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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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As someone who has mild ADHD himself, I can understand why you don't want them on the battlefield.

War is long periods of boredom interspersed by short periods of terror, and if it wasn't obvious, boredom or focusing on incredibly boring tasks like guard duty or keeping watch would be an issue for someone with ADHD.

Of course, that doesn't particularly matter since we have drugs for the problem, drugs that work pretty goddamn well, are quite cheap, and would be kept in stock anyway if only for high value people like fighter pilots who can't afford to be tired and jet-lagged. A hundred dollars or less than a kilo of Adderall added to the logistics burden, and your ADHD trooper is ready to go, and he might even sneak a few to his buddies, regardless of regulations, and likely improve their overall performance in the process. I don't think the US of all nations is in a position where that's an onerous requirement, not when during WW2 they had ships dedicated to refrigerating ice-cream.

I play a lot of milsim video games, which while certainly not a proper substitute for war, are slower paced and more methodical than most games. I can certainly tell the Ritalin makes me a better virtual soldier, and even for those with significantly worse ADHD, they're likely to perform to par if you dose them up enough.

It's certainly not a burden so terrible that you should be turning them away during a recruiting crisis!

Said soldiers now need access to the Ritalin. It's not a great analogy but think about shit like type 1 diabetes and insulin, or hell stuff like depression that's stable on SSRIs. Sure, we might have the logistics capability to keep ADHD troops supplied with Adderall for months and months, and the shit can be vacuum sealed or something to last for years. However it's something else that can go wrong in your war operation.

I'm not doubting that the US has the industrial capacity - puny as it is - and the logistics capacity to start making Adderall by the ton and shipping it to soldiers, however.

It's actually even dumber than that, because the US overdiagnoses boys with ADHD at epidemic levels.