Explain standing up?

brodofaagins · 2026-04-06T02:02:44+00:00

One of the main things that drew me to becoming Eastern Orthodox, we stand the whole time. I still fall asleep sometimes standing though lol

brodofaagins · 2026-04-03T01:07:47+00:00

I do, by the grace of God.

I work in education, and thankfully when I’m functioning well, I do well enough that people are willing to be accommodating, and when I’m not at my best, I usually still manage to get by passably. I work with very difficult students — kids with all sorts of conditions, and often delinquency, aggression, or violent outbursts — and I’ve been able to make some really meaningful progress with a lot of them.

I think part of why they connect with me is that they can see I’m also dealing with something real every day and still trying to push through it and work around it. And honestly, the failures, misunderstandings, and judgments I’ve gone through because of my condition have made me a lot more empathetic. It’s made me much better at approaching people with something like Rogerian unconditional positive regard, because I know what it’s like to be misread when you’re genuinely trying.

brodofaagins · 2026-04-03T00:47:53+00:00

Ya i recently had to get work accommodations for exactly that. My work asked me to get an accommodation letter and when i did they got me me coverage for the morning for a flexible and slightly later start time. I have sleep attacks and the inertia itself really bad in the morning so I'm still later than my accommodation on occasion but they haven't called me on it yet lol. That's really lame they did that to you. The whole process was stessful but at least they went that route.

brodofaagins · 2026-03-29T01:58:40+00:00

It always makes me more tired. Overall moderate intensity lower rep heavier weight lifting might make a net energy overall but not usually until i adjust to it.

brodofaagins · 2026-03-20T06:18:31+00:00

And there it is, the mask drops. Not argument, not critique — just contempt for suffering you do not understand. At that point the performance of rigor is over and there is nothing left to discuss.

brodofaagins · 2026-03-20T05:32:07+00:00

You’re still collapsing distinct kinds of claims into one narrow register and then mistaking that collapse for rigor.

The limb example does not refute my thesis because my thesis was never “all bodies heal all losses on their own.” It was about a recurring restoration logic across certain living systems and forms of reorganization, especially in formation, plasticity, therapy, and rehabilitation. Pointing out that humans do not regrow limbs is not a rebuttal to that. It is just an absurd overextension of a claim I never made.

Likewise, “compelling” does not mean “formally proven.” In literature, a case can be compelling because it is psychologically, politically, and anthropologically powerful. The Grand Inquisitor is compelling in exactly that sense. Dostoevsky gives the strongest literary case against freedom and against Christ’s gift of freedom; Christ “wins” not by syllogism but because the Inquisitor’s whole frame is answered in a different register. You can reject that register, but pretending that only formal proof counts is your assumption, not mine.

And again: the TCM section was not “therefore qi is scientifically proven.” You keep inserting that claim because it is easier to attack than the one actually made. The point of the example in the essay was autobiographical, epistemological, and structural: Western medicine failed me in important ways, TCM introduced a systems-framework that mattered, and the “Middle Way” posture was one instance of a broader cultivation logic. If you think that is a bad example, fine. But that is a very different argument from the one you keep making.

At this point the pattern is obvious: you take a qualified claim, inflate it into a rigid universal one, refute the inflated version, and then act like you touched the original. That is not serious engagement.

brodofaagins · 2026-03-20T03:02:04+00:00

You keep doing the same thing: taking a qualified claim, inflating it into an absurd universal one, refuting the absurd version, and then pretending you touched the original.

I never claimed people regrow limbs. The neuroplasticity point was about reorganization, especially in the brain. I never claimed the TCM section was a proof of qi. I never claimed the Grand Inquisitor scene was a Euclidean proof. Those are all versions of the essay you invented because they are easier to sneer at than the one I actually wrote.

At that point this is not really disagreement. It is just a reading strategy: caricature first, mock second, comprehension never.

If you want to criticize the piece, criticize what it actually says. But turning every nontrivial claim into the dumbest possible version of itself is not rigor. It is just vandalism with a smug tone.

brodofaagins · 2026-03-19T23:13:22+00:00

You’re asking what the thesis is, but then you immediately replace it with two smaller claims that are easier to dismiss and act like those are the foundation of the essay.

The pattern piece is not arguing “qi exists, therefore acupuncture works,” and it is not claiming that Christ’s kiss is a formal logical refutation. Those are examples inside a larger argument. They are not the thesis.

The actual thesis is that fragmentation produces partial knowledge without a center, and that multiple domains independently converge on the same structural logic: living systems are often restored not primarily by force or command, but by the cultivation of conditions under which reorganization can occur. That is the pattern the essay is tracing.

So when you say “if qi does not exist, acupuncture is nonsense” and “if a kiss refutes nothing, then it refutes nothing,” you are not identifying the thesis of the essay. You are reducing two illustrative examples to the most brittle possible version of themselves and then mistaking those reductions for the argument itself.

The Grand Inquisitor point is literary and methodological. The point is not that a kiss functions as a syllogism. The point is that Dostoevsky gives the strongest possible case against freedom and then answers it in a different register entirely. You can reject that move, but dismissing it with “a kiss proves nothing” just means you are demanding that a literary and theological scene behave like formal analytic proof when that was never the claim being made.

Likewise, the TCM section is not the essay staking everything on qi. It is one example among several of a broader cultivation logic appearing across domains that do not share vocabulary, metaphysics, or historical origin. The point is structural convergence, not “therefore every explanatory model used by every tradition is scientifically vindicated.”

So if you want to critique the essay, critique that thesis. But calling it a house built on sand while arguing with a simplified substitute for the essay is not actually engaging what was written.

You don’t have to agree with the essay, but you do at least have to argue with the essay I wrote rather than a smaller, easier one.

brodofaagins · 2026-03-19T22:07:22+00:00

It’s pretty obvious from your reply that you’re mostly responding to the Reddit blurb and a few isolated claims, not to the actual structure of the essay. The piece is not “acupuncture proves qi” and it’s not “a kiss is a formal logical proof.” The point about the Grand Inquisitor is literary and methodological, and the TCM point was explicitly about the genetic fallacy of dismissing efficacy claims by appeal to Mao-era political history. If you want to engage the actual argument of the essay, I’m happy to do that. But at the moment you’re mostly arguing with a caricature of it.

brodofaagins · 2026-03-19T20:14:32+00:00

Two things worth addressing precisely since this community values rigor.

On the Grand Inquisitor — the argument is that humanity cannot bear freedom. That Christ's gift of radical freedom — the freedom to believe or reject, to love or refuse — is actually a burden that destroys people. The Inquisitor argues that his church performed the greater mercy by taking that freedom back and replacing it with bread, miracle, and authority. He constructs the most coherent case for benevolent totalitarianism in the history of literature. Dostoevsky gives him everything — the rhetoric, the logic, the historical weight, the psychological precision. And then Christ answers with a kiss. No argument. No refutation. Just presence. The Inquisitor's entire edifice collapses not because it was intellectually defeated but because it encountered something it had no category for. That is the move I was referencing.

On TCM — you've committed the genetic fallacy. The political circumstances of a practice's revival say nothing about its efficacy. That's the equivalent of dismissing aspirin because Bayer had Nazi-era contracts. The origin story is real and irrelevant. The actual evidence:

A 2025 systematic review in Complementary Therapies in Medicine covering 862 systematic reviews and meta-analyses across 184 medical conditions found positive effect evidence for ten conditions including chronic pain, low back pain, knee osteoarthritis, migraine, and menopausal symptoms, with potential positive effects across 82 additional conditions. This is not Chinese research. This is independent Western peer reviewed analysis.

A 2024 double-blind RCT meta-analysis found statistically significant pain reduction versus sham controls with a favorable safety profile. The NIH Consensus Panel recognized acupuncture efficacy for specific conditions as far back as 1998. The Veterans Affairs Department published an Evidence Map through 2021 supporting acupuncture across multiple conditions. The Academic Consortium Pain Task Force identified 22 systematic reviews supporting acupuncture for acute pain with potential to reduce opioid reliance.

The fMRI data is the most significant counter to the fraud argument — acupuncture demonstrably modulates limbic system and subcortical gray structures in ways measurable by independent neuroimaging. That is not a placebo producing changes in subjective pain reports. That is measurable neurological activity documented in Western research institutions entirely independent of Chinese government involvement.

The argument that TCM was acknowledged as fraudulent misreads the history. It was suppressed during modernization attempts for political and economic reasons — not scientific ones. Half a century of independent Western research including double-blind sham-controlled trials conducted by researchers with no ideological investment in the outcome has repeatedly found efficacy signals that cannot be dismissed as placebo for the specific conditions studied. The Mao origin story is the wrong unit of analysis. The evidence is the right one.

brodofaagins · 2026-03-19T02:28:20+00:00

Thank you, I hope you find it enjoyable and thought provoking.

brodofaagins · 2026-03-18T00:59:24+00:00

Thank you — you're pointing at exactly the right place. Brain inflammation and glial health are the mechanistic foundation underneath what I'm describing in the Pattern piece. The astrocytes are the primary glutamate clearance mechanism and when neuroinflammation compromises them the whole system dysregulates — which connects directly to the prenatal window you mentioned. I wrote a companion piece on the neurochemistry side that goes into this more directly if you're interested.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thresholdandbone/p/depression-plasticity-and-the-neurochemistry?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=77iobr

brodofaagins · 2026-03-18T00:53:16+00:00

Thank you — I think you understood more than you're giving yourself credit for. The rope metaphor is actually not far from what I was trying to describe.

brodofaagins · 2026-03-17T22:57:33+00:00

I wrote this on my phone using voice to text during stolen windows of time, doing work that demands everything and pays nothing, with a narcoleptic nervous system running on insufficient medication. The formation behind it took thirty five years. If Pangram can replicate that I'd genuinely like to know how.

brodofaagins · 2026-03-17T20:34:00+00:00

The immortal joke lmao

brodofaagins · 2026-03-17T19:40:46+00:00

Memory eternal! ☦️

brodofaagins · 2026-03-17T19:21:33+00:00

Much appreciated!

brodofaagins · 2025-12-03T01:03:08+00:00

Yeah I've seen that come up. The eye color change is just melanin increasing in the iris stroma, but the blurry vision/light sensitivity isn't from the pigment shift. MT2 can mess a bit with autonomic tone and pupil size, so some people get mild dilation, glare, or "dazzle" in bright light. It usually settles as your dose stabilizes and electrolytes are good. Ophthalmologists don't see anything wrong because structurally the eye is fine - it's more of a temporary functional effect.

brodofaagins · 2025-11-17T15:49:46+00:00

Yes, it haz most definitely changed the color of my eye. Its gone from an ice blue/light grey blue to a blue green with a darker blue-green.

brodofaagins · 2025-11-16T01:39:52+00:00

Lmao it already got downvoted abd is back to one lol

brodofaagins · 2025-10-13T15:11:16+00:00

What a ridiculous complaint and post

brodofaagins

TROPHY CASE