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Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

nytimes.com

451–460 of 599 posts

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#451
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your kind of thinking leads to societal decay like the kind seen at Uvalde. Each of the 374 cops chose to prioritize their own wellbeing over collective interests, ultimately leading to 19 kids and 2 teachers getting killed despite overwhelming odds against the perpertrator. 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,…

I dont agree with your framing but doubt I could change your mind. Instead I will ask what is your excuse, unless you’re posting on HN from some battlefield you must have some sort of excuse as to why you are not acting on your supposedly strongly held beliefs.

I am a reservist in a country that has such a high risk of Russian invasion that defense leaders have stopped all non-essential spending in favor of hoarding as much artillery and rockets as they can for when the time comes. I do not have a suitcase packed and I do not intend to flee anywhere.

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.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#452
post #436
post #427

Qualifier: Former US special operations operator that served in multiple wars. 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 n…

The article links to a USSOCOM-funded study. In your opinion, are they (as a whole) seriously concerned with mitigating this issue or is it just checking the box? The worry is this can be similar to the buried diesel tank issue contaminating water, which was known for decades but seemed to be ignored (possibly out of liability concerns).

I'm not sure how much of it you can minimize. You can only control what you can control...and war/combat is chaos. Honestly it seems most things in relation to this over the years has been on treatment, not so much prevention.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#453
post #204
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If we sent troops to Ukraine, Russia would be out within weeks, and we’d have less casualties than Iraq and Afghanistan, assuming Putin didn’t start nuking." 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…

the US can fight three peer wars at the same time. that's their military doctrine.

*could. It seems to have lost the appetite recently, and bankrupted itself with the twenty year war on terror against itself, which it lost.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not realize when you're reading literal propaganda? This quote is but one section from there, which I clicked to because it had a silly heading - and it delivered. --- 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 a…

Russia isn't "running around randomly". Their (alleged) actions are very targeted and deliberate. "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 nega…

Well... I would agree with your final sentence were it not for the fact that we strongly adhered to Russia's numerous red lines as far as weapon systems delivery to Ukraine.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#456
post #452
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article links to a USSOCOM-funded study. In your opinion, are they (as a whole) seriously concerned with mitigating this issue or is it just checking the box? The worry is this can be similar to the buried diesel tank issue contaminating water, which was known for decades but seemed to be ignored (possibly out of liability concerns).

I'm not sure how much of it you can minimize. You can only control what you can control...and war/combat is chaos. Honestly it seems most things in relation to this over the years has been on treatment, not so much prevention.

[deleted]

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#457
Topical: just a few minutes from where I live, in Lewiston Maine, a former grenade range instructor walked into a bar recently and killed 18 people. His brain was found to have the same kinds of damage- he had been hearing voices and experiencing other psychotic symptoms and he had access to guns. It seems likely that the repeated concussions at the grenade range were a contributing factor.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/us/maine-shooting-brain-i...

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> diving deep underwater, which is also known to cause brain damage never heard about that. can you back this up with a source or explanation?

I don't really have a source, but anecdotal evidence... Some of my commercial diver friends got really fucked up after a while of doing it. 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.

> got really fucked

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/App-Central/How-to-create...

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#459
post #286
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a multi-stage process, even if you fix the cause with 80% responsibility, the outcome may not improve by much, as there is failure now at another stage. Of course, fixing that single cause is still progress.

Then it didn't have 80% responsibility and you failed to identify the bottleneck, it just means you identified a local optimisation, which is again "every little bit helps" thinking - what you should do when thinking about queueing systems (or multi-stage) like you describe is to identify the bottleneck. An improvement on the bottleneck should directly translate to an improvement to the end result.

The issue is when there is overdetermination - fixing a single cause resolves 80% of the current cause of failures, but the process fails at another point which becomes the new bottleneck. Say, most people are failing at a task due to stress(A). But even if you solve that, then most people can start failing due to another cause, B, say laziness. Fixing A is not "a little bit" and any solution will have to face A(in order to have success rate > 20%) but it is not sufficient to fix stress alone.

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.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#460
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surrender is an option, none of those things is worse than death 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 eithe…

Those with that concern can commit suicide instead of surrendering, maintaining a lower bound for how bad things get for them. We disagree on the framing and likely outcomes. I doubt I could your mind so I won’t even try.

Russia has been trying to conquer Ukraine for 2 years now, and has had very limited success. Things are looking so good for them they're importing North Korean troops and artillery shells.

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.

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