So the end musty-fies the jeans?
“Mistake” is generic. “Deliberate fuckup” is more specific. A guy slapping an available strange butt is not mistaken in his aim or intent; he is accumulating masturbatory memories. Slap ass NOW; jerk-off while fantasizing LATER. He knowingly committed sexual assault. He is a fuckup.
Two problems. One is that it’s used both ways; and therefore carries, at least for a lot of people, a strong connotation of ‘it wasn’t my fault!’ The other is that as far as the OP instance, no, I don’t think it was ‘unintentional’ for him to grab her ass; I think it was entirely intentional, and not an ‘accident’ at all.
The issue in drunk driving is the difference between ‘intended effect’ and ‘foreseeable effect’. The person’s intention is to drive while drunk. The foreseeable effect of that is a greatly increased risk of causing a collision. People calling it an ‘accident’ seem to me to be assuming the two can be separated: that the drunk driver didn’t intend that increased risk, even though they knew they were taking an action that caused it, because they didn’t want to take it into consideration. People objecting to calling the resulting collision an accident seem to me to be saying that the two can’t be separated: that the drunk driver may not have intended the specific collision, but they did intend the increased risk, even if they wish it weren’t so.
OK, now that was a stinker.
It’s more that the words have separate meanings that people often conflate with each other.
I mean, I can do something intentionally based on poor judgment (or not), and have it go south on me, and that decision would have been a mistake on my part.
How it goes south on me could be foreseeable/inevitable, or it could be the result of some random component. Generally the latter is what people are talking to about “accidents”. The accidental component doesn’t have anything to do with the mistake component.
Let’s say I decide not to wear adequate clothing when it’s cold, and I end up with hypothermia. That’s definitely a mistake on my part, but it’s not an accident.
But if I wore adequate clothing, and got splashed by a car driving through a puddle, and end up with hypothermia, that wasn’t a mistake on my part, it was an accident.
Where it gets dicey is when the mistake made significantly increases the chance of unforeseen and random things to happen to cause a negative outcome. So if I wore inadequate clothing, then my likelihood of some kind of unexpected negative outcome increases dramatically. Making the mistake of driving too fast significantly increases the chance you’re going to get in a wreck, for example.
But all those potential wrecks are still accidents, even if you made mistaken decisions that make them significantly more likely, as there’s still a considerable element of chance involved. You may well intentionally drive faster than is safe, but still make it where you’re going without incident.
I’ve heard everything from armed robbery to murder called a mistake. Why should Tex Watson be kept in prison for the rest of his life because of his past mistakes?
Makes me sick. An intentional act is not a mistake. An asshole is an asshole because of deliberate acts. Not mistakes. You are not taking responsibility for your assholeries if you call them mistakes.
And gosh, your rationalizations for impaired drivers actually make me wonder if you are someone who would do such a thing. Seeing as how I think there is no excuse for someone to choose to drive while being voluntarily impaired/distracted and you think its not a big deal even if someone is killed, I don’t think we can come to agreement on this issue.