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Comment by low_key | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with the term 'accident' for crashes because they can always be attributed to causes, not just chance.

This is even more true when missiles are involved.

Indeed, even if a missile strike is accidental in the sense of mistaken identity, it is misleading to call the situation a "plane accident" or "air traffic accident". It is a military accident.

Just like when a car is blown up by driving over a mine, we don't call that a "car accident" or "traffic accident".

Doh?

I think it is silly to argue such semantics with natural language. We all know what it means when they said "accident." Something unintentional, unexpected, and unfortunate. So why do we need to go off topic and argue whether something was the correct word, when everyone is aware of the meaning implied. In this context, "crash" and "accident" are really the same. The events are random and out of control from the perspective of the airline or passengers, the people who matter in this post.

It's not like we're programming, where (hopefully) 2 != two != "two" != "2"

Its concerning how the Pro-Russian narrative has been formed over the shooting down of that plane. We don't call the shooting down of planes during the Cold War accidents, but somehow we do for this?

The world is coddling Putin for fear of losing his economic ties into countries that control the editorial content of much of the Western press. So we say 'accident' and we say 'supposed' ties to Russia, and we say blatant lies like 'Nazi party has taken over the Ukraine' in Western papers.

Sadly, Putin's money is held above morals and truth in Europe. Especially in Germany and France.

For reference, the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 was termed in the US report[1] as a "a tragic and regrettable accident". The report goes on to use the word 'accident' many more times.

[1]: http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/International_security_affairs/o...

I take it your press is different from ours... http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/british-newspapers-are-p...

I don't know which Germany you're looking at, but there is significant anti-Putin sentiment and, correspondingly, newspaper stories and commentary calling for harsh measures against Russia.

But it is somewhat tempered by the significant anti-American sentiment that we've been experiencing for a bit now. I never thought I'd see this, but it's much, much worse than when Rumsfeld talked about "old Europe" (although that was probably overblown in the European press, I don't think Americans ever understood how damaging that was).

Luckily every few years one of the big TV stations is producing another emotional, uplifting "good American" film like http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Luftbr%C3%BCcke_%E2%80%93_N... and in those times you still feel how close we are to the U.S.

Erm, what country are you in? In the US, the media hysteria over what is very obviously an accident seems to be calling for WW-3. Has been since the olympics, really.

Accident just means unintended. And while there are causes, they may now well be unknowable, in which case a statistical look is probably the most interesting look you can justifiably make.

Someone driving in a car who's not paying attention for a moment and hits someone else feels like an accident to me. The same could have happened with a missile. Strictly speaking, everything has a cause. So by that definition there are no accidents.

That's all just arguing semantics though. I even agree with you that the term "accident" is not correct, despite what I wrote above. (Although I don't agree with your reasoning behind it). I'd prefer the term "incident".

An event doesn't have to be purely random (whatever that means) to be an accident.

An accident is something that happens unintentionally. Though I'm sure many crashes are down to genuine negligence, I'd be surprised if most crashes are deliberate, even indirectly (e.g. "Whoops! I've cross-threaded this bolt, oh well, I'm sure it will be fine" vs "Ha Ha! I'll cross-threaded this bolt. That'll make the plane crash one day!").

That's true, I guess I didn't fully describe what I meant.

It seems to me that when people use 'accident' to describe something they are trying to remove attribution or disconnect causes.

I don't think that people do that at all. All accidents are investigated thoroughly to find the cause(s).

'accident' doesn't mean that the crash happened by chance, just that it was unintentional.

Imo accident is an "oeps" that occurred without intend. In case of a fired missiles it's an incident. So unless someone misfired the missile it's I'd call it an incident.

When do you use the word 'accident'?

For unintentional, inconsequential failures. Unintentional, consequential failures are called 'negligence.'

While driving a car, I get stung in the neck by a bee. I freak out. I hit someone. It's unintentional, there's consequential failures. Yet it's not negligence by any definition I know.

Language is so hard. It's no wonder communication is the cause of most of your conflicts.

The outcome of the shootdown was easily foreseeable given the circumstances, so I don't see how it can be described as an accident.

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