Combobulated

Writer and aspiring financial journalist. This is my blog for articles, musings and shameless self promotion. I mean, that's what blogs are for, right?

[amalnahurriyeh-blog]

Today in well-meaning white people

My son has just told me that they’re practicing a song for the black history month assembly on Friday. Details about this song acquired through conversation:

-it has a verse in Swahili -it has the name of a famous person (upon some googling and checking with his memory it’s Miriam Makeba) -it was written by Paul Simon

His school has about 5-10 students of color in a 300 person school. None of them are of African descent.

*buries head in hands* white people, NO.

(Things I would like to see at a black history month assembly in a nearly all white school: lessons about Afro-Canadian history. A guest speaker/presenter who is black. A lesson about Canada as a home to escaped slaves during the Underground Railroad. ANYTHING ACTUALLY ABOUT BLACK CANADIANS OR AFRICA NOT FILTERED THROUGH WHITE PEOPLE.)

[cassie-chang]

Because to white people, black people can only ever be exotic.

[diannaeanderson]

[content note: violence against women, graphic descriptions of violence]

When I logged into Twitter this morning, one of the first things I saw was Andi Ziesler, founder of Bitch magazine, tweeting about another mass shooting and talking about a pattern of violence against women. I immediately...

[cassie-chang]

Yes, yes and yes. Especially that link with male evangelism.

[david-8]

[ifeelbetterer]

“Starting to root for this guy” as in “They sent me to kill her and I made another call” kind of root for this guy? Did he and Coulson make a deal after the whole whoops-Black-Widow-is-now-an-asset-sorry-Coulson deal where Coulson made Hawkeye promise to tell him when he started rooting for the person he was supposed to shoot in the head? How many times has this been a problem for Hawkeye? Is he, like, known in SHIELD for being the agent who might adopt the target you sent him to kill?

[leupagus]

I firmly believe that this is what happened with him and Natasha. Like, Fury gives Clint the order, the next thing he knows Barton’s dragging Natasha in being like BOSS CAN I PLEASE KEEP HER I PROMISE TO CLEAN UP ANY BODY PARTS SHE LEAVES LYING AROUND PLEASE PLEASE PLEEEEEEEEASE

[anakinnaberrie]

Preach it (x)

[cassie-chang]

HA.

[lolasoleda-deactivated20150120]

The X-files

Bad Blood (5X12)

[cassie-chang]

These two. Forever reblog.

[artmonia]

I’m An Animal | Jensine Eckwall.

[unapologetic-book]

Correspondence

(Posted with permission)

23 March 2013

Dear Mr Spufford

I have read your book ‘Unapologetic’ with interest and as carefully as I can. However, I’d like to be check my understanding of the Christian gospel against what you believe. We seem to have at least two competing theories of what Jesus was doing on the cross: 

1. The punishment theory of the atonement. Jesus’ death was a death penalty suffered on behalf on the human race. This satisfies the evangelical/Calvinist requirement for justice but it nullifies any thought of God’s forgiveness because nothing has been forgiven - the penalty has been paid in full.  (Even if you equate God and Jesus the judicial logic remains the same.) Christians who believe this usually believe in hell too and that this is the destination for people like me who do not accept Jesus as their personal saviour. This is a horrible, hate-filled version of Christianity.  

2. The cost of forgiveness theory of the atonement. Jesus’ death is somehow ontologically identified with the consequences of human sin: Jesus on the cross is the rape victim, the abused child, the tortured prisoner, the Holocaust victim. God, as Jesus, takes all this upon himself and forgives it all. I presume it’s this which makes ‘surprising emotional sense’ to you but it won’t satisfy the Calvinists and it’s difficult to make any rational sense out of it. How can Jesus ‘be’ the rape victim when the rape victim is still with us? The usual theological move at this point is to fall back into the fluffy marshmallow of ‘mystery’ but I’m really hoping you won’t take that easy option. I’m rather hoping that you will concede that it shouldn’t be taken literally at all and that it only works at the level of myth and metaphor. In which case, maybe you have joined the Sea of Faith network?  

It seems obvious to me that there is mending and forgiveness in the world whether or not we believe in God. Why can’t we just agree on that instead of dragging all of this contentious theology into everything? 

Yours sincerely 

David Warden (Chair, Dorset Humanists)

—————————————————————————-

26 March 2013

Dear David Warden,

Thank you for your email.  I’m sorry to have been slow in answering it: it’s been a busy weekend, one way and another.

I am not a theologian, as you know, but I have read a fair bit of theology, and listened to a fair bit more, so I am not coming to the question of what the cross accomplished entirely unprepared.

Read More

[mariahcareys]

[treebeards-is-dead-deactivated2]

#FROM ASHES A FIRE SHALL BE WOKEN #A LIGHT FROM THE SHADOW WILL SPRING#RENEWED SHALL BE BLADE THAT WAS BROKEN #THE CROWNLESS AGAIN SHALL BE KING

[cassie-chang]

I didn't even watch the show but this is perfect. 

[fakenewsjunkie]

[cassie-chang]

Best response to the ridiculousness.

[heywejustmetyou-blog]

WHEN PEOPLE TELL ME WHAT I'M EATING IS FATTENING

[harlz-quinn]

[liminal-zone]

Favorite Film Fight Scenes | The Matrix - Lobby Fight

this movie’s alright.

[cassie-chang]

Never gets old.

[davetrains]

Who cares if your “deadly art” was originally practiced in a temple in some obscure corner of Bangladesh if an ill-tempered girl scout with 6 months of boxing can knock the hell out of its practitioners?

Mike Driscoll, in a CrossFit-bashing thread at Catalyst Athletics Forums (via davetrains)

[cassie-chang]

New blog about women's self defense and martial arts.  Follow follow.  There will be more activity there than here. (there's already more text)

[cassie-chang]

Lesson of the day

Be proactive.  Chase up chase up. Dig for things. A lesson in ignoring insecurities.  

Things are getting busier.

[cassie-chang]

Happenings

In the past few weeks I have:

Eaten out more

Discovered very fine madeira, and reaffirmed my love for complex drinks.

Scraped my elbows and knees but good while grappling during krav

Studied

Tried not to freak out about studying

Tried not to freak out about trying not to freak out about studying

Discovered that there is no shame in mixing vodka with red wine.  In fact, mixing vodka with another alcoholic substance should be the only way vodka is drunk.

Discovered that for some reason, my body wakes me up at 5 every morning after I've been drinking and that, surprisingly, I can function very well the morning after. 

Realized that I have truly lovely, wonderful friends. Ones who will readily give you 200 pages of course notes.  Ones who will listen sincerely while you drunkenly relate silly feelings you have about boys.

Thought about starting a blog about women's self defense.  Put that thought on backburner, but I will write it

Been praying more.

Been making an effort not to rush through prayer.

Understood just a little bit more about what it means to live life to the fullest

[sarahdaly42]

Visit Original Link

[cassie-chang]

An example of when a cover trumps the original.

alpalpal:

Reblogging so I can listen to it later.

sarahdaly42:

Lay, Lady, Lay by Bob Dylan by me on the occasion of his birthday.

[needful]

[cassie-chang]

He has just had sex. I can tell by the way, when he notices his shadow ahead of him, broad, spilling over both curbs to the road he is walking down slowly, most of him wants to stop and, as if remembering, stand briefly at a kind of attention. He has just had sex, it’s unclear with whom. It was a man, it was a woman… it was the air, whose inconveniently wide-apart edges can be all day coming together. There’s this sense in which it can’t matter- sex being, for him, any attempt to fill a space in so there’s no room left, for a while, for what he surely calls a suffering inside him- that much his brow gives away, his mouth too, designed, it seems, for delivering lines like Already, as far into the world as I’ve wanted, I’ve come. He’s thirty, thirty-two - it’s easy, still, to say a thing like that. Write it down, even. Call it a poem. Carl Phillips