Before anyone says it, I know that the best option for me is to just delete my Reddit account and never use it again, but I don’t have any type of impulse control to stop me from mindlessly scrolling through social media so that option is out of the question for now

Anyways, I saw a Reddit thread about an NFL player who accidentally killed someone while he was drunk driving having PTSD from the incident and a good amount of the comments were acting revolted at the thought that a person who fucked up was a human being with emotions. Maybe I’m being too sympathetic to the NFL player but I think like it’s a bit extreme to say that the feelings of a dude who seems to be pretty guilty and remorseful over unintentionally committing the worst mistake of his life are invalid because of what he did. It’s also kind of representative of this thing that redditors do where they go out of their way to post these deranged fantasies about what they think should happen to every criminal and to talk about how people in prison don’t deserve to be treated with any kind of dignity or compassion because they committed a crime once. I don’t know if these people are just saying this because they want to feel morally superior to everyone else and look down on prisoners because they’re easy targets or if they’re genuinely just deranged and like it when people are dehumanized

But yeah thanks for making it this far into my semi-coherent essay, you can tell me why I’m an idiot in the comments if you feel like it

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Yeah. Recent research shows that just the tackles and impacts from football cause small but significant brain injury and it stacks up over time with worse and worse symptoms. NFL guys who have been doing it since they were kids can show pretty severe, disruptive symptoms. It's a little shitty to assume someone's behavior is due to brain damage, but it's enough of a known and well researched problem, and one of the major symptoms of TBI is varying kinds of impaired judgement, I think it's reasonable to posit that symptoms of TBI could be a contributing factor.

      • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        Ah christ, I read about repeated concussions causing issues. I guess the full extent is much more than just that.