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I don’t know much about this except that I know perfectly normal or even jacked men with lower than expected testosterone. I suspect messing with hormones based
by tyleo 28d ago
I don’t know much about this except that I know perfectly normal or even jacked men with lower than expected testosterone. I suspect messing with hormones based on the results of a test and no actual problems can unnecessarily alter mood.
So my theory—based mostly on conjecture—is that these tests selected people they didn’t expect and the treatments would do more harm than good.
- noir_lord 28d agoI think it's simpler than that, I think Hanlon's Razor applies here. Not sure there has been a less capable Secretary of Defence in my lifetime than who they currently have in the role. Note: not saying less objectionable, I'd put Rumsfeld right alongside for that but as much as I didn't like the man, it was hard to argue he was incapable.
- amelius 28d agoBoth can be true. Incompetence AND malice.
- schiffern 28d agoTroublingly, I think he actually does think these ideas are helpful. Is a True Believer any less dangerous? "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
- noir_lord 28d agoThey are generally dangerous but they are truly dangerous when what they believe is itself dangerous.
- jjgreen 28d agoI'll be using that
- hedora 28d agoYou’ll like the Simple Sabotage Field Manual too: https://archive.org/details/simplesabotagefi26184gut/page/n1/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/simplesabotagefi26184gut/page/n1... It helped the allies win WWII. It contains lots of good advice (and the white collar chapter should be required reading in corporate training).
- dylan604 28d agoI think True Believer is worse. I would say that if someone is willing to try something while still willing to accept that it might not work but need to confirm they'd be a rational person. A True Believer will not accept that the thing is not working and try to rationalize why others are still wrong.
- budman1 28d agoa while back we had an army private as the secretary of defense. end of the day, his experience as a private meant nothing towards the job. perhaps he was slightly more able to relate to the needs of the troops. now we have a reserve captain. who was pushed out of the service for extremest views and body art. his experience means he hates the army, and his selection to the post means his political views have been vindicated. a master of strategy? leader of men in battle? CEO of the worlds biggest institution? nope. he doesn't even understand those roles.
- bryancoxwell 28d agoOr simpler still, although related. Maybe we just can’t afford it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/07/21/pentagon-sinking-billions-into-iran-is-quickly-running-short-cash/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/07/21/...
- xnx 28d agoNot being able to afford something has never stopped the US before.
- duskdozer 28d agoWell, depends on what "something"
- bryancoxwell 28d agoIt’s literally stopping them from routine training and maintenance.
- Jgrubb 28d agoRumsfeld put in the work and was very smart. His natural disposition was such that, when given the ring of power, things went badly. The current head of DoD is basically a manosphere influencer that bumbled into this job. Now, I'm not an endocrinologist, just an aging guy, but from my current vantage point it appears that over the course of my life, many stupid decisions have been made that I have lived to tell about. I can't help but feel that my "wisdom of age" might just be testosterone getting out of the way. This is all to say that our current "situation" just kinda looks like one insecure guys roid rage when you take a big step back.
- lokar 28d agoTrump was pretty clear he chose him because he looked good in TV.
- tyleo 28d agoI think we're saying the same thing. I suspect there were a lot of people saying, "this probably won't work," but the Secretary of Defense pursued it anyways until real problems materialized.
- InsideOutSanta 28d agoIt still irks me that people mocked Rumsfeld's explanation of unknown unknowns. The guy was probably a terrible excuse for a human being, but he wasn't stupid, and that quote was a pretty good explanation for why we shouldn't be overconfident in our knowledge: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."
- YackerLose 28d agoWisdom tends to sound obvious, and obvious statements aren't novel. The digital society values the novel over the wise.
- mattm 28d agoAnyone who's ever worked on a software project can attest to this
- smallerize 28d agoIt's the context that makes it crazy. Someone asked if there was any evidence of a link between Iraq and WMDs, at a press conference, and this is how he avoided giving an answer or taking any accountability.
- mirmor23 28d agoRumsfeld heard it from some smart guy in NASA and repackaged it to sell Iraq war. This is similar to the influencers bandying around 'algorithms'; Rumsfeld is more like the Big Lebowski in parroting whatever to make him look smart. Never for a moment he stopped to think about the amount of damage that would haunt the veterans that served there. He wrote a book about leadership but he lacked balls to do anything about Abu Ghraib for example, nor he did anything to stop the war. IMO he is just another corporate coward. In his most stunning display of 'leadership', he used autopen to stamp his signature on condolence letters sent to the families of soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Imagine that!
- ethbr1 28d ago
- XorNot 28d agoGoing on injectable testosterone suppresses natural production. It also leads to compensatory feedback effects like an increase in estrogen. Once you're on it it's very hard to come off it, and the side effects are significant.
- alexgieg 28d agoThere's also the relevant details that we don't live at a time in which being extremely muscular and full of aggressiveness (which is what the testosterone policy was meant to cause) makes one a good soldier. Being healthy and able to exert a lot of physical effort is absolutely needed, but beyond that not much is gained. To put it mildly, no matter how pumped up with hormones one is, one cannot outrun an explosion (much less a thermobaric one), a sniper firing from hundreds of meters away or, for that matter, a drone swarm. For those kinds of challenge other traits are needed. And these required traits are dismissed as unimportant, just witness all the extremely competent military personal, including medal recipients, who were dismissed or made to "voluntarily" resign due to stuff that had no bearing whatsoever on whether they were good soldiers or not. Note: I'm not American and, from the perspective of my country's own national interests, which tend to be at odds with the US's more often than not, it's a good thing the US is doing all of this, since it's making itself weaker. But from a personal perspective, that I find it quite sad, I do. I have too many American friends for me not to worry about what this will cause them on the long run.
- Der_Einzige 28d agoThis is also why I'd reform all types of US Military basic training. It's shocking to see how different the treatment is between standard basic training for US grunts vs for example, the UK. In the UK, the things valued and required of their soldiers are far less focused on "breaking them down and building them up again", there's an order of magnitude less yelling, there's more liberty, and there's less of an "ethos to kill". Yet the Royal Marines, having gone through this kind of training, can still regularly mog our own special forces troops and has proven that in the Fakland wars, a war they may very well be having a rd 2 in soon. For context, US Marine basic training https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjDHoNcH5o4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjDHoNcH5o4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9gnRQaXH38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9gnRQaXH38 Compare this to Royal Marine (officer) basic training: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv-pxrUNhmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv-pxrUNhmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ime0t2I_eKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ime0t2I_eKE
- kansface 28d ago
- josefresco 28d agoYou're giving them too much credit. It's pure incompetence/malfeasance like everything the regime does in the name of "culture wars". Somewhere, some testosterone lab with connections got paid.
- somenameforme 28d agoI wouldn't be surprised if they didn't understand that testosterone can't be 'supplemented' in the normal sense because of how it operates. If somebody gets a testosterone supplement, your own body will stop producing testosterone. And if you ever stop taking the supplement, your own natural production may never return. So it's often a one-way trip. If you're on t-replacement, you're on t-replacement for life. An army that would fall to pieces without a constant supply of testosterone supplements is probably not going to be the most effective fighting force.
- ethbr1 28d agoThere are ways of more cleverly nudging testosterone (and estrogen) production without directly supplementing. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5009465/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5009465/
- somenameforme 28d agoInteresting. I'm somewhat into body building and had never even heard of this. Thanks for the link. Great rabbit hole to go down!