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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2385 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 22, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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The US has been laundering casualties for a while now. I’ve noticed that every time there’s a big offensive in Ukraine, two weeks later there’s a helicopter crash off the coast of America that kills half a dozen special forces guys. Or how there was another helicopter crash that killed a bunch of guys from the USS Eisenhower air wing two months after the Houthis totally did not hit it with a missile. Or how a helicopter crash killed some Delta Force guys two weeks after a big Israeli raid to try and rescue hostages in Gaza. Or that general that was mysteriously “found dead” at Twentynine Palms three days after he supposedly got back from Ukraine. Open source intel had indicated that a building housing American advisors in Ukraine had been hit by a missile a week before. Or going back a while, how half the SEAL team that killed Bin Laden died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. Witnesses in Pakistan said that one of the stealth Blackhawks crashed during the Bin Laden raid with many casualties, but the Government maintained that the Blackhawk crash during the raid hadn’t killed anyone. They just happened to all die in a separate helicopter crash in Afghanistan a month later.

Training/deployment accidents happen absolutely regularly. Especially in any active army - US, Israel, etc. If you pay attention to it, there are a lot of them. Attributing them to "casualty laundering" would require some very strong proof - or at least evidence of a large statistical anomaly. Otherwise it just pointless posturing pretending to know more than the rubes, while not actually knowing anything.

I mean yes they happen fairly regularly, but having a high fatality accident every time the us or her Allies get involved in a battle does seem somewhat provocative to me.

Typical mistake. To show the correlation, you would have to demonstrate that accidents do not happen when US is not involved in a battle.

Helicopters are very unstable and crash a lot.

My father was a career NCO in the USMC. His stories when I was a little kid have left me with a lifelong fear of helicopters. I've never been in one and probably never will. I'm perfectly fine with airplanes have have gone skydiving twice.

I think this is dumb, but in a way which basically can’t be disproven. It just screams “confirmation bias.”

Is there a site somewhere that tracks casualty announcements?

This. We need disprovability and statistical averages, not anecdotes. How many incidents that might plausibly create casualties that need laundered occur, how many accidents involving military personal happen, and then do these correlate with each other more than we would statistically expect?

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