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.
I 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.
I 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.
Rumsfeld 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.
It 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."
It'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.
If it makes you feel any better, think of it more as a catchy synecdoche to communicate “the man was a dangerous incompetent” than a formal verification disproval of his claim.
Rumsfeld 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.
I 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.
I 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.
a 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.
There'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.
This 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.
You'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.
I think it still depends. More test can also result in more estrogen. There is selection bias in athletes who dope because they're the ones who happen to respond positively to it.
There must be a graveyard of athletes who tried doping and it made them worse lol.
it absolutely does make you stronger, I was training for powerlifting when I started it and my lifts went up a LOT with no change in my routine or diet, both of which I was tracking.
It also makes you crazy. I have a friend that took it for years. It certainly made him buff, but it also made him divorced, friendless, addicted, and unhealthy.
Yep. Knew someone that got himself killed thinking that being strong was the same thing as knowing how to fight. Stupidly got into a fistfight on pavement outside a bar, got knocked out and that was it.
what if your baseline was not so much training? i assume it works by improving recovery, if not someone will need to explain what it's supposed to do to make you stronger. so, given that, your anrcdote indicates you were overtraining before t, and t reduced your recover times so that you were no longer overtraining.
but if you're working well within your ability to recover and you add t and change nothing else, how do you get stronger?
Do teenagers need to work out to get stronger than when they were little children, or are their hormones making them grow regardless? This should be self-explanatory to a good degree.
Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? That's exactly what testosterone does, including the "more manly" part. Literally the reason it's gender-affirming care for female-to-male transitioners and aging men. "Robust" is the only word there that's questionable, and even then, I'd say science says "probably". You can give it to a horse, and it will make the horse notably stronger and more “manly”.
It depends. It may be that more testosterone when you already produce "enough" - which is individual-dependent - won't give much additional strength if you aren't training specifically to take advantage of it. Additionally, hormones are complicated. The body will downregulate its own production when given "too much". I'm aware that bodybuilders have to follow certain treatment regimens and add other drugs to restart the body's production if they stop supplementing it at times.
Why would it require explanation? It was stupid beyond belief to begin with. It would be like rescinding a policy profiling soldiers using phrenology or waving some scientology wand over them or something.
The fact that people think there's anything even worthy of discussion on this is alarming to me.
So, was this some kind of trans witch hunt to weed out people who were transitioning? Or was it just a misguided attempt to name and shame men who weren’t “manly” enough?
It’s hard to imagine it was actually an ill conceived measure aimed at supporting healthy testosterone levels, but I guess it isn’t impossible.
I feel like maybe it was a cartoon inspired measure to create a super army of aggressive super soldiers? It’s got what plants crave? SMH
>So, was this some kind of trans witch hunt to weed out people who were transitioning? Or was it just a misguided attempt to name and shame men who weren’t “manly” enough?
Shorter lives due to cardiovascular damage, and shrinking testicles as their body fails to regulate the self-inflicted hormone imbalance... Also irrational mood swings... A million piece puzzle was just solved.
Real athletes never touch the stuff for good reason, and sport organizers tend to test the 40lb overweight dude keeping pace as obviously more suspicious. =3
What’s next, force the troops to drink as much whiskey as the SecDef does on a daily basis? Most of them would die on the first day, after their BAC hits .3% at 3 PM, a double whiskey on the hour every hour hits the liver hard.
Is there even a US-based testosterone supply chain? Or was the idea to inject all their service members with a product from overseas that could have supply problems or subtle strategic "impurities"?
That's some kind of urban joke on 4chan yet the far more objectively cruel act of mass male circumcision at birth happens daily and hardly anyone bats an eye at it.
Why have horror movies when real life is all I need? Unironically!
First impressions will stick with people so just the announcement of things is seen as positive by supporters who do not seem inclined to peek behind the curtain and do work on following up on what actually happened (or listening to things contrary to dogma) - which tends to get a lot less media coverage because it requires journalists to work instead of regurgitating press releases. A lot of low information voters can be swayed by this. It doesn’t work on people who are paying attention but it’s not meant for them.
I mean, sure, it would probably be embarrassing to have to say "because this was extremely stupid and nonsensical and entirely due to the weird hangups of the present guy in charge."
Perhaps the explanation is: to make space for other incoherent self-defeating policies like threatening the Fed that they'll increase tariffs if rates aren't lowered?
They're not weird at all given his worldview. It's Nazism. From his book to his public statements and actions, he consistently expresses this. The only thing he does not do is use the literal language that is not accepted. But the meaning and actions are the same. People are in denial.
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.
I 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.
I 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.
Rumsfeld 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.
Trump was pretty clear he chose him because he looked good in TV.
The entire cabinet and appointed administration positions is full of the closest to Idiocracy level people.
And keeps him because he's good at the number one priority, being a fluffer.
plus, he could hold his liquor.
and does not take no for an answer.
Also, does not say no to an order
Eh, I’d say more he hadn’t been fired for being drunk. Part of the trick to being a success as a functional alcoholic is being a white guy.
Please don’t ask how I know.
It 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."
It'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.
I unironically paraphrase this at work all the time when talking about ops concerns. That and “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”
> the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
takes notes. love this!
If it makes you feel any better, think of it more as a catchy synecdoche to communicate “the man was a dangerous incompetent” than a formal verification disproval of his claim.
Anyone who's ever worked on a software project can attest to this
Rumsfeld 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.
Wisdom tends to sound obvious, and obvious statements aren't novel. The digital society values the novel over the wise.
I 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.
Both can be true. Incompetence AND malice.
Troublingly, I think he actually does think these ideas are helpful. Is a True Believer any less dangerous?
"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
I 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.
They are generally dangerous but they are truly dangerous when what they believe is itself dangerous.
I'll be using that
You’ll like the Simple Sabotage Field Manual too:
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).
a 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.
Or simpler still, although related. Maybe we just can’t afford it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/07/21/...
Not being able to afford something has never stopped the US before.
It’s literally stopping them from routine training and maintenance.
Well, depends on what "something"
There'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.
This 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=K9gnRQaXH38
Compare this to Royal Marine (officer) basic training:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv-pxrUNhmw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ime0t2I_eKE
Going 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.
You'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.
I was very surprised the "we need more white babies" people were pushing a policy that lowers sperm count.
> “Taking testosterone is not going to make you more manly, more strong, or a more robust individual. That’s just not how it works,”
It will make you stronger. Perhaps not at certain therapeutic ranges, but there is a reason this would get you kicked out of the Olympic Games.
I think it still depends. More test can also result in more estrogen. There is selection bias in athletes who dope because they're the ones who happen to respond positively to it.
There must be a graveyard of athletes who tried doping and it made them worse lol.
It will make you stronger period.
There are side effects, problems, long-term consequences...
But testosteron blood levels absolutely do regulate muscle growth.
that's why most bodybuilders take other drugs to counter the estrogen, like arimidex or aromasin. It definitely makes you bigger and stronger.
it absolutely does make you stronger, I was training for powerlifting when I started it and my lifts went up a LOT with no change in my routine or diet, both of which I was tracking.
It also makes you crazy. I have a friend that took it for years. It certainly made him buff, but it also made him divorced, friendless, addicted, and unhealthy.
Yep. Knew someone that got himself killed thinking that being strong was the same thing as knowing how to fight. Stupidly got into a fistfight on pavement outside a bar, got knocked out and that was it.
Testosterone is a hell of a drug.
what if your baseline was not so much training? i assume it works by improving recovery, if not someone will need to explain what it's supposed to do to make you stronger. so, given that, your anrcdote indicates you were overtraining before t, and t reduced your recover times so that you were no longer overtraining.
but if you're working well within your ability to recover and you add t and change nothing else, how do you get stronger?
Do teenagers need to work out to get stronger than when they were little children, or are their hormones making them grow regardless? This should be self-explanatory to a good degree.
Yes, and when you have guys at a FOB that hasn't had a resupply for a while, I'm sure their trt supply will be great. No withdrawal problems at all.
Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? That's exactly what testosterone does, including the "more manly" part. Literally the reason it's gender-affirming care for female-to-male transitioners and aging men. "Robust" is the only word there that's questionable, and even then, I'd say science says "probably". You can give it to a horse, and it will make the horse notably stronger and more “manly”.
Crazy that a doctor would say taking testosterone would not make you stronger. Remind me to never listen to the American College of Physicians.
It depends. It may be that more testosterone when you already produce "enough" - which is individual-dependent - won't give much additional strength if you aren't training specifically to take advantage of it. Additionally, hormones are complicated. The body will downregulate its own production when given "too much". I'm aware that bodybuilders have to follow certain treatment regimens and add other drugs to restart the body's production if they stop supplementing it at times.
IMO he obviously meant boosting someone who was low back into the normal range.
You should see what they say about Male Circumcision (it's great!), water births (bad!), Chiropractors (okay for insurance I guess?), etc
Fuck the US medical system and specifically fuck medical ethics researchers who make the american medical system so morally bankrupt.
They realised that gender affirming care is something that they were against?
Why would it require explanation? It was stupid beyond belief to begin with. It would be like rescinding a policy profiling soldiers using phrenology or waving some scientology wand over them or something.
The fact that people think there's anything even worthy of discussion on this is alarming to me.
I’m surprised that reading The Game hasn’t been added to the annual trainings for soldiers and DoD civilians.
I figured they were just trying to manipulate the elections.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12230349/
It's because it's incredibly stupid.
So, was this some kind of trans witch hunt to weed out people who were transitioning? Or was it just a misguided attempt to name and shame men who weren’t “manly” enough?
It’s hard to imagine it was actually an ill conceived measure aimed at supporting healthy testosterone levels, but I guess it isn’t impossible.
I feel like maybe it was a cartoon inspired measure to create a super army of aggressive super soldiers? It’s got what plants crave? SMH
>So, was this some kind of trans witch hunt to weed out people who were transitioning? Or was it just a misguided attempt to name and shame men who weren’t “manly” enough?
Probably both.
Hopefully they figured out that they would be effectively castrating their military
I was very curious what the results were going to show.
They'll release them right after they finish the "tylenol causes autism" study.
They wouldn't provide results. You'd only get conclusions that were made from the beginning.
Shorter lives due to cardiovascular damage, and shrinking testicles as their body fails to regulate the self-inflicted hormone imbalance... Also irrational mood swings... A million piece puzzle was just solved.
Real athletes never touch the stuff for good reason, and sport organizers tend to test the 40lb overweight dude keeping pace as obviously more suspicious. =3
If we explained how dumb this was somebody would have to resign, so we’ll just sweep it under the carpet.
My money is on "someone higher up the chain of command got pinged for low T, and decided that the tests were bullshit".
The only person higher up the chain of command is the president.
I guess your theory does make sense.
What’s next, force the troops to drink as much whiskey as the SecDef does on a daily basis? Most of them would die on the first day, after their BAC hits .3% at 3 PM, a double whiskey on the hour every hour hits the liver hard.
Is there even a US-based testosterone supply chain? Or was the idea to inject all their service members with a product from overseas that could have supply problems or subtle strategic "impurities"?
The US produces an enormous amount of pharmaceutical testosterone
"only 17% of dairy cows in the U.S. are now being treated with the synthetic [bGH/rbST] hormone"
It is perfectly safe for US children according to the FDA, and illegal in most other developed countries. =3
I had no idea this was a thing.
It seems to edge us closer to the dystopian ‘super soldier gone wrong’ trope.
It seems more like the "middle school penis inspections" joke to me.
That's some kind of urban joke on 4chan yet the far more objectively cruel act of mass male circumcision at birth happens daily and hardly anyone bats an eye at it.
Why have horror movies when real life is all I need? Unironically!
But but ... how will they now win against iranian bears in hand to paw combat?
Stupid ideas is all they have yet they won't even stick with them?
First impressions will stick with people so just the announcement of things is seen as positive by supporters who do not seem inclined to peek behind the curtain and do work on following up on what actually happened (or listening to things contrary to dogma) - which tends to get a lot less media coverage because it requires journalists to work instead of regurgitating press releases. A lot of low information voters can be swayed by this. It doesn’t work on people who are paying attention but it’s not meant for them.
"Without explanation"
I mean, sure, it would probably be embarrassing to have to say "because this was extremely stupid and nonsensical and entirely due to the weird hangups of the present guy in charge."
Perhaps the explanation is: to make space for other incoherent self-defeating policies like threatening the Fed that they'll increase tariffs if rates aren't lowered?
They're not weird at all given his worldview. It's Nazism. From his book to his public statements and actions, he consistently expresses this. The only thing he does not do is use the literal language that is not accepted. But the meaning and actions are the same. People are in denial.