My anecdotal take is there are many ways that shock and trauma can accumulate through training and war that are far beyond the minimal effects of an M4.
Firearms: While the primary weapons systems are the M4 and side arm (pistol), there are many weapons systems utilized by special operations such as sniper rifles, crew serve weapons, and niche small arms.
The M82 sniper rifle shoots a 50 BMG round. In either the bolt action or semi-auto versions they feel like you are getting punched in the face when you shoot them.
Crew serve weapons like the MK19 and M2 do pack a punch. The MK19 is a machine gun that shoots 40mm grenades. The M2 is a .50 cal machine gun. These weapons systems are mounted, but the percussion of them is still far greater than an M4.
More niche arms like the M249 SAW, M16 HBAR, full-auto AKs, M240 Golf, MP9, etc are not as mild as the standard M4/M16.
Blasts: There are many types of blasts encountered such as Mortars (inbound and outbound), Flash Bangs, Entry charges, IEDs, Landmines, etc. These do make your head ring if you are close enough to them.
In my own personal experience there are many other daily jarring events that aren't nearly as sexy to talk about. Riding in the back of a 5 ton will almost shake your brain out of your head. Riding in an LCAC (hovercraft) is like riding in a 5 ton. Doing boat work in Zodiacs will bounce you all over the place, especially when doing surf passages. Doing hydrographic surveys right where the surf breaks will pound you for hours and make you a little sick afterwards. When your chute opens on a jump, if jumping round chutes, will make you see stars...the landing is not a soft pretty one like rectangle chutes...you hit the ground hard.
There are many more ways your body gets pounded on a daily basis far in excess of the weapons you use.
Round chutes (cupolas) are designed to get soldiers from the plane to the ground quickly.
Quickly enough to remain the least possible amount of time in the air where they are an easy target for any ground troop. (This is why soldiers are dropped from very low altitudes; 400m is usual, but some combat drops occurred at even lower altitudes) But not too quickly that too many of the dropped soldiers end up unable to fight from the hardness of the landing. Please note that it is assumed that some will get hurt on the landing, and the calculus is designed to balance the risk in the air with the risk of the landing.
In contrast, rectangular chutes (wings) are designed to be dropped from higher than 900m, steered in the air, and to provide a very comfortable landing (as long as the surface of the wing is adequate for the suspended weight). They were also introduced for skydiving as a sport, and only later found some military use.
Ram air parachutes can effectively open in a more gradual manner due to the cellular design.
The special forces tale is heroism - being brave and tough in dangerous situations.
That the danger comes from your own equipment, used as intended, is just sickening.
Most injuries involve an element of luck or skill, and the ego serves as a natural buffer.
Consistent, unavoidable, permanent, self-inflicted damage is different. It hurts in its own (sickening) way.
>It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.
Maybe it is a physical phenomenon like adrenal fatigue or brain injury, maybe it isnt; that is why people study it.
that is to say, it's actually shell shock? as in, actual physical shock from actual shells? george carlin would be so proud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
the article also mentions that they'd all trained extensively in diving deep underwater, which is also known to cause brain damage, but the 'interface astroglial scarring' pathology lab results sound pretty specific to big shock waves
i'm skeptical that firing a rifle produces shock waves that induce cavitation in brain tissue, though
Firing a rifle may or may not cause shock waves that are strong enough. If you have been firing a whole day you definitely feel funny in the head.
The US military, and militaries in general, do not use weapons like the M82/M107 as sniper rifles very often. The M82/M107 in particular has a recoiling barrel (the entire 2.5' barrel slides back when shooting) and isn't a very precise weapon.
They're used for blowing up ordinance or disabling light vehicles. They are sometimes used for hostage situations because they're more likely to immediately disable someone.
The US military has pretty rarely used shoulder fired weapons, since they very rarely have to worry about tanks or aircraft. SEALs in particular wouldn't be doing that.
Do you know that, or are you thinking "these are AT weapons so they wouldn't be used"?
I haven't worked with US forces on a tactical level, but I have served in Afghanistan with my own country's SOFs. We used M72s extensively, even though we never engaged any armor.
I wasn't around for this picture, but it illustrates the point:
This should really be a big, fat, red flag that something is not quite right..
The CG is LOUD. Wicked backblast on that, too.
Generally, you're limited to firing 6 rounds or less per day during training due to blast & shockwave effects. The guys we trained with didn't have that much ammo on hand, anyway, but interesting to know.
https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/ImageVault/publishedmedia/fumm...
You're much more likely to see SF guys with short-barreled rifles, pistol-caliber carbines, suppressors on everything, etc. For all the (justified) complaints about military overspending, there just aren't the resources or training available to give every rifleman a suppressor.
lead is also easy to detect in blood, or via things like hair samples. no doubt SF types are getting more residue than most, but again fairly easy to notice
Math avoids this kind of uncertainty.
I'm not sure if these types of units usually dive that deep that you would be worried about brain damage, but I'm less familiar with that side of things. Diving probably hasn't been that much of a focus during the recent years in the middle east either.
as for diving, it's more about holding your breath for long periods of time repeatedly; look up national apnea teams
They are pretty loud, more so if you’re to the left or, especially, right where the ejection port sits.
My guess for SEALs is the breaching charges play a big role. Carl Gustafs are notorious as well, but I don't know whether SEALs use them. US Army Special Forces do.
Edit: Yeah, I should clarify to say the M16 is more likely to cause hearing damage, but not brain damage. The concussive force isn't that bad.
Other react mostly to guns, but as a diver I can assure you that there is no automatic brain damage from 'diving deep underwater', whatever that layman term means. There are many folks in diving community with 10s of thousand of dives working cognitively as well as their peers. If you mean Nitrox for bigger depths, again that ain't true, Nitrox is actually better than regular compressed air re effects like nitrogen bubbles in your bloodstream.
If you screw up or your equipment fails and end up with decompression sickness thats another story, but its like saying paragliding breaks your legs.
possibly people are upvoting because they know some facts you don't
never heard about that. can you back this up with a source or explanation?
One of my friends in particular had a saturation dive go really bad and he came back a completely different person. Like going from someone living the life to a complete wreck in one month.
https://community.atlassian.com/t5/App-Central/How-to-create...
I've never heard of seals doing that kind of training.
[1] https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fj.201...
[1] https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/1...
so, this paper neither is relevant for seal training nor does it claim any harm caused by breath holding, based on the Abstract section.
this kind of bullshit is really frustrating. my comment already explained that the kind of brain damage caused by apnea isn't the kind the pathology reports found, so it absolutely doesn't matter whether seal training involves apnea or not, or exactly what conditions are needed for apnea-induced brain damage, unless you have some strong reason for believing that the news article's reporting of the pathology is wrong
so actually it's fine with me for you to continue being wrong if you want. i don't have anything to sell you
to add something of substance - here is a study that does not even find any "Link between Repeated Transient Chokes and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Related Effects" and that kind of asphyxiation is obviously much more extreme than holding your breath.
---
Over the course of their 6-year investigation into “Havana Syndrome” U.S. officials expended considerable human capital and financial resources going down a rabbit hole searching for exotic explanations. Instead of finding secret weapons and foreign conspiracies—they found only rabbits. For in the end, prosaic explanations were determined to be the cause of the events in Cuba and its subsequent global spread. That is the lesson of “Havana Syndrome”—follow the science.
---
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10913303/
“It is necessary to use an animal like a ferret that has brain structures resembling the “gyrencephalic nature” of the human brain; mice and rats do not fulfill this criteria, according to the summary. The brain tissue of gyrencephalic animals, like humans, ferrets, pigs and primates, resembles ridges and valleys, compared to smooth surfaces of the brains of lissencephalic animals, such as mice and rats.”
“You don’t get approval for animal testing unless the science is there. … You’ve already proven out that the science is correct and exists, and now you are looking at the biological impacts that can’t be modeled and you need a specimen to determine what it does biologically,” the former official said.
0. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/09/pentagon-funding-ex...
[1] - https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_W81XWH2211105_210...
[2] - https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_W81XWH2211105_97D...
- a very small minority of navy seals have committed suicide after exhibiting signs of psychological disorders
- post-mortem analysis showed damage that could be related to exposure to blasts
- blasts causing brain damage? perhaps in training?
Everything else that's written is (to me) pretty much irrelevant. Because in science, a good scientist engaging in good science would now setout to reject their own hypothesis. And only after trying to refute it in every way imaginable might they begin to accept it as even possible, and then set out to test it, again with the goal of rejecting it, so much as possible. But media goes the other way and now runs around collecting statements, data, and evidence in favor of their hypothesis, but you can collect practically endless evidence in support of ideas that are false (which is why science focuses on rejecting your own ideas instead), so it's quite a pointless endeavor.
I tried to do the same with the 60 minutes article (going by the transcript), but failed. The reason is that what they presented sounds pretty silly if you remove it from the "flow." A Russian working in America as a chef, who previously worked as a military comms guy, is arrested for speeding/evading arrest and has a device to allegedly wipe his car's comp? That doesn't even really qualify as circumstantial evidence, because it's just not at all logically connected unless you're playing a game of "connect the dots." And one can do that, but in the end you mostly just end up drawing a Jackson Pollock.
Subsequent evidence debunked that "post-mortem", as another user posted.
We've seen, with evidence, China pressure research groups and Nature into calling the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory. Like "fake news", "conspiracy theory" is now actively used by China as a way to shut down evidence.
From subpoenaed communications we even know that certain figures who publicly denounced the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy, privately believed the theory was likely.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-lab-leak-deception-an...
Government covert operations are not the kind of phenomenon science can properly study because it's not reproducible and data is not open. It's the realm of investigative journalism and intelligence.
But when journalists or intelligence agencies lie, exactly nothing happens. Intelligence agencies clearly see lying as just part of their retinue of weapons. And the media in general has mostly become a mixture of entertainment and bias confirmation. The internet seems to have largely killed the traditional role of the media as the bearer of information and knowledge on the happenings of the day.
[1] - https://nypost.com/2024/06/02/us-news/house-covid-panel-chai...
I also didn't claim Journalists and Intelligence Agencies are bearers of truth but it stands that to study something like Lab Leak or Havana Syndrome is a question in the realm of investigation, not science. No?
Peter is risking criminal consequences based on evidence gathered by investigation, not the scientific process. Also not because of purposefully misleading research but dangerous research and lies while testifying, which isn't fraudulent science.
But if you want a more general case, just check out Retraction Watch. You'll find that consequences are very real, they're just not the sort that typically make the news. For instance looking up cases at Harvard, I randomly picked Sam W Lee. [1] The final charge against him was in 2019. Since then he has not only been terminated at Harvard, but has not had a single publication - meaning he likely has been unable to find a position at another university, nor has he been able to independently publish. [2]
[1] - https://retractionwatch.com/2019/04/19/harvard-cancer-lab-su...
---
A consensus has formed among the growing community of AHI sufferers that the U.S. government — and the CIA in particular — is hiding the full extent of what it knows about the source of Havana Syndrome. The victims offer two general hypotheses as to why. The first is that releasing the full intelligence around Russian involvement might be so shocking as to convince the American people and their representatives that Moscow has committed an act of war against the United States, thereby raising thorny questions as to how a nuclear power fond of showing off its hypersonic missiles ought to be made to pay.
---
Okay, so Russia is running around randomly attacking low level embassy workers, and the US knows this and is playing PR for Russia, because they're worried about US citizens viewing Russia negatively. I'm sure there's far more absurd mental gymnastics in there as well, as that was literally from the first section I clicked to. When we get out of this clown world era and back to something vaguely resembling normalcy, there's about a 100% chance that these "citizen investigative journalists" are mostly all going to end up having been little more than Operation Mockingbird 2.0. [1]
"attacking low level embassy workers"
Do you think really they'd pick the US president as their first target on an experimental (or even proven) weapon? And I wouldn't call embassy employees "random" in any context.
>US knows this and is playing PR for Russia, because they're worried about US citizens viewing Russia negatively
As a student of history, there are hundreds of reasons and prior examples of governments hiding the true capabilities of nations they consider enemies or adversaries. This allows them time to investigate and create a defense, it also appease the public becuase telling everyone "hey everyone watch out our advisory has this super top secret weapon to which we have no defense!" is not a great idea.
The idea that the US would "play PR for Russia" is absurd.
---
While the U.S. Government allowed the release of the [politicized findings which suggested weapons as a possible cause], they withheld the results of other investigations that were skeptical of the condition. In 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that mass psychogenic illness was most likely responsible for the outbreak. While the report remains classified, its conclusions were leaked to the media. The contents of a second classified report were only released in September 2021 after a Freedom of Information Act filing. It found the role of microwave radiation “highly unlikely,” and that psychogenic illness appeared to play a role
---
The political establishment was actively trying to suggest it was caused by secret weapons from "foreign adversaries", and classifying the opinions which contradicted that. They were undermined by a mixture of leaks and Freedom of Information Act requests. People claiming to suffer from the syndrome numbered in the hundreds in 70 countries around the world [1], including many Western nations where "foreign adversaries" would stand minimal chance of deploying any sort of a weapon, even more so after the initial incidents. Notably, from the same article, workers who reported suffering from 'Havana Syndrome' were able to receive compensation of up to $200,000.
[1] - https://apnews.com/article/health-cuba-havana-congress-e0186...
Are you suggesting these people reported symptoms in order to be eligible for potential future government compensation? Compensation I remind you, that didn't even exist until very recently.
Oh and I couldn't resist:
"Specific amounts will be determined to by the extent and severity of the victims’ injuries, which have included brain damage not limited to vertigo, cognitive damage, eyesight and hearing problems, according to the officials and aides."
That's some "psychogenic illness"! And why would they compensate at all if this is just made up?
---
One found that patients “appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma” (Swanson et al., 2018, p. 1125). But standard MRI scans of the brain were normal and based on the criteria for abnormal neuropsychological tests, just about anybody would be diagnosed with brain injury as the threshold for impairment was excessively high (Della Sala & Cubelli, 2018). Another study using functional MRI found “brain anomalies” in a small cohort of patients (Ragini et al., 2019). But such anomalies are common with this imagining technique, often representing normal individual variation.
--
And I'm stopping the quote there for brevity. It goes on with further elaboration.
This would take a much bigger explosion.
Ear protecting does not protect brain much. It protects hearing. Brain heals from very mild damage when there is time to rest, but when you shoot all day, day after day, the damage can accumulate. One already recognized problem area is the show wave getting between helmet and skull. It can amplify the impact.
Nobody knows what the impact from very frequent rifle training is. Very people few do that. Once a month in the range is probably not enough.
People that hunt and shoot guns their whole lives don't shoot guns their whole lives. They shoot guns a few times when hunting and then a lot of times at the range but at a leisurely pace. This is like comparing a package delivery guy who likes jogging to an Olympic athlete.
You'd be surprised how much time SOFs im general spend lying in a bush, peeing on bottles and radioing in updates. Although US SOFs may have been doing it less than others during GWOT. Not everything is DA.
(That doesn't change your general point though, and SOF training is extremely rigorous and demanding and does include a lot of shooting. But not all day every day.)
A hunter (I am one) might shoot a dozen rounds to zero in a rifle, or a hundred shells at a clay range. Actually hunting is never more than a handful of rifle rounds or a few dozen shells.
An M4 (the only carbine I can think of in use by the military) is already a step down in boom as a 5.56mm; adding a suppressor makes that even less so. It’s like shooting a .22 at that point. As to SMGs, they’re all small caliber – 9mm, .45, 5.7mm…
I'm saying that a SEAL shooting a suppressed SMG feels nothing after dumping magazine after magazine downrange. There's no way this is causing concussions.
Grandpa's 30-06 will rattle your fillings a little bit after one round - still probably doesn't result in TBI.
SCAR-H, M14 EBR, M249 SAWs and M240 all shoot 7.52mm x 51mm NATO (compatible with .308 but slightly different chamber pressures)
As I said, we don't if calibers below .50 cause significant damage when shooting in excessive amounts. Trying to figure it as a layman is useless. It's better to show epistemic humility than try to assert one way or another.
The way it's explained in the article is that this is actually a result of the blast energy wave bouncing off of differently dense brain tissue sections and causing cavitation.
I'm glad that these issues are finally being brought to light, It's truly unfortunate that no matter how highly trained and skilled some of these soldiers are, that blast waves from IEDs or in this case from their own munitions can result in such insidious physiological changes.
And incredibly it seems that the Adrian helmet still outperforms modern helmet designs in the blast protection quality. [1] It can't stop a bullet sure, but I suspect that chances of being hit by an overhead blast are higher than that a of a headshot in a typical warfare scenario.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The momentum of a projectile impact is very low, far lower than head contacts in sports. See, e.g.: https://i.ibb.co/7X6YCLD/ballistic-head-impact-updated.jpg -- from https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/13390/chapter/9
If your helmet stops a bullet, there's some risk of head injury if the helmet shell, upon deformation, comes into contact with your skull. Otherwise you'll be okay. There's some historical information on this at: https://www.ade.pt/bulletproof-helmets
Also, the kinetic energy of a fragment near the site of an explosion can be higher than the kinetic energy load of a 9mm handgun bullet, which is generally the only small-arms threat that combat helmets are rated to stop.
Kinetic energy is not an unsolvable problem, energy can be dissipated. The momentum is in fact the problem that can't be really worked-around (except spreading it over longer period of time) but the momentum of a bullet is low.
UPD replaced "impulse" with "momentum", lost in translation
Helmets cannot deform as much as vests before seriously injuring the wearer, limiting their capacity to dissipate kinetic energy. And if you make them too rigid, concussion becomes a problem.
Momentum is conserved, recoil momentum is the same as bullet momentum, yet recoil does not kill the shooter.
The initial statement that's being refuted here is that a bulletproof helmet would break your neck and thus cannot work.
This statement is false because (besides such helmets existing on practice) your skull can absorb the momentum without too much damage and helmet can absorb the kinetic energy.
But then the bullet hits the villain’s 300lb henchman, who is lifted off his feet and goes flying.
This is why people think bullets are magical momentum machines when in reality, due to air resistance, the momentum transfered to the target is even lower than at the moment of firing.
(He survived, it's not really relevant here as it didn't stop the bullet - there was an exit hole too).
So not surprising to see some brain damage in navy seals. Of course the question is what comes first, the brain damage or the ptsd. And whether something can be done before brain damage happens in terms of medication or therapy.
Psychological doesn't mean "imagined", just means "in the realm of thought". Your thinking is not "imagined", nor is the impact of decisions, ruminating, etc to you.
Depends, because we had millenia of wars, even much more gruesome (but without explosions), and much fewer accounts of psychological shit. It was just a fact of life, and most people carried on.
Also throughout history there just wasn't much attention for regular people, and they're seriously under-represented in the historical record in pretty much every way. Do you think some Roman general is going to write about his soldiers crying about how horrible war is? Of course not; that would make him and his army look bad. He was much more likely to under-represent his numbers to make his army look good ("we defeated the Barbarian horde of 50,000 with just 5,000 soldiers!" sounds a lot better than "our armies were of equal numbers but we won"). And the soldiers themselves typically didn't leave any records.
And throughout much of history there just wasn't all that much attention for these types of problems in the first place. Patton famously slapped some soldiers dealing with shell shock because he thought it was just fake and they needed to "man up". That was probably more or less the typical response for much of history.
The aristocracy generally fared relatively well in medieval battles as it was more profitable to capture a noble unharmed for ransom than to risk severely injuring or killing them, not to mention the class taboo and difference in training and equipment between a noble and a commoner.
But warfare was also extremely different. The use of crossbows against Christians was banned by the Catholic church because it was considered too horrifying because of its speed. Battles would often be won by forcing the other side to surrender or morale breaking down and being routed. Because the violence was also much more direct than the pull of a trigger or press of a button, humans were also much more hesitant to actually try and kill their opponent. The crusades are infamous because they actually involved a more modern level of dehumanization but throughout most of history wars would be fought against people who looked like you, spoke a similar language and shared a similar culture. The exceptions are so well-known because they were rare.
"It was just a fact of life" is something we say about all kinds of horrors of the past. You say "most people carried on" but this is literally survivor bias: most people who served in past wars don't go on to kill themselves even without treatment even when they suffer from PTSD or shell shock or whatever. That doesn't mean recognizing and treating their condition wouldn't drastically increase their quality of life. It also ignores that "most" is not all. People would simply starve themselves to death or go into the woods and never come back or get "battle frenzy" and throw themselves at the enemy with no regard for their safety and that too was "just a fact of life" but today we would call that suicide.
History is full of "psychological shit". We just lacked the understanding of psychology to properly classify and recognize it in ways that would allow us to address any of it.
It may be the case that being from a society in which violence is glorified and made into a virtue makes people less susceptible to war-induced PTSD. Or the circumstances of the war could make the difference; if you are fighting a just war you earnestly believe to be in the direct defense of your family and community, or whether you were drafted into a war that has nothing to do with you and society tells you is cynically or foolishly motivated.
I think it's a mistake to look at a civilisation past or present that is defined by widespread violence and death and think of it as anything other than dysfunctional. It's just that the baseline of suffering is so high it drowns out all the easily identifiable forms of suffering we're accustomed to.
You often hear people talk about the cultural trauma of Japan, Russia, or Germany. As an outsider there's also a clear circle of violence in American society which pervades and informs cultural attitudes, social policy and conflict resolution. This shouldn't be surprising given the US's history of widespread suffering throughout its history: indentured servitude, religious prosecution, chattel slavery, genocide, disease, civil war. American hyperindividualism as well as both the Cold War and War on Terror "world police" eras of foreign policy and the more recent popularity of isolationism have all the trappings of a trauma response.
Meat is violence. This is why slaughter is often highly ritualized in "primitive" societies, often thanking the animal for its part and being deeply aware of the interplay of life and death that meat eating requires but also the importance of the slaughter for the survival of that society. Both the meat-eating urbanite having an existential crisis over having to kill an animal for sustenance as well as the farm hand thoughtlessly killing an animal are in unhealthy positions - one from the detachment of mass production, the other from the desensitization of their involvement in it. The vegan might be in a healthier space but given modern industrial production is likely as detached from the food they consume and the suffering and death that enables it (be it the field hands working in bad conditions for low pay, the animals dying in the process of industrial farming or the ecological damage caused by shipping exotic or out-of-season produce around the globe).
I say that as a city dwelling meat eater living in Germany, which is a deeply unwell country scared of understanding its own history beyond easy platitudes and simple stories of good and evil people. Humans are not a virus but humanity is very sick and it will take a long time and a lot of effort for it to get any better - if ever.
More to the point: as someone who has had a justified need for therapy before, I think it's important to recognize that of course you can often simply "push through it" because if you can't, you simply break. But importantly you won't get any better, you will just appear more functional for as long as you can keep it up. Therapy was a taboo in my lifetime and I'm not even 40. Suicide is still often a taboo but only started being acknowledged a few short decades ago because a number of celebrity deaths became widely publicized (in Germany it was a soccer player, the stoic masculinity equivalent of an American quarterback). That didn't mean these things didn't happen before. It just meant we didn't acknowledge they did and we didn't know how to get help.
Yes, there are people who aren't "bothered" by killing animals. There are also people who aren't "bothered" by killing people. I'm saying that's a bad thing. I live near an industrial slaughter house, in fact one of the biggest "meat factories" in Europe. The people who work there are not okay.
I'm not saying "don't eat meat". I'm saying if eating meat literally doesn't bother you, you should consider that a warning sign.
You were using the wrong words, that's it. I think it would be good for you to use the right ones instead, for several reasons, one being that you might not get mistaken for a Ruggiu kind of person.
But the way you've phrased it implies a bit more and you should probably clarify.
I’ll summarize the video’s transcripts here partially.
In WW1, it was called Shell Shock. That was 70 years ago. In WW2, a generation later, it was called Battle Fatigue. In the War in Korea in 1950, it was called Operational Exhaustion. In the War in Vietnam and because of that war, it has been called Post-Tramatic Stress Disorder.
The NYT Article basically concludes that PTSD has been Shell Shock all along. Progress has been hampered by Euphamisms. If the combat veterans were diagnosed with Shell Shock, we might have a solution or remedy for it 70 years later.
This problem is pretty bad. U.S. soldiers are almost 9x more likely to die by suicide than by combat, according to a Pentagon internal study ending in 2019.
According to data published by the CDC, if you’re a white male (civilian/military/all) the main thing you have to do to live to see your 44th birthday is not die by suicide. The data says that’s a lot harder than it sounds as it’s the second leading cause of death in all age brackets up to age 44. A staggering 70% of all suicides are by white males. What societal factors are disproportionately affecting them?
Maybe put out an ad campaign that says “Suicide is selfish, misandrist, and racist.” Although that doesn’t treat the underlying issue(s) and causational factors. It’s similar to when Foxconn added nets to the upper floors of their iPhone factory.
Prior to ww1 there were limited periods where you would live on edge - if you have to march armies into position and have pitched battles (e.g. Waterloo) the soldiers have some warning and mental preparation time.
WW1 saw the start of widespread normality of living in trenches and never knowing when the artillery shell might kill you.
Just thinking aloud.
Shock damage from firing a gun might be bad, damage from incoming shells is much worse.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/06/14/armys-recruit...
That policy changed by 2016, so the rationale no longer holds.
With that said, we also haven't had mandatory conscription since the Vietnam War, and I think it's unlikely that we would any time in the near future, short of WW3 landing on our front doorstep (either directly or as a result of NATO's collective defense clause) -- recall that we didn't formally enter WW2 until after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
I recall that the only reason I signed up for selective service was because it was a requirement to receive federal financial aid for college, although it seems that requirement was removed in 2023.
Historically countries didn't let women fight in wars because they didn't want their civilisation to die out. If a country loses a double-digit percent of its men it can still repopulate just as quickly, because one man can make multiple women pregnant, while if it loses its women then it takes significantly longer to repopulate, because one woman can't have multiple babies at the same time so the birthrate will necessarily be reduced.
People keep repeating this, but nobody has so far answered my follow-up question: do you have any example where that actually happened? Even in heavily impacted countries (like Serbia in WWI, which lost around 50% of its prewar male population), there were no laws or campaigns to allow harems or one man - multiple women combinations.
Edit: To provide more context: It was not exactly "official policy", but single mothers became much more common in Britain after WWI due to the fathers either dying in the war or, well, being already in another marriage. To the point the women started organizing and campaigning for their rights https://www.gingerbread.org.uk/about-us/gingerbread-history/
At least in Russia it meant: less options for women, a more male centric dating market and more children born out of wedlock.
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/99/2/229/58403/...
> Using unique archival data, the results indicate that male scarcity led to lower rates of marriage and fertility
Lower rate of fertility is the important bit.
I see it working without the luxury of extra legal and financial protection.
> A married man going around spreading seed and women getting pregnant and going at it alone?
Well that and more. It's a combination of all available options:
* Men having kids outside of marriage
* Men having kids from 2-3 marriages
* Women marrying older men who normally are out of the reproduction race
None of that is unheard of even in peace times, and just becomes more frequent.
> women getting pregnant and going at it alone
Women going at it alone is a very modern phenomenon. It takes a village to raise a child, not just your partner. And conversely if you do have a village to support you then you don't need your partner that much.
So all of it certainly can work and did work in the past. How it will pan out in the 21st century no one knows yet. I hope we'll never have to learn.
IF that were the case, governments would do something, anything, to encourage such behaviour (one man getting multiple women pregnant) after the war is over. Nobody is able to come up with any examples of anything like that happening, which again leads me to believe that the premise is bullshit and the real reasons why only men are drafted are somewhere between biology and misogyny.
Sounds about right. Historically, the military culture is obviously deeply rooted in patriarchy. Men are to defend their countries, in the same way that 'women and children' have been supposed to go first into lifeboats.
There are some arguments to be found in the above mentioned Rostker v. Goldberg, and in the legal debate that followed:
Once the combat issue is put in proper perspective and the evidence of women's recognized ability to perform military functions is assessed, it becomes apparent that an exclusion of women from a draft registration requirement would be the product of the archaic notion that women must remain 'as the center of home and family.'
and
Congress followed the teachings of history that if a nation is to survive, men must provide the first line of defense while women keep the home fires burning.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150502095151/http://digitalcom...
It's one of the concerns, not necessarily the primary. Somebody had to keep the household going, raise and feed the existing children, and so on (which, at the day, and even today in most parts, was the role of women).
>IF that were the case, governments would do something, anything, to encourage such behaviour (one man getting multiple women pregnant) after the war is over.
That doesn't follow. Governments would only need to "do something, anything" if the thing didn't just happen by itself - which generally, it did.
And of course the morals of the day wouldn't have them explicitly promote anything of the sort.
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/99/2/229/58403/...
You don't need laws or campaigns, it happens naturally, due to the increased sexual selection availability. And of course, given that, why would men opt of harems (especially where they aren't even historically relevant to their culture)? They'd just have relationships on the side, jump ship and marry again, etc.
Again, do you have any examples of this actually happening in the real world? It naturally happens that men become more desirable because there's less of them, but is there any actual case where it became widespread for men to get multiple different women pregnant to repopulate the country?
Not to mention, even if it did happen (and again, nobody has come up with any examples in the tens of times I've asked this question, and Google hasn't been helpful either), unless there was a concentrated government policy to that effect, you'd be mistaking correlation with causation - less men than women, so men are more desirable and can pull off multiple kids from multiple women doesn't mean that's the reasoning why only men were drafted.
You were given examples already: "Using unique archival data, the results indicate that male scarcity led to lower rates of marriage and fertility, higher nonmarital births, and reduced bargaining power within marriage for women most affected by war deaths"
You can read about similar post-war periods with similar problems and outcomes in history books too.
>unless there was a concentrated government policy to that effect you'd be mistaking correlation with causation - less men than women, so men are more desirable and can pull off multiple kids from multiple women doesn't mean that's the reasoning why only men were drafted.
Women were needed to raise the present kids, and to be able to raise future kids. People didn't need to have this spelt out in law, or to have subsidies for sex with more different partners post war.
Even so, the very link you continue to ignore mentions such legal changes too in the case of post-WWII USSR:
"The impact of sex ratio imbalance on marriage and family persisted for years after the war's end and was likely magnified by
(...wait for it...)
policies that promoted nonmarital births"
The fertility rate (amount of kids per woman) dropped, so no.
> policies that promoted nonmarital births
Nonmarital births does not mean that men were getting multiple different women pregnant at the same time.
Of course it did, since tens of millions men still died and tons were left with severe impairements. It's not about it remaining stable or raising after the most horrible war casualties in history it's about it not dropping as much. It's about it being elevated to where it would be if what we describe wasn't the case.
"The magnitude of the effect on completed fertility is relatively small in light of the scale of male losses, perhaps due to the pronatalist policy that promoted out of wedlock births"
>Nonmarital births does not mean that men were getting multiple different women pregnant at the same time.
Who said anything about "same time"? Men had more choice and thus more affairs/women and reduced being tied to marriage. This translates to more women pregnant by fewer men over the previous period - doesn't mean men got 2-3 women pregnant at a time.
In any case, I think this is more of a "hands on the ears" mode, than a discussion mode, so I'll stop here.
In no cases were there laws, government doesn't need to pass laws to make it happen, just just because there weren't laws doesn't mean it didn't happen a lot
Any data on Paraguay?
No, women have been excluded from front-line combat because they are physically weaker than men and would be killed quickly without accomplishing much. Men are just much more aggressive, have higher stamina etc. It's never been about repopulation. Nothing biologically stops a woman having 10 children with a single man, it's just rare.
What went wrong - in fubar situations, men instinctively lunged for protecting women, instead of rationally estimating situation and acting accordingly. We men are simply still too much gentlemen to have women around when bullets are flying, despite feminists trying hard erasing this. Give it 2 more generations and western society will be there.
FYI eastern Europe countries like Ukraine have women in the military, including combat positions. Not surprisingly they keep getting injured and dying just like rest of them.
It might be interesting to think about what sets them apart from regular armies, which have often had trouble in this area.
You're confusing the requirements and needs with regular armies.
This report might be useful. It summarizes a large scale study done in 2002 by the British army. The tests were heavily rigged in favour of the women but even so the conclusion was to keep them out of combat roles. Note the part where they say that fewer than 2% of women were as fit as the average male soldier:
https://www.cna.org/reports/2012/Practices-of-Foreign%20Mili...
A panel of subject matter experts conducted the study. They issued a report, A Study of Combat Effectiveness and Gender, to British ministers in 2001.[24] The study's tests were designed to examine the feasibility of mixed-gender tank crews, all-women crews, mixed infantry units, and all-women infantry units. They also were designed to examine how men would react to the presence of women on the battlefield and how each gender coped with the physical demands of combat.
According to news articles, some reports maintain that the exercises found that women were as capable as men for service in combat units, but the results were mired in controversy [56]. Senior military officers, including Brig Seymour Monro (the Army's director of the infantry), stated that the Army field tests were so diluted that they “amounted to little more than aggressive camping.” Brig Monro also said that tasks that women were not physically capable of doing were simply dropped from the trials [56]. According to the final Ministry of Defence report, the study showed that fewer than 2 percent of female soldiers were as fit as the average male soldier [57].
Specifically, news reports stated that the trials stalled early on when women were not able to complete a number of tasks under battlefield conditions:
• When asked to carry 90 pounds of artillery shells over measured distances, women failed 70 percent of the time (compared with a male failure rate of 20 percent).
• When asked to march 12.5 miles carrying 60 pounds of equipment followed by target practice in simulated wartime conditions, women failed 48 percent of the time (compared with a male failure rate of 17 percent).
• Women were generally incapable of digging themselves into hard ground under fire.
• Women were generally slower in simulated combat exercises involving "fire and move" drills.
• Women suffered much higher injury rates in close-quarter battle tests, such as hand-to-hand combat.
You'll have to forgive me for finding this non-explanation unsatisfying. Do you think there's any reason for it being "rare"?
This is the actual process of human natural selection, and it's not much influenced by laws and things like that, no matter how hard the law tries.
I don't believe not using a condom with a Tinder date is an option, at least in the West. No matter how attractive and insisting the male is, a woman knows she is the one to bear the consequences. Even if they're on a pill, STDs are still a thing, so why take the risk.
It's a very common option. About 30% report non-use of condoms in their previous one-night-stand.
Most STDs are minor and/or easily treatable diseases. The worry about them has a huge moralistic component.
The man has to also bear the consequences in most nations, since he has to pay a lot of money. They like sex, but not at that price.
(Although having sex isn't something that you need to survive (like eating), or something that will happen embarrassingly for physics reasons if you don't choose a voluntary place to do it (like peeing), it is controlled by similar mechanisms thanks to evolution being evolution.)
It works somewhat, but to a much lesser extent than, say, penalties for driving without carrying a warning triangle, which is a rational-brain activity. At some point the penalties are creating a cost that is bigger than the cost of dealing with the thing they are trying to prevent, while still not working all that well.
Anyway, that's extremely off topic. I think the point is that there's no shortage of babies wanting to get made, and if you want the population to make more babies, you should reduce the things that are preventing them from doing so, not add positive incentives (unless they cancel out negative ones).
Really? Might is also have something to do with women having trouble moving 80-100 lbs of gear like in WW2? It was 50 lbs in the Civil War. Do you think the leaders at the time had the foresight to keep women out of the war for future breeding purposes?
That's thinking 15-20 years into the future while they are fighting wars now.
The draft should work the same way.
Like not wanting to hire non-white people.
Like not wanting to hire people who are "too old"/"too young" for the field.
Like not wanting to punish men who harass women.
Like not wanting to make sure that your employees are well-treated, satisfied with their jobs, and healthy enough mentally and physically to concentrate on the job regularly.
The idea that The Almighty Market will solve all problems and be perfectly rational is notably unsupported by evidence.
It is demonstrably often overpowered by classism, racism, sexism, queerphobia, etc.
It doesn't "only take one person" to try something like that. It takes one person who is already part of the capital class—ie, someone who is already wealthy, a category correlated, if somewhat loosely, with the exact bigotries listed here. It takes someone who has, statistically speaking, made their money by being ruthless about it deciding they want to take a huge risk with it rather than do the sure thing (hire from the privileged classes). It also takes them having an idea for an actual business that's not merely viable, but highly lucrative. It also takes enough people in the marginalized classes who are within the target industry, who actually hear about the business, who are looking for a job, who are qualified, who can prove to the hirers' satisfaction that they are qualified.
This is not an exhaustive list.
You are oversimplifying in service of justifying an irrational ideology.
I thought the assumption was that they were already present in order to get a lower wage. if they are just not present, then I don't understand the argument. your belief that there is absolutely nobody greedy enough to make it happen seems unrealistic.
OK, congratulations. You have satisfied one of the conditions I said were necessary.
Just in my line that you quote there are 5.
You want a pat on the back for solving bigotry forever?
* Women can be hired for a discount relative to hiring men
* Women are just as good at those jobs as men are, i.e. the lower wages are not due to worse job performance
Then it follows that some company or other would be going out of its way to hire women in preference to men. Yes, not everyone is a rational actor - but even if many companies are run by raging misogynists, not all are. And the companies who are willing to get a cheaper (but just as effective) workforce will have a significant advantage, and over time outcompete the other firms.
The fact that this hasn't happened is very strong evidence that one of those two premises is false.
As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, people take it as axiomatic that markets would react to this, but the evidence is strong that they don’t.
The Spartans didn’t send their women off and let the men stay back in the homeland.
By preserving the women, society can bounce back from a catastrophic loss of young men.
There’s a few anomalies where old dudes are sticking around voluntarily.
Also worth noting that a lot of the videos posted claiming to be “people being drafted” are actually videos of the police just arresting criminals…
Big assumption. Other options are also North Korea sending troops. Or Iran. Or while the US engages there, China uses the opportunity to take Taiwan. Geopolitics is complicated. No one wants a nuclear war, but at some point there is no more rationality, when a side feels pushed over the limit.
That's never been doctorine for the simple reason US hasn't had (near) peer rivals until PRC in last 30 years. Peak hyperpower US 90s doctorine was calibrated for 2 "major" wars, when major is with adversaries who were frankly all medium powers (IRAQ tier). Then in 00s-10s it shifted to 1 "major" war, 1 holding war, i.e. actively fight 1 major war, fix another major war in place so resources can shift to second war after active war. Now half the think tank writing is questioning if US can win in PRC backyard, where PRC is characterized either as near peer, pacing power, or peer. US doctorine right now is maybe can deter PRC until post 2030s "decade of concern" but right now US IndoPac posture in PRC backyard a tossup.
Maybe it would be fair if men had privileges to go along with such obligations but equality is equality. It’s not like the world is short on people.
Are you under the impression that we're still doing trench warfare, though?
And any big nukes won't be aimed at soldiers.
The biggest difference/innovation as of late is inverting the trench, bringing the dirt/sandbags above ground instead of the soldiers below ground
Anything involving modern combined-arms warfare. Iraq, for example.
Still, I believe earthen barriers are still used to solidify the 'frontlines' if you squint a bit
Afaik the Iraq Iran war was still doing straight up trench warfare (at points) and the Syrian civil war + Afghan theater were using caves (in some areas). Same with Korea and Vietnam.
Then again you're right in that I don't think sudan etc have used trench warfare (in the first civil war, apparently the second one has on a post edit search: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-65962771 )
You're completely right on the second Iraq war, I don't see any sources for trenches, minus hesco.
I think what I comes down to is trench warfare is popular for the same reason earthworks are popular in civil engineering. Cheap, locally sourced, and effective in its purpose.
Static versus combined arms. The U.S. military is deadly not only because it is big, but also because it practically invented and then mastered modern combined-arms warfare. (It’s why we put so much emphasis on air superiority over e.g. armour.)
their national birthrates, just like in the rest of Europe, are low, and losing 20-40% of the 18-25 year old cohort means population collapse.
Russia is in a similar place, and is generally only drafting from ethnic minorities, far eastern locales, and prisoners, plus a hearty dose of mercenaries. that said, they have 3x the population and can just pull way more people.
in both countries the average of a trooper is like 38-45.
What sort of male sends the female to check on the noises that sound like an intruder in the wee hours of the night? Do they set turns and when it's her turn she's gotta check out the noises? Any gal married or shacked up with a guy like that should kick him out before night is over.
Can you imagine Paul asking Nancy to check out the basement noises in SF?
Also, those war hawks should see duty in the front lines. None of this sitting behind "green zones" directing grunts. Get out there, get in the line of fire. Imagine Washington, Nimitz, Yamamoto, Zhukov, etc., let's just phone it in.
Israel is likely the most prominent country sending women to war. I'm eager to call Israel many bad names, but "cowardly" is not one of them.
I think it's a worthwhile discussion, but your argumentation seems to be mainly based on stereotypes (women are weak) and some old chivalric ideals.
It usually comes down to proximity and appetite.
Not that I support the idea of drafting civilian populations as soldiers in general: it's mostly a way to get innocent people killed and not much more.
Not if you train them before sending them to the front. Check Ukraine, they would have been defeated without the massive influx of conscripts due to the massive Russian influx of poorly trained conscripts.
Also, women are not children. Children deserve protection because they don't know any better, their minds are not fully equipped to understand what going to war means. Additionally, children make very poor soldiers, as their motor skills and reasoning skills and emotional control are just not developed enough to function as well as an adult, particularly in times of extreme stress such as war.
So again, children require and deserve protection from the rest of society. Women neither require it, nor deserve it, not any more than any other civilian.
Misandry would be saying men must be sent to war instead of women because they are inferior, or because they deserve a worse life, or something like that.
World War 2 had a shitload of famous actors, athletes, politician's kids, etc go off to war. What are you smoking?
The onus is on you to show that it is bad in this case. We discriminate routinely, children are exempt from working for example.
We haven't even drafted men in fifty years.
Surrender is not an option. Unfortunately, everyone (men and women included) must do their duty to stop a genocide.
Slavery is always evil, including military slavery ("conscription").
Also, the guerilla scenario is not that realistic. Russians are experts at fighting guerillas and insurections, they have accumulated centuries of experience in it. That's because they've been a multi-ethic empire consisting of a lot of conquered unhappy minorities for a long time now, so they had to learn how to keep them in check. They have world-class spy network and surveilance state, so that any dissidents will be quickly found (torture enough people and someone will give up the location of their guerilla relative etc.). Moreover, they begin the occupation of a given region with mass-murdering people who have leadership capabilities ( see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre ), so that there's literally no one left who could organize the guerillas into anything meaningful.
For context - in the part of Poland occupied by Germans during WW2, there was a vast Polish underground state (there were 200k guerillas soldiers alone, but there were also underground schools, universities giving diplomas, underground theaters etc.). That was all operating under Gestapo's nose, and in spite of heavy military commitment to occupy Poland. Meanwhile, in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland, there was practically nothng. Russians were that much better than Germans at squashing dissidents.
Surrender is an option, none of those things is worse than death. I would not make that trade. If the Ukrainian men want to stop it they can still volunteer, so can anyone else. And it looks like they will lose the war anyway, so they’ll have to surrender anyway except now after a huge amount of death and destruction. Ukraine is heavily indebted and the belief that some Marshal plan reconstruction would enable them to pay that off is unrealistic.
And there are many things worse than death. Do you know how Russian combat medics are trained? Instructors pick a prisoner, cut off their palm, then instruct the medic on how to stop the bleeding. Then they cut the arm off up to elbow, teach how to stop the bleeding, and repeat it until the prisoner has no limbs left. Stories like these are a common occurrence. The number of documented war crimes has exceeded 100 000, and investigators don't even have access to most of occupied land.
It is natural that no-one wants to take the risk of ending up in the situation I described, but at the same time, someone has to take the risk, otherwise Russians will simply exterminate Ukraine and Ukrainians as they exist today. Like at Uvalde, more people will die as a result.
Unless there’s plentiful evidence for the above (it’s possible one-off, I suppose), I think you’ve gone full fruit-loop territory.
I humbly suggest you look in the mirror and ask what’s actually going on in your head, and why. This sort of distorted extreme thinking is what creates monsters.
And people here are taught since childhood that this not about being an useful little soldier for the government, but an essential duty to your friends and family, because when the situation gets tough, there won't be anyone else to protect them. A huge professional military that can come to your rescue - like the US Army - is a luxury that most people in the world don't have.
I don’t agree with the framing again, but again I don’t think I’ll be changing anyone’s mind here.
Vaccines are a good example of this. Everyone is better off when they take a personal risk to eradicate polio from the entire group. In the process, some people will suffer side-effects ranging from allergic reaction to even death in the worst case, but that is the sacrifice that needs to be made. Unfortunately, modern imbalance towards individualism has produced a generation of parents who cannot tolerate any risk, choose the selfish option and leave their children unvaccinated, leading to re-emergence of old infectious diseases that kill and maim more children than the universal vaccination would.
Individual and collective interests need to be fairly balanced, and Ukraine has done that by preferring older conscripts over younger ones, but you will never find enough volunteers for any truly shitty situation that requires more people than the tiny fraction of natural-born risk-takers who fill the ranks of firefighters and other dangerous professions.
Being tortured, raped and beaten until you die is not worse than death? Beg to disagree.
> And it looks like they will lose the war anyway
Highly unlikely. Russia is bleeding men they can afford to lose for now, but don't in the long term. Russia has absolutely no way of achieving victory, so by definition Ukraine can't lose. It can't really win either, because Russia as it is today cannot accept defeat.
We disagree on the framing and likely outcomes. I doubt I could your mind so I won’t even try.
They have shown no serious improvement in military tactics or armaments.
Meanwhile Ukraine is being armed by half the world, and has shown crazy advancements in unmanned tech (like hitting Russian ships with underwater unmanned vehicles hundreds of km from Ukrainian ports).
Russia cannot win. Even if they somehow manage to conquer the whole of Ukraine which will not happen easily or soon, it will still be at best a Pyrrhic conquest at the expense of guerilla warfare.
Ignoring the details of your statement I will instead focus on the inherent contradiction of using the slow pace of advancement as evidence of lack of prowess at the same time as confidently stating that gorilla warfare would render such actions a Pyrrhic victory.
I would suggest that maybe Russia knows that, they dealt with a serious insurgency in Chechnya. I would also suggest that the slow progress is in part intentional in order to maintain defined battlefield lines and avoid such insurgencies. They know it costs more in Russian lives but that is price they are willing to pay. People who want to fight them can go out and meet them on the battlefield.
Oh, you're either very naive, very stupid, or Russian. You mean to tell me that when Putin announced a 3 day special military operation, it was on purpose that it's taking 2 years of a meatgrinder with hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties to take barely any land? Cool, makes sense if you're braindead.
Russia has been planning for this war since before 2008 it is ridiculous to think that they thought it would only take 3 days, if they did they would have started the war much sooner. They knew there were in for the long haul and had already made steps to prepare their economy for long term sanctions. There were not completely prepared but prepared enough.
Additionally, this conflict sits within a broader US/China conflict and a long drawn out conflict with Russia benefits China to which Russia is largely a vassal state, now more so than ever. China is prepping for a great powers war and understandably would like to undermine the west substantially before that happens. Bogging the west down in a series of regional conflicts is an effective way to do that. China would much rather their adversaries economically implode than to fight a massively destructive WWIII.
I know you're probably Russsian or identify strongly with Russia, so it doesn't matter what I say, but think about it...
Why would Russia get themselves involved into a protracted multi-year war meatgrinder? They know what happened in Afghanistan.
Also, if they were planning a long war, why would they throw paratroopers at Hostomel airport right outside of Kyiv? Why would they throw multiple brigades attacking Kyiv and getting stuck in a traffic jam? Look at a map, Kyiv is not far from the Belarus border, and the capital, but any such attack would be extremely isolated and risk being cut off. Also, the Ukrainian government could just run away to Lviv and coordinate the fight from there, so Kyiv would be little more than a symbolic victory if they managed to capture it.
It's obvious they were hoping to capture Kyiv quickly and have Ukraine fall apart. They weren't ready for a prolonged fight.
> They also said they would not invade and then they did
> That's the problem with trusting Western media
The same western media that called it that Russia will invade?
Russia is worried they will be Balkanized by the west and that is clearly against the interest of the Russian leadership. To not understand that Russian are willing to pay an enormous cost to do so is to not understand Russian history, beyond Afghanistan where they really didn’t want to be there in the first place.
As a policy I would rather see Russian tanks turned around and go into China. The West courted China in order to undermine Russia but underestimated China and overestimated Russia. Russia was successfully turned against Germany in WWII and if the west was smarter we would swallow our pride and do that again for WWIII. Having your enemies engaged in destructive conflicts is a big part of realpolitik and an essential part of remaining a dominant hegemon.
I’m repeatedly bemused by those who emphatically declare that Russia will fail because it is corrupt as if they have discovered something that the Russians themselves are not aware of. Russia has taken a learn-by-doing approach which is the only way of improving war-fighting capability in such an endemically corrupt country. This externalizes the negative signal for bad ideas, those failed excursions having died are no longer able to make future decisions. The average intelligence of those who remain has gone up. To paraphrase Napoleon; we mustn’t teach our enemies to fight by fighting them too often.
The media is telling the truth when it’s in their interest to do so. I’m not sure how you are trying to generalize this to them always being right when clearly they contradict themselves on so many matters. In the weeks before the invasion I was telling right wingers that they are about to look like fools when Russia really does invade. US intel provided proof by noting the movement of blood supplies to Western Russia which would only be done in preparation for a war as opposed to the exercises that was claimed.
Except if by international order we mean "the will of the stronger dogs imposed upon the whole world, with tons of mayhem and blood, but it's not done to white people so it doesn't matter"?
Violent deaths per capita is trending down both inside states and between states, and has been for nearly a century despite increases in tension and extreme improvements in weaponry.
Just telling people not to, or to call a hotline, seemed like the worst most patronizing advice as it never solved the underlying thing.
I've since learned that there is a subset of suicidal people where that's enough, where the suicidal tendency is a kneejerk decision that can be disrupted, but it bugged me that its not serving everyone that becomes suicidal with a recurring condition that's not improved by merely being present.
It always feel like people are too uncomfortable to talk about it enough, or to question the response measures. A "I'm Helping!" sentiment by copy and pasting a suicide hotline memo, when they're not helping at all, just offloading their discomfort into a protective layer for their own psyche.
In contrast, I'm comfortable enough to wonder whether suicide was the most rationale and objectively best choice, as someone with strong self preservation circuits you can see how far apart I am from everyone else. But this is opinion, a hunch, what I really want is a data driven analysis of the conditions. As with real science, I am accepting of any conclusion, instead of trying to conform a conclusion to preventing it if prevention isn't what winds up being on the table with our current infrastructure.
I feel this article does a good job of not explicitly saying this when describing what must have been an agonizing existence for David Metcalf before he took his life.
Sometimes opting out is the only rational choice. If there is no support in society for an individual who cannot work and generate profit, if there is no support in society for an individual who is terminally ill (expensive palliative care aside), if there is no support in society for an individual who has "fallen throigh the cracks" (and the cracks are mighty wide), then what is there to do? Slowly die on the street?
This thinking can lead to all kinds of dark paths, such as the state being in charge of the matter (and abusing it, as they can already abuse it via the carceral system), but ultimately we have to confront the fact that as a society we often leave people with no way out, collectively shrug our shoulders, and then act horrified when they take the only viable option that immediately removes all suffering.
People who are uncomfortable with suicide are ultimately uncomfortable with facing the reality that they live in a society that encourages it.
This also is the problem with the autonomy argument - this is not what the person might themselves would choose if they were in a more sober mood. The autonomy argument is also seen as invalid in other situations like when signing oneself to slavery.
Money men being against suicide for economic reasons runs contrary another other point in your post - money might be saved by the suicide of the invalid and sick. Making suicide legal can easily be abused by powerful state officials incentivizing people to commit suicide for economic or political reasons.
So yes, create a good social support system, but don't encourage suicide.
Source: I am a man who has, and is, "falling through the cracks" as a child abuse victim with multiple disabilities, no hot job skills, and a marginalized identity.
My life is slipping away and I'm almost 40. I am an extremely suboptimal individual as far as capitalism is concerned. The passage of time has only cemented this very real and very grim outlook.
The "powerful state officials" are already doing what you fear they might do, and have been doing it for longer than I've been alive. They do it with prisons or under terms like "austerity" of "welfare queens" or "dole moochers"
Disabled people are treated like garbage. Look to the USA or UK for immediate examples.
"Aktion T4" never went away, it just got privatized.
There is no support or viable path forward for people like me, short of going on Social Security Disability and living in basically a slum if I'm lucky. Honestly If something like MAID was available, I would absolutely take it.
No, I am not irrational or acutely suicidal. No, I do not need some hotline. My upbringing and disability has taught me exactly how society views me over the course of decades. No, touching grass isn't going to solve it.
I have a partner and a job (for now). Partner understands what I'm going through, and is also marginalized and partially disabled, in a dead-end job, also circling the drain.
I was writing about myself and others I know in the same boat.
Go talk to some disabled people and otherwise marginalized people (due to skin color, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, disability, etc. -- often several overlapping things) who are clinging by their nails to the workforce. You'll find many similar stories.
Many of us are gone already. Many of my friends are gone or on their way out (homelessness, etc).
The kind of comprehensive help we need simply isn't there. We disappear quietly. You don't see us go, and we are not noticed or missed by anyone except our immediate circle or whatever community we can cobble together.
Seriously, go talk to people. You'll find that this is a common but unspoken thing.
FWIW, my point was that in many cases suicidal feelings can be relieved and the abuses (that you point correctly say exist already) can become more dangerous when directed towards getting rid of vulnerable people. But, that doesn't mean that chronic, hard-to-cure situations don't exist.
Best.
People with temporary problems have a right to bodily autonomy and so do irrational people. Everyone does and doesn't need to justify themselves to anyone. The only exception is if they're hurting somone else.
If you are allowing transient decisions for giving away a life, then transient decisions would be allowed for lesser stakes too.
Most societies are debating even something like unrestricted access to drugs. There are people who would take drugs as a conscious/long-term plan for whom the transiency distinction is irrelevant but there are also those who hate it while succumbing to it and would gladly sign a contract to stop access to consumption, if that were practically possible to enforce.
Contracts often involve trading away autonomy of a future self whether for the good or the bad. Signing such a contract is often not legally valid if the person is in a disturbed mental state.
A more common example, children are not allowed to buy alcohol or consent to a sexual relationship with an adult.
The issue being that the immediate decision of the child can be something they would reject if they have more experience and had the ability to make a more informed choice. Of course, the problem of impulsive bad decisions doesn't go away as an adult, but considerations of intrinsic freedom and the problems of giving power to a state become much bigger.
When a criminal commits a crime, a premeditated/planned action is treated more severely than an impulsive action which in turn is treated more severely than an action caused by a mental illness.
Taking one's life is a much more drastic step than drugs or signing a contract.
> not necessarily transient
Not assuming this, chronic examples don't rule out the existence of large families of cases where things can and do look better due to time and a change in circumstances.
* Dead people don't even have feelings and can't regret anything. Your argument isn't even applicable. There are literally zero consequences for the person.
It really does seem like projection.
In the US, neighbors will pay for your funeral but not your insulin. Collective disinterest in being confronted with the problem.
They do? Genuinely curious.
For the very simple reasons: it costs money and resources to grow up (and to die), and it’s a life that capitalism could’ve otherwise maybe used.
Artillery was around for 500 years and shell shock was hugely discussed for past 100 years.
There is much better corellation with divorce. Soldiers returns home with PTSD, only to have their house, children, savings and pension stollen. Because they were not around to guard it! And they may get thrown into prison for being too poor!
Shell shock is very convinient excuse, when victims do not get proper recovery!
"It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.
The lab’s research team started looking for similar damage in other brains. In civilians’ brains, they did not find it. Nor was it in the brains of veterans who had been exposed to a single powerful explosion like a roadside bomb. But in veterans exposed repeatedly to blasts, they found it again and again."
In other words, data is always a better choice than narratives.
The SEAL in the article was married at the time of his death.
"Shell shock" is a made up term. Other than on hearing the effects of high impulse on a human are long-term, complex and still an areas of research.
In WW1, in Northfields hospital they started to define PTSD in ways that didn't quite add up. Some soldiers had never been under bombardment but had the same symptoms.
Nonetheless, the term remained in use because
1) "Shell shock" was deemed curable with rest, and the main objective was to get soldiers patched up and back to the front.
2) It was a way to avoid getting shot for desertion. A decent officer would not order traumatised men disciplined but send them on to hospital with "shell shock".
Encounters with IEDs were common, especially during the surge.
So many of my friends have died to suicide or have killed themselves due to drugs and/or alcohol that it is hard to keep track.
Now that primadonna seals are dying maybe someone will pay attention.
Thankfully the only lasting effects of my deployments seem to be a bad back and distaste for authority.
Why not both?
One of the key challenges with taking care of humans is that we rarely have the luxury of having only a single problem at a time.
While we cannot find a response to everything, we can isolate the key significant factors.
It can be the case that two easily treatable conditions combine to make a condition that is very hard to treat.
It’s not like the mere fact of creating/concentrating the population of the folks willing to be this doesn’t also create a whole swath of secondary effects.
Since after all, if steroids and similar PEDs do actually improve performance - which we wouldn’t be getting worked up about them this way if they didn’t! - then isn’t using them nearly a duty of the folks we are talking about? After all, mission first, and they’re (somewhat) expendable due to the nature of the work.
We make them do all sorts of other things which regularly puts their lives and health in danger, after all, and all the ‘high speed low drag’ folks I’ve personally known have had some kind of long term health impacts. Even if it’s just a lot of joint pain, or screwed up knees/backs.
And barring undesirable secondary effects, isn’t it saving lives and accomplishing missions that otherwise would not be? That is what they signed up for, literally. That and having the absolute craziest stories at the bar later.
note: professional bicyclists and weight lifters will also always have a doping issue that needs mitigating. Well, mitigating if we care about their health vs absolute performance anyway.
Unless, like you’re saying, it is as much about the group being selected for as it is whatever is going on during the activity itself.
As the article says, the brain damage described here is from blast shockwaves passing through brain tissue with different densities. It's entirely different from the brain damage caused by sports injuries like in American football.
He started to isolate, got paranoid and (more) violent, and ended up divorcing his first wife and marrying a second woman who seemed to be a kind of hoarder, and isolating at home with her - long before it was ‘cool’.
No idea what ended up happening to him, but murder/suicide would not have been surprising.
You can of course agglomerate A & B into a single cause C but for that to be meaningful C has to be the 'root' of A and B, otherwise the solution for C also just becomes an agglomeration of the solutions for A and B.
"80/20" absolutely can't be applied to "almost everything" and assuming it can is lazy thinking.
Even if it does apply in this case, just because as secondary cause has 1/4 impact, that doesn't mean you should ignore it. Sometimes secondary causes have cost effective solutions that mean it is more efficient to address first. Simply ignoring this possibility like you are suggesting is not smart.
If I break my leg and have COVID, I'm not going to be better until both of those problems are fixed and neither has any bearing on the other. There is no primary cause. There may be different levels of urgency, but some problems in the real world are just intrinsically messy and complex.
I have no idea.
Strangely the most common thread seems to be the ones who off themselves went back home after getting out.
Almost everyone I know who got out and stayed away from home is doing ok. Almost everyone I know who got out and went back home is a wreck.
Some had TBI exposures, some didn't.
Particularly when vocational and transition supports are available from the VA.
Ending up back at the place you wanted to get away from could be pretty depressing.
I don't know whether home folks are actually the problem or it's just delayed response. I think it was T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) who said that reactions to the trauma of war continue to bubble up long afterwards. Maybe that is suppressed for as long as you stay "in the field."
Also they're all on drugs and will kill you if you report them for embezzling unit funds.
This is maybe not too related to the brain damage stuff (or maybe it is?), but I don't think the wider public knows nearly enough about the frankly shocking kinds and amounts of criminality in the various US special forces units. OP is not kidding about these people operating as gangs (but worse, because they're sanctioned killers).
A smattering of such behavior:
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/07/internal-study-defe...
https://news.usni.org/2021/01/24/seal-sentenced-to-10-years-...
https://abc7chicago.com/us-navy-seals-seal-training-drugs-in...
The journalist (and Army vet, iirc) Seth Harp does yeoman's work on this topic, and is a good Twitter follow. He's got several excellent long-form investigative articles, often for Rolling Stone. Here's one on the rampant murders (ongoing!) at Fort Bragg that the Army won't talk about:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/fort-b...
And another one about rampant drug deaths at ... also Fort Bragg:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/inside...
I think it's time to have a big cultural conversation about how much our current era of spec ops worship is worth all the war crimes and other less-than-normative behavior.
Discussing or criticizing anything military related us seen as disrespectful to troops, and Killing the argument there kills more problematic questions (like 'was the invasion of Iraq a symptom of a larger problem like a too-bloated budget?')
One can appreciate those choices served, and support their assimilation into society, while at the same time questioning military ideals, spending levels, and behaviors.
And yes, training people to function well in situations that are borderline suicidal, training them to follow orders that put them in harms way, is going to have psychological effects on at least some of them. When you train people to behave abnormally you shouldn't be terribly surprised at abnormal behaviour patterns.
I say this as an ex military person myself. There are a lot of questions worth asking, but unfortunately society would prefer to remain ignorant. It's easier to live guilt free if "we didn't know".
I don't know exactly what our military budget should be. It is probably undoubtedly bloated and perhaps full of white elephants, while we're underspending in some area. It seems that the peace dividend is over.
I've seen this too, and it doesn't make sense to me either. Asking if it we shouldn't have sent our troops to do something isn't being disrespectful, IMHO; they didn't choose to go do the thing that shouldn't have been done; I'd like to ensure we respect the troops by only sending them on appropriate missions. I can respect the people, and not the mission.
What the flying fuck!?
UCMJ can take a long time to process similar to civilian cases. All that time the accused is with their unit, as usual.
To be fair to the SEALs, this is every US SF unit.
I sense a lot of bitterness.
> they're all on drugs
See the Kyle Mullen death during the SEAL entry testing[0] and subsequent policy to test for PEDs[1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32656856
[1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/10/20/navy-seals-st...
Digging into an issue that is affecting lives in such a drastic way and bringing these issues to light.
Like this part of the article for example:
Until The Times told the Navy of the lab’s findings about the SEALs who died by suicide, the Navy had not been informed, the service confirmed in a statement. A Navy officer close to the SEAL leadership expressed audible shock, and then frustration, when told about the findings by The Times. “That’s the problem,” said the officer, who asked not to be named in order to discuss a sensitive topic. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”
Could this problem also be affecting civilian gun enthusiasts? Or is the order of magnitude of the exposure just wildly lower compared to the military, even in the most enthusiastic?
And then if you have a chance to be around some small artillery, do that too. It’s hard to describe the difference.
(“You” here is used to address HN in general, not you personally)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caltech%E2%80%93MIT_rivalry#20... [1] (which is, admittedly, pretty small)
Intrigued, I got some info from wikihow.
> If you are a fast runner or have bad knees, run in a straight line away from the attacker towards cover. The faster you can get away, the fewer shots they will be able to fire.
>If you are a slower runner and do not have knee trouble, a zig-zag run may be a better option. You may still be hit in this case, but the chances of being hit in a vital area may be reduced.
It’s so, so hard for any amateur to hit a target that is moving radially in a polar coordinate system centered on them, at all. I’d bet your average shooter who makes the news can’t put 7/10 shots in a stationary silhouette at 10yd. It’s harder than you’d think.
Fictional, but based on a real event.
Isn't that the easiest possible way because they remain on a constant bearing?
Yeah. Researchers would have liked to interview them, but all the people who zig-zagged in favor of running as fast as they could are dead.
Idk if i would trust my life with that. What if they just spray a bunch of bullets in the general direction I am? Also what is the minimum distance where this tactic becomes effective? I just can’t imagine that zigzagging helps that much when you are 2 meters away from the shooter. And then there is the question of what is the typical distance between the shooter and the victim in most gun violence scenarios. Would not be surprised if that is inside the “zigzag helps you” distance.
Besides… how would going to a range and shooting guns help one learn this information? It feels what you really would need is someone practicing running away from someone with murderous intent to get an intuitive understanding of what you are claiming. And of course people are reluctant to practice that.
From what I understand, real soldiers generally don't spray bullets like you see in movies or video games unless they are in a defensive machine gun nest or on some sort of vehicle. Ammo is an extremely finite and precious resource on the battlefield. You can't carry much with you, and you don't necessarily know when you can resupply, so every shot has to count. If you spray bullets you'll be out within seconds and then you're on a battlefield unarmed. Not good.
> And then there is the question of what is the typical distance between the shooter and the victim in most gun violence scenarios.
In a war? Can be quite high.
> how would going to a range and shooting guns help one learn this information?
Ranges have moving targets, you try to hit them and observe that it's hard.
If you ever saw any combat video, soldiers often fire a LOT, experienced or not (experienced just tend to hit more often). Maybe not a full auto, but nobody thinks in '1 bullet per enemy' mentality, self-preservation makes you overdo it, and they train you to not save on ammo unless you are cut off from supplies.
> U.S. forces have expended at least 250,000 small-caliber bullets for every insurgent killed in the present wars
Think about that number for a second. Technically, 1000 fully equipped NATO soldiers fire all their carried ammo per 1 single dead enemy. Life ain't Call of Duty.
>U.S. forces have expended at least 250,000 small-caliber bullets for every insurgent killed in the present wars
Right, but it is that high because of the machine gun nests and vehicles.
Yeah, there's a very big difference. I mean a BIG DIFFERENCE
“Great question, did you know if you zig and zag you become impervious to bullet :)”
Still snarky, but there is a point.
Aside from the cavalier “I know something you don’t” there was nothing of any value posted.
I suppose I can imagine that GP said that you can feel the difference between levels of brain damage incurred (they did not), but even if that were the case then why would you encourage someone to expose themselves to artillery if you thought the damage was more than zero?
“The damage from both is different but also zero if you zig zag check mate 8-)”
There are several orders of magnitude difference between a 9mm handgun and a small artillery round. The difference is in terms of concussive force.
If you shoot a handgun with earplugs in, you hear a pop that sounds kind of like dropping a small ball bearing on a wood floor. You feel a shock in your wrists and a bit in your elbows, like high-fiving someone.
Now, you stand a few yards from artillery - and I’m talking Korean war artillery, not modern stuff. Also not talking about reenactment stuff; they usually just put a bit of black powder in there. I’m talking about small tow-behind artillery that you’d see at the Big Sandy Shoot (Google it).
You _feel_ the sound before you hear it. You’ll look for some shooting muffs to put on _over_ your earplugs. The concussive force comes through the ground, through the air, moves through your head and stimulates your eardrums from the backside. You feel your guts vibrate a bit. It feels like the ground moved under you, like you’re landing after jumping in the air.
And _that_ is an order of magnitude or so below what we’re talking about with SEALs here - those guys are placing explosive with a sticky backing on doors, and torching it off from not very far away. There’s stories from them of not being able to get physically “far enough” from a charge, and having to detonate it anyway because you’re in a freaking war zone. When a SEAL says “oh, this is going to fucking suck” before pushing a button, you know it’s real.
> Could this problem also be affecting civilian gun enthusiasts?
Since you are clear that you do not think that civilian gun enthusiasts could be affected because they
> shoot a handgun with earplugs in
I thank you for your service for sharing your advice on how to become invulnerable to gun fire. Without that I might have doubted your expertise on this issue of brain damage from concussive force
I hope they never invent a gun that fires more than once per trigger pull, then you would be able to just sweep it around in the general direction of Invincible Mr. Zig
Why does this matter? Hearing loss is often a causative factor with depression, social isolation, anxiety and early onset dementia.
Fear and anxiety drive a lot of the behavior that gun merchants leverage to sell guns. It’s a vicious cycle.
Doing something is a stressful situation (combat zone) is infinitely more likely to lead to stress-related disorders than doing it in a safe, controlled environment (shooting range)
No?
> came home plagued by hallucinations and psychosis
I have some hearing damage (which I actually think is from somewhere else - we've always been anal about protection). Other than that, no other issues to report with myself nor my family/friends who participated with me in this hobby. Small calibre gunfire does not have a big enough shock/impact to really affect bystanders. Interestingly, I dislike shooting in an indoor range, because so much of the shot is radiated back to the shooter and bystanders. Where in an open air range that impact goes up in the air and away.
Risk of lead exposure is very real though. A friend almost passed away due to too much shooting in an indoor range with poor ventilation. After some serious negative personality changes and other related symptoms he was finally diagnosed with nearly acute lead poisoning. Lead bullets basically vapourised when they hit the backstop, so the dust that's kicked up is very nasty.
There is safe ammunition these days, but it costs more. Swiss make their military ammo lead-free (they have cca same ammo as US/NATO but bullets are most effective with different barrel twist compared to NATO ones, I think 1:7 vs 1:10), but both can fire each other's rounds safely.
Safe ammo is essentially just back of the bullet covering lead core (if present at all), but for some reason most manufacturers don't do it by default. Some stuff doesn't have lead core at all, but then desired weight needs to be achieved via other substances and is priced accordingly.
I use solid brass ammo on one of my larger caliber rifles, but not the others. Guns can be very finicky about their bullets, and not all like solid brass ammo which results in weird accuracy issues.
The US military has been switching to lead-free ammo, too, starting about 10 years ago.
Unfortunately at my public range it seems like there is always one guy with a muzzle brake and he ends up setting up beside me.
Handguns and rifles make loud popping noises. Exploding artillery shells are concussive bombs that produce brain rattling blasts.
It seems the WW1 doctors got it right the first time.
The concern itself was right to have, but I don't think the concern has ever gone away.
So I don't characterize that as very "right the first time".
PTSD is a different thing from TBI/CTE, overlap or not. The diagnosis for PTSD was called shell shock. They did not have it right in a general sense.
Not at all. It might be a cause, but tons of PTSD has nothing to do with concussive trauma, so much so that the other cases overwhelmed the correlating cases when they investigated the causation.
one of the major problems with such weapons is that although the support crew can shield themselves, often the firing soldier cannot due to operation of the weapon.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/26/us/military-brain-injury-...
there is no good way to protect from concussive blasts aside from avoidance and shelter.
fwiw most DoD studies have found that concussive blasts that seem to be damaging to personnel start at around the AT4/Carl Gustaf range of large shoulder-fired almost-artillery -- understandably since they're large and mostly open-air combustion driven.[0]
[0]: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/05/01/...
It reminds me of the other side, the receiving end: shell shock in WW1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock
I think the key here is to explore all options, not limiting yourself to the obvious.
Steel Industry: In the steel mills people reported similarities 100-60 years ago. I remember talking to workers and their problems after being exposed to huge mechanical machines that form steel. Usually they are extremely loud, feel like a permanent earthquake, dusty and toxic air, hot temperatures and high risk for life threatening events.
I see some similarities here between steel worker’s mental impact and military. It is fair to say that some conditions are not really helping you as an individual “unlocking your full potential”. Some conditions are simply very detrimental to your health.
Exposure to lead is a much larger risk for gun enthusiasts from my point of view.
On the other hand, artillery and rockets are extremely loud. If you want to look it up and start comparing things, keep in mind that every 3 decibels represents a doubling in pressure, so a howitzer having twenty or thirty decibels on a handgun is actually saying a lot.
It’s possible small arms fire doesn’t make big enough shockwaves. To cause the effects. I’d hypothesize it’s the larger blasts… perhaps even a frequency component to it? Blasts from a fast explosive like C4 could do more damage than slower shockwaves like mortar or artillery shots.
Idk. Interesting subject.
To someone familiar with the subject matter, “shooting guns gives you brain damage” is an absurd, incorrect idea that one feels obligated to voice an objection to, in order to perhaps slow the spread of misinformation.
I've shot .357 magnum and shotguns in there. It's loud, yes. I wear ear plugs and ear muffs when doing that.
But not by any means do they rattle my brain, and I can't imagine it's anything close to what you see around an artillery when firing.
I mean look at the ground towards the camera in this[1] shot, clearly a powerful shock wave going out in all directions.
Don't read into it too much, though. This isn't snark or passive aggression, just genuine interest.
Sports shooters who shoot larger calibers, ie a 7.62 NATO or higher in terms of sound energy, are typically shooting relatively few rounds at a time. Those who shoot a lot of rounds typically shoot smaller calibers.
Now, I think you might have a point when it comes to competitive practical/dynamic shooters[1], who shoot open division with hot .40 super loads or similar. Especially those, like in my club, who train a lot in indoor ranges.
However these would make up a relatively small percentage of the overall recreational shooters out there I imagine.
Don't know about micro-TBIs but it sure fucked up my hearing.
However
I’ve personally met a gun enthusiast that collected elephant guns [1] and shot barrels filled with tannerite [2] for fun. He was also… not all there. So who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/
As an aside I entreat everyone not to entertain confident proclamations about secondary damage from weapons from someone that claims that they can avoid primary damage (bullets) by the proper tactical battlefield execution of a Sesame Street dance. [3][4]
1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_gun
2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannerite
* to quit with the games, relatively moderm firearms are 1700-1800's tech, with things like 3D printing banning them is as nonsensical as banning alcohol. Its just too easy to make.
Impact of repeated blast exposure on active-duty United States Special Operations Forces - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2313568121
"We performed a multimodal study of active-duty United States Special Operations Forces (SOF)—an elite group repeatedly exposed to explosive blasts in training and combat—to identify diagnostic biomarkers of brain injury associated with repeated blast exposure (RBE). We found that higher blast exposure was associated with alterations in brain structure, function, and neuroimmune markers, as well as lower quality of life. Neuroimaging findings converged on an association between cumulative blast exposure and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), a widely connected brain region that modulates cognition and emotion. This work supports the use of a network-based approach, focusing on the rACC, in future studies investigating the impact of RBE on SOF brain health."
Characterisation of interface astroglial scarring in the human brain after blast exposure: a post-mortem case series - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27291520/
"The blast exposure cases showed a distinct and previously undescribed pattern of interface astroglial scarring at boundaries between brain parenchyma and fluids, and at junctions between grey and white matter. This distinctive pattern of scarring may indicate specific areas of damage from blast exposure consistent with the general principles of blast biophysics, and further, could account for aspects of the neuropsychiatric clinical sequelae reported. The generalisability of these findings needs to be explored in future studies, as the number of cases, clinical data, and tissue availability were limited."
We can train everyone without this level of exposure, and I can imagine a world where your dose is tracked like radiation, kept to a safe level, and people are forced into retirement after they hit the limit.
I've said for years that people who are suicidal typically have very serious, intractable personal problems but get dismissed like it's "mental" or emotional. They need actual help for actual problems, not "attaboys" and not empty assurances that "Someone cares."
The quote says they frequently get psychiatric diagnoses but new research indicates it's brain damage, not something talk therapy will help.
I'm saying the same thing: Suicidal people have real problems that need real solutions, not talk therapy or emotional encouragement.
I'm not really trying to say "Just give these people x drug, clearly!" I'm trying to make a broader point that people who are suicidal need some problem resolved.
Homeless people are frequently suicidal. They need housing, not to be dismissed as "crazy."
People with torturous medical problems are frequently suicidal. I'm pro right to die but I also would like to see the world take their problem seriously and not act like you are "crazy" to feel like your body is a prison, you just want the torment to end and to feel your only hope of escape is death.
Etc.
People who are suicidal are routinely dismissed as "crazy," like they don't have a real problem. This needs to stop.
At least 2X more soldiers kill themselves in peacetime than die in combat in every war that we as a species has tracked suicide rates for veterans.
[0](https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009846329/military-suicides-...)
I'm not sure if I would have made it if I'd been born into a world without computers.
My concern: given that this is becoming more common knowledge, in a world in which other, potentially adversarial, countries are more than fine sending their soldiers through the mental meat grinder, how can we prevent outcomes like the ones shared here while retaining hard power?
In the short term I could see leadership pushing a fourth volunteering (volunteering to commit suicide so the Mission can continue)
Flesh and mind are weak. Metal and code is strong.
Of course this is now a much bigger problem for the military as it affects all combat soldiers even during training exercises.
OK, so not that.
There are going to be a huge number of people with this problem from the Ukraine war. There haven't been years of artillery duels since WWII.
The Carl Gustav 8.4cm recoilless rifle now be procured by the Marines has a big back-blast through the typical venturi used by these kinds of weapons. In training, (Sweden at least) they are limited to the number of rounds they can fire. I do not know if this for merely hearing loss, or if there are concussive effects.
Also, while "small arms" do not typically have concussive effects, I have stood behind a.50 Barrett rifle discharge and there was a noticable shock wave in the air. I didn't feel it in my head, but my intestines were not happy. If you were in the front hemisphere of the muzzle blast it would be far worse.
Muzzle brakes on rifles usually make the blast wave propagate more to the side. A high caliber rifle with a muzzle brake could easily hit 160db. Maybe a .50 cal could go higher. So now you are even punishing your friends, not just folks downrange.
One of the things that is becoming apparent in football CTE is that damage is not limited to the big hits, the chronic effects of smaller hits are causing damage.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/sports/football/cte-study...
Maybe an instructor sure, but we're talking about SF here.
I don't doubt that artillery will also do this kind of damage, so I'd be curious about what the brains of field artillery folks look like.
> Researchers found that before they worked around blasts, the instructors brains looked healthy. But in follow-up scans five months later, their brains were teeming with an abnormal protein called beta amyloid that is associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
> “In a young brain you should see no amyloid. None. Zero,” said Dr. Carlos Leiva-Salinas, the University of Missouri neuroradiologist who ran the study. “We were surprised, very surprised.”
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00406-013-0403-6
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/us/maine-shooting-brain-i...
Is it possible damage can be modeled with something like:
total_damage = incident_count * Impulse - or - total_damage = incident_count * Energy Density
It seems like the question of potential damage from small arms and personal weapons should be investigated.
What other preventive measures could be employed?
luckily i only experienced those lows for a period of time. and some days i would be lifted out of it and feel perfectly normal. this experience is what made me realize what almost nobody realizes: that there is no situation where a healthy person will feel the desire to kill themselves. this is because mood is an illusion. i would go from having this entire world view that my life is hopeless and being completely lost and almost instantly switch over to having lots of things on my mind and looking forward to many things and wanting to get on with life. having a normal mood involves being blind to negative things as much as being depressed involves seeing bad things that arent bad. the human mind is designed to translate sensory input into action by any means and when this system breaks down it weirdly feels painful and makes you want to kill yourself. i think the breakdown of this system can be isolated to a domain, concept or situation or be global. and i think that high stress can cause this effect through inflammatory dysregulation or some other stress pathology giving the incorrect impression that suicide is a reaction to stress. if there were a pill to stop the root cause of depression, nobody would ever kill themselves except for terminally ill people. and just because someone killed themself doesnt mean that their life was especially hard, hopeless or messed up or whatever. it just means they were sick. thats it. and yet every time theres a suicide, all people talk about are the circumstances surrounding the suicide even though they probably are indirectly involved at best!
when i was in those deep depressions i would connect the dots of all the things about my life into a causal web and would be convinced myself that it was the circumstances of my life were the reason i felt depressed. but then within hours that mental framework would disappear completely and i would feel fine. its an extremely powerful illusion. thats why the word trapped resonates so powerfully with people who have been through it. the illusion makes you feel trapped.
this realization has made me basically immune to depression. i recognize mood disfunction immediately now and i have coached myself to remember its an illusion. i am sure that i have experienced significant mood dysfunction in the past, and that most people have, and gotten lost in it simply because i didnt understand what was going on. i think that this is a huge component of the decision to commit suicide: people start experiencing pain, they think its intrinsic to their life situation, they get lost in it, and they would hold on if only they had some context. i wish there was a way to induce severe depression temporarily to show people what it is and educate them so they could not go into it completely blind when the time comes. that would really help people.
Hormone replacement therapy is a game changer for a lot of men who have CTE. I’m a clinical social worker. I’ve worked in emergency medicine, correctional medicine, and now outpatient psychotherapy. I used to think HRT was for ego lifters and old ladies. But I have seen first hand the value of HRT for CTE patients. I’ve seen guys go from three OWIs and unable to manage an entry level job at Lowe’s to law-abiding, midlevel executive at national corporations within months of starting on HRT.
> Nearly everywhere that tissues of different density or stiffness met, there was a border of scar tissue — a shoreline of damage that seemed to have been caused by the repeated crash of blast waves.
> It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.
Estrogen in the brain is neuro-protective and neuro-trophic. The primary source of estrogen in the brain for men is testosterone converted via aromatase.
However, that's speculative. I found no significant studies on point, notwithstanding physician interest. Because some men seek out testosterone, some doctors might be quick to offer it off-label for other conditions.
Hormone replacement would remedy some of these issues. The same can be seen in people under chronic stress or substance abusers.
By definition "Leadership" in this capitalistic society is predatory - this style extends to the armed forces, where everyone is expendable.
I just don't understand this "freedom" argument that seems to gloss over the obvious--poor people dying for a small group of people that benefit massively from war