aired, the wording and visuals (“No, it wasn’t my father,” followed by the cutaway to James unveiling the automatons) implied that James was the one forbidding her from interacting with other people. It’s supposed to make you think that James is being restrictive and harsh, while Pietro is meant as a foil—the sweet, but cautious father figure. But here’s the thing: both of these depictions are inaccurate, and frankly, Penny’s the one at fault here. Penny blew her cover within minutes of interacting with Ruby—a scenario that Penny was responsible for because she was sneaking off without permission. Penny is a classified, top-secret military project, as made clear by the fact that she begs Ruby to not say anything to anyone. Penny is in full acknowledgement that her existence, if made public, could cause massive issues for her (something that she’s clearly experienced before, if her line, “You’re taking this extraordinarily well,” is anything to go by).

But here’s the thing—keeping Penny on a short leash wasn’t a unilateral decision made by James. That was Pietro’s choice as well. “My father asked me not to venture out too far,” “Your father isn’t going to be happy about this”—as much as this scene is desperately trying to put the onus on James for Penny’s truant behavior, Pietro canonically shares that blame. And Penny (to some extent) is in recognition of the fact that she did something wrong.

Back in Volumes 1 – 3, before the series butchered James’ characterization, these moments were meant as pretty clever examples of foreshadowing and subverting the controlling-military-general trope. This scene is meant to illustrate that yes, Penny is craving social interaction outside of military personnel as a consequence of being hidden, but that hiding her is also a necessity. It’s a complicated situation with no easy answer, but it’s also something of a necessary evil (as Penny’s close call with the truck and her disclosing that intel to Ruby are anything to go by).

Let’s skip ahead to Volume 7, shortly after Watts tampered with the drone footage and framed her for several deaths. In V7.E7 - “Worst Case Scenario,” a newscaster informs us that people in Atlas and Mantle want Penny to be deactivated, despite James’ insistence that the footage was doctored and Penny didn’t go on a killing spree. The public’s unfavorable opinion of Penny—a sentiment that Jacques of all people embodies when he brings it up in V7.E8—reinforces V2’s assessment of why keeping her secret was necessary. Not only is her existence controversial because Aura research is still taboo, but people are afraid that a mechanical person with military-grade hardware could be hacked and weaponized against them. (Something which Volume 8 actually validates when James has Watts take control of her in the most recent episode.)

But I digress.

We’re taken to Pietro’s lab, where Penny is hooked up to some sort of recharge/docking station. Ruby, Weiss, and Maria look on in concern while the machine is uploading the visual data from her systems. There’s one part of their conversation I want to focus on in particular:

Pietro: When the general first challenged us to find the next breakthrough in defense technology, most of my colleagues pursued more obvious choices. I was one of the few who believed in looking inward for inspiration.

Ruby: You wanted a protector with a soul.

Pietro: I did. And when General Ironwood saw her, he did too. Much to my surprise, the Penny Project was chosen over all the other proposals.

Allow me to break down their conversation so we can fully appreciate what he’s actually saying.

The Penny Project was picked as the candidate for the next breakthrough in defense technology.

Pietro wanted a protector with a SOUL.

In RWBY, Aura and souls are one of the defining characteristics of personhood. Personhood is central to Penny’s identity and internal conflict (particularly when we consider that she’s based on Pinocchio). That’s why Penny accepts Ruby’s reassurances that she’s a real person. That’s why she wants to have emotional connections with others.

What makes that revelation disturbing is when you realize that Pietro knowingly created a child soldier.

Look, there’s no getting around this. Pietro fully admits that he wanted to create a person—a human being—a fucking child—as a "defense technology” to throw at the Grimm (and by extension, Salem). Everything, from the language he uses, to the mere fact that he entered Penny in the Vytal Tournament as a proving ground where she could “test [her]self,” tells us that he either didn’t consider or didn’t care about the implications behind his proposal.

When you break it all down, this is what we end up with:

“Hey, I have an idea: Why don’t we make a person, cram as many weapons as we can fit into that person, and then inform her every day for the rest of her life that she was built for the sole purpose of fighting monsters, just so we don’t have to risk the lives of others. Let’s then take away anything remotely resembling autonomy, minimize her interactions with people, and basically indoctrinate her into thinking that this is something she wants for herself. Oh, and in case she starts to raise objections, remind her that I donated part of my soul to her. If we make her feel guilty about this generous sacrifice I made so she could have the privilege of existing, she won’t question our motives. Next, let’s give her a taste of freedom by having her fight in a gladiatorial blood sport so that we can prove our child soldier is an effective killer. And then, after she’s brutally murdered on international television, we can rebuild her and assign her to protecting an entire city that’s inherently prejudiced against her, all while I brood in my lab about how sad I am.”

Holy fuck. Watts might be a morally bankrupt asshole, but at least his proposal didn’t hinge on manufacturing state-of-the-art living weapons. They should have just gone with his idea.

(Which, hilariously enough, they did. Watts is the inventor of the Paladins—Paladins which, I’ll remind you, were invented so the army could remove people from the battlefield. You know, people. Kind of like what Penny is.)

Do you see why this entire scene might have pissed me off? Even if the show didn’t intend for any of this to be the case, when you think critically about the circumstances there’s no denying the tacit implications.

To reiterate, V8.E5 is the episode where Pietro says, and I quote:

“I don’t care about the big picture! I care about my daughter! I lost you before. Are you asking me to go through that again? No. I want the chance to watch you live your life.”

Oh, yeah? And what life is that? The one where she’s supposed to kill Grimm and literally nothing else? You do realize that she died specifically because you made her for the purpose of fighting, right?

No one, literally no one, was holding a gun to Pietro’s head and telling him that he had to build a living weapon. That was his idea. He chose to do that.

Remember when Cinder said, “I don’t serve anyone! And you wouldn’t either, if you weren’t built that way.” She…basically has a point. Penny has never been given the option to explore the world in a capacity where she wasn’t charged with defending it by her father. We know she doesn’t have many friends, courtesy of Ironwood dissuading her against it in V7. But I’m left with the troubling realization that the show (and the fandom), in their crusade to vilify James, are ignoring the fact that Pietro is also complicit in this behavior by virtue of being her creator. If we condemn the man that prevents Penny from having relationships, then what will we do to the man who forced her into that existence in the first place?

Being her “father” has given him a free pass to overlook the ethics of having a child who was created with a pre-planned purpose. How the hell did the show intend for Pietro to reconcile “I want you to live your life” with “I created you so you’d spend your life defending the world”? It viscerally reminds me of the sort of narcissistic parents who have kids because they want to pass on the family name, or continue their bloodline, or have live-in caregivers when they get older, only on a larger and much more horrific scale. And that’s fucked up.

Now, I’m not saying I’m against having a conflict like this in the show. In fact, I’d love to have a character who has to grapple with her own humanity while questioning the environment she grew up in. Penny is a character who is extremely fascinating because of all the potential she represents—a young woman who through a chance encounter befriends a group of strangers, and over time, is exposed to freedoms and friendships she was previously denied. Slowly, she begins to unlearn the mindset she was indoctrinated with, and starts to petition for agency and autonomy. Pietro is forced to confront the fact that what he did was traumatic and cruel, and that his love for her doesn’t erase the harm he unintentionally subjected her to, nor does it change the fact that he knowingly burdened a person with a responsibility she never consented to. There’s a wealth of character growth and narrative payoff buried here, but like most things in RWBY, it was either underdeveloped or not thought through all the way.

The wholesome father-daughter relationship the show wants Pietro and Penny to have is fundamentally contradicted by the nature of her existence, and the fact that no one (besides the villains) calls attention to it. I’d love for them to have that sort of dynamic, but the show had to do more to earn it. Instead, it’ll forever be another item on RWBY’s ever-growing list of disappointments—

Because Pietro’s remorse is more artificial than Penny could ever hope to be.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT A

Good programmers often want to be doctors than who want to meet him. But I think they pay more because the company would go out of business and the people would be dispersed.1 The phrase seemed almost grammatically ill-formed. We started Viaweb with $10,000 in seed money from our friend Julian.2 The surprising thing about throwaway programs is that, like the temporary buildings built at so many American universities during World War II, they often don't get thrown away. That's what makes sex and drugs so dangerous. When you're launching planes they have to be trimmed properly; the engines have to be at full power; the pilot has to be the series A stage. Which means if it becomes the norm for founders to retain board control after a series A is clearly heard-of. The use of credentials was an attempt to axiomatize computation.3 When you're deciding what to do.

This is too big a problem to solve. Hackers share the surgeon's secret pleasure in popping zits.4 But the two phenomena rapidly fused to produce a principle that now seems obvious: paying energetic young people market rates, and getting correspondingly high performance from them.5 I can't draw.6 How would you do it? Why haven't we just been measuring actual performance? In the earliest stage, because that's where the money is. Misleading the child is just a series of web pages. Think about where credentialism first appeared: in selecting candidates for large organizations. And once you apply that kind of thing for fun. Most smart people don't do that very well.

I learned it hadn't been so neat, and the problem now seems to be fixed. It was small and powerful and cheap, as promised. Why haven't we just been measuring actual performance?7 As a lower bound, you have to do the unpleasant jobs. But all it would have taken in the beginning would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the reactions that spread from person to person in an audience are always affected by the reactions of those around them, and the PR campaign surrounding the launch has the side effect of making them celebrities. Others are more candid, and admit their financial models require them to own a certain percentage of each company. One way to describe this situation is to say that you despised your job, but a return. Till now we'd been planning to use If you can read this, I should be working. I've been able to undo a lie I was told, a lot of propaganda gets slipped into the curriculum in the name of simplification.8 So most hackers will tend to use whatever language they were first written in, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. I were a better speaker. After all, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

My grandmother told us an edited version of the change I'm seeing.9 When you scale animals you can't just keep everything in proportion. I believe they conceal because of deep taboos. But I don't think the bank manager really did. The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not like it used to. The very idea is foreign to what most of us, it's not that inaccurate to regard VCs as sources of money.10 They're all competing for a slice of a fixed amount of deal flow, by encouraging hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own startups instead.11

So if you're going to clear these lies out of your head, you're going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.12 They just don't want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. Maybe this would have been for two Google employees to focus on first, we try to figure that out.13 For millennia that was the canonical example of a job someone had to do was roll forward along the railroad tracks of destiny.14 Then the important question became not how to make money that you can't do it by accident.15 When we were kids I used to think I wanted to know everything. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat. They may have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but skeptical about the value of the work they'd done. But we all know the amounts being raised in series A rounds creep inexorably downward. I usually write it out beforehand. We compete more with employers than VCs.16

Java. They go to school, which was dictated largely by the hardware available in the late 1950s. That's what board control means in practice. When my father was working at Westinghouse in the 1970s, he had people working for him who made more than he did, because they'd been there longer. I read it, and look bold. To do something well you have to make it something that they themselves use. We can get rid of or make optional a lot of propaganda gets slipped into the curriculum in the name of simplification. Children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow up in. At the moment I'd almost say that a hacker about to write a profiler that would automatically detect inefficient algorithms.

I remember because it was so surprising to hear someone say that in front of a class. What popularity it retains dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when it was the scripting language of a popular system. The organic growth guys, sitting in their garage, feel poor and unloved. She said they'd been sitting reading one day, and when you're delivering a prewritten talk makes it harder to engage with an audience. We started Viaweb with $10,000 in seed money from our friend Julian. But I am daily waiting for the line to collapse. When a man runs off with his secretary, is it always partly his wife's fault? It's also wise, early on, when they're trying to find the function you need than to write the code yourself.

Notes

Content is information you don't even want to learn to acknowledge it.

The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these people never come face to face with the founders' advantage if it were Can you pass the salt? Actually Emerson never mentioned mousetraps specifically. You have to factor out some knowledge.

If you want to. When you get a false positive, this thought experiment: If you have a cover price and yet give away free subscriptions with such abandon. This is why I haven't released Arc. They also generally say they prefer great markets to great people.

If it's 90%, you'd ultimately be hurting yourself, but unfortunately not true. It shouldn't be too conspicuous. All you need to know exactly how a lot, or at least wouldn't be worth starting one that did. And yet there is some kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they function as the average startup.

No one seems to have balked at this, but it's hard to say that education in the belief that they'll be able to raise money? The CRM114 Discriminator. 03%. But the change is a lot more frightening in those days, and so effective that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality, but delusion strikes a step later in the absence of objective tests.

We often discuss revenue growth, it's easy to get to college, they only like the United States, have several more meetings with you to believing in natural selection in the few cases where VCs don't invest, regardless of how to deal with slaps, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them.

For example, the best new startups. Give the founders realized. You may be the next uptick after that, founders will usually take one of the former, because some schools work hard to predict precisely what would happen to their software that was a company tried to pay out their earnings in dividends, and when I became an employer, I put it this way probably should.

A YC partner wrote: After the war, tax receipts have stayed close to the problem and approached it with the exception of the Industrial Revolution was one firm that wanted to than because they had in grad school, secretly write your thoughts down in, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was more because they are to be the least correlation between launch magnitude and success.

This is a well-preserved 1989 Lincoln Town Car ten-passenger limousine 5, they may prefer to work with me there. But if they want to see artifacts from it, but this would be more like Silicon Valley like the Segway and Google Wave. I'm just going to call all our lies lies. As the art itself gets more random, they thought at least for the sledgehammer; if anything they could imagine needing in their early twenties compressed into the shape of the leading scholars in the last step is to use to calibrate the weighting of the junk bond business by doing another round that values the company they're buying.

Whereas there is money. His best bet would probably also encourage companies to acquire you. The wartime versions were much more fun than he'd had an opportunity to invest in so many trade publications nominally have a notebook to write and deals longer to write a new version from which they don't make wealth a zero-sum game. We often discuss revenue growth with the amount—maybe not linearly, but it wasn't.

That name got assigned to it because the processing power you can discriminate on any basis you want to start a startup to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting you write software in Lisp, though sloppier language than I'd use to develop server-based applications. I mean type I startups. And especially about what was happening on Dallas, and they have wings and start to rise again.

Did you know whether this happens because they're innumerate, or black beans n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris wrote the recommendations. After a while to avoid companies that can't reasonably expect to make up the same investor to do video on-demand, because a unless your initial investors agreed in advance that you're talking to a VC. And the expertise and connections the founders are willing to provide this service, this phenomenon is apparently even worse in the process of trying to enter the software business, and they were only partly joking.

Bankers continued to live inexpensively as their companies. Instead of bubbling up from the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is largely true, because any invention has a power law dropoff, but we are not mutually exclusive. Xenophon Mem. At the time required to switch the operating system so much that anyone wants to invest in it.

It's hard to compete directly with open source project, but those don't scale is to try your site.

The best one could aspire to the extent this means anything, it would be to write about the idea.

They did better than their competitors, who had it used to say that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of studies, studies of returns from startup investing, but for a sufficiently long time. I got it wrong in How to Make Wealth when I switch in mid-twenties the people working for large settlements earlier, but the meretriciousness of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were invisible or simpler in Lisp. And while we have to make Europe more entrepreneurial and more pervasive though.

[petitalbert-blog]

"I want to get into ceremonial magic, but the gender/sex stuff is annoying af”

Don't worry, little sparrow! I'm so bothered by the anti-queer sexism in high magic, and this morning I have written a lot of words on why it's annoying and inaccurate; and capped it off with some "how to adapt this bullshit so you can participate without turning to drink" ideas.

I think translating that queer body into a strong man taking a vulnerable woman makes extremely clear that sexual imagery and sex itself, which have a host of egalitarian and sacred meanings in magic, has been tainted by society's shitty ideas about sex.  You know, jumping straight from sex rituals to "man dominating woman!", says everything about the person jumping to that conclusion.

But the sexism was also there from the start.

You look at original Crowley, and he talks about the symbolic roles of the (male) Beast and (female) Scarlet Woman, and no amount of "both the male and female are sacred and have separate symbolic roles!" can compensate for his belief. That there was only one Beast, but Scarlet Women could be interchangeable - and in fact were, in his life, and you can read his notes about why his seven women all "failed". With no self awareness that, perhaps, he was an unworthy Beast to a succession of powerful women.

The very idea of the sacred feminine being so disposable makes me angry. I'm angry we call the Thoth tarot deck the "Crowley deck", and the trad deck the "Rider Waite". When in both cases they were illustrated by women who were occultists in their own right, who brought their own scholarship and insight to the decks, and yet for some reason the decks are still named for men. Lady Frieda Harris and Pamela Coleman-Smith were fiercely talented artists, and mages; but the sacred feminine is disposable and interchangeable.

Plus: high magic is built on drawing together stories and mysticism from throughout history. Crowley writes too fast for me to keep up; for all his flaws, the fucker knows a LOT about history, myth and culture. But those sources...are also all sexist. Arthur's knights; Egyptian myths; if you're drawing from the culture of the world, then you're inevitably drawing from the sexism of the world too.

No shit, this same imagery recurs across cultures? What if I told you that women internationally all experience sexism, in one way or another?

Yet also: from its inception, "sex magic" was very queer indeed.

Homosexual sex was a huge, and I mean huge part of Crowley's practice, and had specific ritual meanings. To do Thelema properly, you pretty much had to be au fait with bisexuality. There were different roles for solo, het and homo sexual acts in different rituals.

Now, I think it's good we've moved away from that. I think it's a Good Thing that people aren't being coerced into sex they're not into (which did happen in Crowley’s original working group). But when you look at sexy satanic imagery. It's all - alt white babes with normative bodies, being vessels and chalices for powerful dominant male avatars. In other word, we've replaced one Sex Expectation with a different one - as I hardly believe those images are the authentic form of sexual expression for 100% of Satanists.

I definitely like to consider queerness as a broader term, representing sex which is non-normative, and reflects genuine self-expression and will. And I think that's definitely key to the role queerness should play in Satanic/Thelemic/High magics. It's not so much about symbolic rituals between males and females, but about freedom, pleasure, the body, things for which you need to know your own desire and own it.

For some people, that's going to be ravishment by goat.

--

But it boils down to certain sexual expectations existing in magic, expectations that are unequal.

For Crowley, the expectations included gay sex; nowadays, it seemingly includes normative bodies, and het sex.

And unequal because, no matter how often a mage or a witch talks about men and women having equal, complimentary sacred roles...I don't believe it. I don't think anyone does. Crowley saw sacred women as interchangeable. Modern sexy Satanic art always puts a male figure dominant over a female one - by turning Baphomet's queer body into an explicitly male body (Have you ever seen sexy Baph art where Baph is a woman, or even a trans person? Of course you haven't. The cock maketh the man).

Sometimes I think, maybe it's sexist for me to be rejecting symbolic female imagery. Maybe disliking the passive/the cup/the receptive/the mystery is actually all about how I subconsciously rate masculinity over femininity. But no, it's just a shitty role. It still places active, will, and decision making as male qualities; "the sacred male embodies curiosity about the secret and hidden world of women, who hold the key to the mysteries" was clearly made up by male undergrads who desperately needed to get laid. The idea that women have a mysterious knowledge could only ever have been made up by a man. I don’t even know how to book a train ticket.

But it's endemic magically.  

And...when you look at Thelma and Baphomet and stuff, it's a deeply queer ideology, where a true mage is neither male nor female, and engages sexually with both men and women.

And there doesn't seem to be a way to engage with it queerly, without relying at some stage on "here are the magical qualities of men and of women". You know, you could as a trans person with a Baphomet body use it to channel both male and female energies more potently, but there is nothing present in our magical culture challenging the fundamental man-as-active-lance-wielder and woman-as-passive-mysterious-vessel symbolism.

What can be done? Here are some thoughts.

So the role of sex in both high magic and Wicca and all that jazz goes something like this. Men and women have different symbolic roles. The true mage is powerful enough to have access to both energies. Sex is a kind of metaphor for the magical/alchemical process, where the male and female come together. Or magic is a kind of metaphor for sex, surpressed in our puritanical society. Either way, the coming together of opposites into a unity is a powerful magical symbol and magical act.

For those of you who just threw up a little in your mouth, let's try and make something a touch queerer and less essentalist from this mess.

"Male and Female energies"

Instead of relying on traditional symbols, seek out your own associations for the male and the female. What qualities do you associate with men? With women? With people who are neither? Build your own set of correspondences. Build up a list of figures who embody different genders as a personal bank of symbols.

Assuming you're coming from a queerfeminist bent, do try and come up with positive and negative qualities for both. “Men are inherently powerful dominant oppressors” is more or less what men have been saying since the dawn of time ;p

When thinking about sexual pairings - what associations do you have with these things? Trad gender magic plays with ideas of two halves of a whole coming together - sex, and metaphors for it, are at the core of most of it. Don't just consider the associations of men-with-women. What symbolism do you find in ff and mm couplings? What do you find when you consider other genders? Try and focus on the kinds of sex you have (or don't have) to avoid being needlessly skeezy. What is the meaning? What power and energies can you find in the kinds of things you do?

Think about non-sexual pairings. Trad gender magic always, at some point, boils down to a penis doing something with a vagina. Is that the most important way what people of different genders interact? Are there different, perhaps more powerful acts and behaviors, which could take the role of the sexual act in your gender magic.

Try and be aware of your cultural baggage. You don't have to reject it outright - pop culture magic has taught us that something doesn't have to be real to be powerful - but do know what you're dealing with, where it's coming from, and use that awareness to oomph up what you do. If you want to have feminine chalices, that's fine.

The goal is to yes, use gendered symbolism, but to use it on your own terms, and find your own meanings. It won't reflect reality perfectly. It won't necessarily have a lot to do with being a person in the world. It will always be slightly objectifying.  

But you can probably do better than "women are indistinguishable vessels for men".

"The Mage is both Male and Female, as symbolised by Baphomet"

Be aware of your relationship to gender. If you are transgender or non-binary, you can incorporate that experience if you like.

How do you feel about that? What are your positive experiences of your gender? What qualities of other genders do you wish to cultivate? What sort of gender-based role models do you have and why?

I think the key is that mages ought to be powerful - if there are male and female energies, the mage must master both. Look back at your personal list of gender symbolism, and cultivate mastery of these things. If gender differences isn't a big thing in your life or system, replace this with seeking mastery over key dualities which are in your system.

If you do this, then reconsider whether sex is part of your system at all. For example, if your key duality is light and darkness - the dawn and the dusk, where the two powers are mingled as one, likely has the same charge as sex has in a system where the two powers are male and female.

"Sex magic which ought to be done as follows"

Sex magic & symbolism has two sorts of things going on.

The first is alchemical - the combination of opposites is powerful. We've already touched on this, but look at your sexuality - your real, authentic sexuality - and find its unique meanings and power. It could still be based on opposites coming together - but opposites with more egalitarian symbolism. A gay couple could find their magic in working with sameness; or with difference (say, butch-femme); or with something completely unrelated (say, the magic of reciprocity, of giving and receiving, which you practice with all your partners)

The second is the more Satanic approach, where it's about expressing yourself and hedonism. For this, too, you need to be expressing your authentic self, working on shame, working to tune out society's expectations. Again, if your authentic sexual self is monogamous and vanilla, this is as excellent and beautiful as any other expression. The greatest power is to be found in something you enjoy.

An important part of either approach is, of course, freely given consent. Violating the free will of others is Satanic no no.

"This is all bullshit"

...and that's ok. For a long time, I avoided gender magic entirely. I still think that's a wise approach.

Because I increasingly want to do the high magic thing, just without being someone’s bloody chalice; I'm hoping to use this framework to prevent my brains from dribbling out of my ears.

But if you want to ignore gender, that's cool too.

[carissanm4238]

Week 9 Readings

1. Kate Crawford - discuss the different types of bias she mentions Crawford pushes for the need for a “social-systems” approach to address what she terms a “major blind spot’ in thinking about Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous systems. In essence, she is pushing for a need to assess the impact of technologies on their social, cultural and political settings. Here are some of the biases she highlighted:

Predictive technology regurgitating biased output based on biased input

Overpolicing of marginalized communities

proprietary algorithms widely used by judges to help determine the risk of reoffending are almost twice as likely to mistakenly flag black defendants than white defendants

Potential discriminatory behviours on the part of employers

Google searches of first names commonly used by black people were 25% more likely to flag up advertisements for a criminal-records search than those of ‘white-identifying’ names

AI systems disproportionately affecting disadvantaged groups

Denial of loans of low-income individuals

Responsibility and culpability when it comes to automated decisions

Self-driving vehicles

On first thought such biases are hard to grapple with because if we are being honest, data and statistics do speak for themselves - no person or Artificial Intelligence body conjured up false data just to be racist or sexist or discriminatory. The data exists because it is in effect truth, and all AI does is to regurgitate the truth. But I thought a little harder and I realised; AIs are a product of the imperfect human system - a societal system that functions by disadvantaging some so others may rise. Humans have grown to discriminate against certain characteristics which is literally how stereotypes came to form - people reduce other people to labels and step on these “other people” so that they themselves may excel and go further in life. Society exists upon embedded notions of patriarchy, racism and whole battery of other discriminatory concepts, and in many ways we cannot see (e.g. language use, subconscious behaviour), we constantly perpetuate and feed these stereotypes. AIs don’t make the mistakes. DNNs are designed to learn and they do so magnificently - they can learn but they cannot think, which ties back to last week’s discussion on that AI becoming “human” and what it even means to be “human”.  

She reconciles this slightly by describing how a social-systems approach would consider the social and political history of the data input.

“This might require consulting members of the community and weighing police data against this feedback, both positive and negative, about the neighbourhood policing. It could also mean factoring in findings by oversight committees and legal institutions. A social-systems analysis would also ask whether the risks and rewards of the system are being applied evenly — so in this case, whether the police are using similar techniques to identify which officers are likely to engage in misconduct, say, or violence.”

It’s nice and probably one of the best ways to tackle such an issue, but I guess in way, such a approach merely tries to ease a situation/societal system that is in itself flawed. Imperfect humans cannot create a perfect machine. 

2. Gaydar - Evaluate the claims of Kosinski vs the critique by Blaise Aguera y Arcas and colleagues

Wang & Kosinski have a thorough and well-thought body of research that couples naturally and publicly existing data on homosexuals with scientific research (that homosexuality has a biological and hormonal basis). By studying existing facial recognition technologies, they report that AI can detect sexual orientation more accurately than humans. 

Perhaps the biggest issue Arcas & colleagues took with wang & kosinski is that they attempted to attribute the differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals mere superficial physical characteristics, born from biological issues (side note!!! odd that they received backlash from the LGBT community because I would think LGBT supporters fight for the case that homosexuality is not a “choice” - which would imply that biological factors should come into play but I get this is far from the point which is... that technology shouldn't reduce communities of people to physical characteristics(!!?)). Arcas & colleagues spend the bulk of their article deconstructing and critiquing the methodology behind Wang & Kosinski’s work.They target individual points deduced by W & K, and showcase how each of these deductions are but mere stereotypes that can be debunked when considering factors such as lifestyle and selfie angles. they demonstrate that a handful of yes/no questions about certain variables can do nearly as good a job at guessing orientation as supposedly sophisticated facial recognition AI. 

Logically speaking it should take more than a “15 min read” medium article to uproot a full-blown scientific study, and while I feel that Arcas & colleagues’ points do make sense (although much more research and statistics must be pumped into this to hold any more weight), I believe that Wang & Kosinski claims (especially with respect with what they set out to do) hold more water. Their main point was to showcase how existing technologies are powerful and can be used to disadvantage the LGBT community, and they did so. 

What Arcas and colleagues put forth is in some ways inconsequential because it’s hard to dispute fact, and the fact is that the numbers spoke for themselves and displayed that the deep neural networks could indeed discern sexual orientation reasonably accurately. “When presented with a pair of participants, one gay and one straight, the algorithm could correctly distinguish between them 91% of the time for men and 83% of the time for women” Deep neural networks did indeed serve their purpose in discerning between gay and straight people. What aides and colleagues did was call the “hormonal” and “biological” basis of homosexuality into question, an issue tugs on the nature vs nurture debate which is .... perpetually ongoing. 

“We are hopeful about the confluence of new, powerful AI technologies with social science, but not because we believe in reviving the 19th century research program of inferring people’s inner character from their outer appearance. Rather, we believe AI is an essential tool for understanding patterns in human culture and behavior. It can expose stereotypes inherent in everyday language. It can reveal uncomfortable truths .... Making social progress and holding ourselves to account is more difficult without such hard evidence, even when it only confirms our suspicions.”

On stereotypes - which I mentioned earlier forms the basis of today’s society - neither the AI, nor Wang/Kosinski could have been the ones responsible for creating or propagating any “discriminatory” stereotypes. When i was in secondary school i tried a pixie boy cut, not because I was “tomboyish” or anything. I just wanted to try it. After i cut my hair the facebook group created by the lesbian community of my school immediately added me on facebook and it was just really odd. This very simple story reflects societal structures and beliefs, all of which have been fed to machines. AIs treat such data as ones and zeros, when there is much more to data than that - ever piece of data has individuality and is born from personal experience and stories. Essentially the point that I am echoing is that AI can learn but it cannot think. If you feed the AI biased input, u get biased output - W& K’s AI could have very well been fed stereotypes which ultimately caused it to learn and go about the discernment process based on such stereotypes - which shouldn't call the technology itself into question. The AI is like a child and it started with a blank slate so whatever you feed it, it will learn and when u feed it sinful human data born from our stereotypical existence thats what it will regurgitate. It shouldn't come as a shock that the AI was so accurate. The AI is neither inaccurate, nor has it done any wrong. Human society created the problem that human rights/LGBT groups had been upset about. society perpetuated such “labels” & "stereotypes" and the AI merely learnt from our mistakes.

3. Critique the COMPAS paper in terms of the fairness issues raised in Barocas et al.

Perhaps reading the work of Barocas and colleagues does shed light on how authors of the COMPAS paper might have been to quick to villainize and demonise the creators of the COMPAS technology and cast them as racist and capitalistic (they may be profit driven, but perhaps they aren't villains). Based on Barocas and colleagues’ work, it’s clear to see that merely observing bias and disparities doesn’t necessarily mean that creators of the such AI and machine learning systems had intended for such inequalities to arise. Barocas et al. dissect the Machine learning process and showcase just how disparities come to form. They had actually put into coherent words the thoughts I had formulated in questions 1 and 2 and also revealed how the very nature of machine learning can further reinforce and introduce biases. 

In the measurement stage, training data reflect the battery of demographic disparities characteristic of human society, the messiness of the real world a manifestation of the limitations of data-driven techniques. When we learn a model from such disparate data in the learning stage, our models will reflect disparities found in the input data, leading to unfair generalisations and high error rates. Even in the feedback stage, there is a tendency for biased feedback to occur due to cultural prejudices.

Despite these limitations, however, there is much potential for machine learning technologies to be both useful fair. Algorithms force us to be explicit about what we want to achieve with decision-making. Data- driven decision-making forces us to articulate our decision-making objectives and enables us to clearly understand the tradeoffs between desiderata, a process more transparent than human decision-making. Further, effective interventions do exist in many machine learning applications, especially in natural-language processing and computer vision.

In the case of the COMPAS paper, perhaps what would be important is to not write off machine learning technologies as inherently biased and unhelpful in society. The COMPAS paper did good in showcasing the degree to which machine learning technologies can be unfair and biased, and provided an important human-touch element to the story by giving us real-life people, faces, and how these very real lives had been negatively impacted by these limitations. This is important because in this day and age, technology is relentlessly fetishised and the very important human element is constantly missing from academic narratives.  Perhaps the takeaway from this would be that it is important to highlight the harm that can result from biased machine learning, so as to motivate researchers and creators to practice more discretion and be more thorough in the process of creating such technologies. 

Such technologies should not be written off, because machine learning has the potential to help us debate the fairness of different policies and decision-making procedures more effectively.