This makes me realize I’ve been misinterpreting bell the cat references my whole life. I thought it was about team work.
My mother told me a version that had the mice building some rube goldberg contraption to get the bell on the cat. It’s a very different lesson from what’s described here. I wonder if she got her version from someone else or if it was her addition to avoid teaching me a cynical lesson.
JdeBP · 19h ago
In fairness, there have been a lot of versions of this over the past 15 centuries, not always with the same moral.
The Wikipedia writers here have not plumbed the full depths of this, and have not yet reached Paul Franklin Baum.
You should feel free to contribute to the Wikipedia article.
JKCalhoun · 19h ago
Yeah, when I came across it recently (I was looking at it for inclusion in a free "Primer" for school-age kids I am creating) I realized it was a lot more cynical than I remembered.
I think it's hard to draw any other conclusion (at least from the versions I found online) that it's really about individuals wanting someone else to do a thing that they are afraid to do. "Talk is cheap" could be the moral they append to the end (I hate those though and am stripping those off for the fables that I am re-printing).
I just realized this too. Gosh this brings a much darker and courageous meaning to their organization.
howard941 · 15h ago
The very same. Folks did yeoman's work nailing Russian separatists' Buk for MH317.
tuatoru · 18h ago
Congratulations on being one of today's ten thousand!
tuatoru · 17h ago
Wow, people here clearly don't like it when I express delight in learning.
Loughla · 17h ago
I've noticed that many individuals here assume negative tone in what are actually neutrally toned statements unless you add overly descriptive language to ensure neutral tone. It's not great and leads to echo chamber style communication and overly pedantic arguments often.
mjevans · 13h ago
It's not just here. Readers will apply whatever default emotional context they assume without realizing they've projected their expectations onto what is otherwise potentially a very different statement.
wyre · 14h ago
I think most people here are aware of the 1 in 10,000 reference, but it can come off as belittling because it implies it is knowledge most people know.
bmm6o · 16h ago
This is a community that values a high signal to noise ratio and generally eschews small talk, a la nohello.org. Congratulating someone for learning something does not advance the conversation.
It also has a low tolerance of what it perceives as reddit- style in-group signaling via repetition of a common meme (xkcd, in this case). Again noise vs signal but also suspicion of karma farming.
JumpCrisscross · 20m ago
Bingo. Same reason “congrats” comments are downvoted. A comment page full of empty congratulations is thoroughly uninteresting.
dev0p · 17h ago
I don't think it was intended to be negative, just a reference to this XKCD https://xkcd.com/1053/
Even when something is known by "everyone", there's still going to be someone who doesn't know it yet.
I never heard about this fable before, either...
tuatoru · 15h ago
Yes, it was. And now you have! That's great. New intellectual tools for you!
wyldfire · 16h ago
I believe you have misinterpreted something that was a reference to xkcd with purely positive intent. At least, the original has that intent and I'm assuming that is reflected here.
praptak · 20h ago
It's also a tragedy of the (anti-)commons. The mice should coordinate, tax themselves fairly and hire a ninja to put the bell on the cat.
ben_w · 20h ago
The cat can represent many things, one of which is a government easily able to mobilise against such organisation.
No comments yet
notepad0x90 · 12h ago
I love this. But it should also be said that if a mouse is in the process of putting the bell on the cat, other mice should shut up and get out of the way.
In my experience, the same people that have ideas similar to belling the cat, are the same people that are major critics and with opinions about how something can't be done even though someone is actively in the process of doing it.
I guess the moral is about how ideas and opinions (positive or negative) are empty when one is unwilling to be involved in their implementation.
(if the color scheme is hard to read, hit reload. You'll understand after reading the piece)
move-on-by · 10h ago
Yeah, I know the type you speak of. Always quick to bring up concerns, attach their own demands, or just generally sandbag anything that wasn’t their own idea. There is something to be said about the ‘put up or shut up’ mentality with regards of getting things done.
ChrisMarshallNY · 18h ago
I heard the story, when I was a kid, but didn't realize that it was what was meant, when used in popular culture. I always thought that it meant establishing a warning threshold for undesirable outcomes.
I enjoyed this reference from the Wikipedia article[0]. Sort of the flip side of the Abilene Paradox[1].
Interesting, this is a phrase I’ve never heard before. But this is a concept I’ve had to articulate quite a number of times in recent years, as it has been quite pertinent as of late. This’ll be useful shorthand.
> One of the earliest versions of the story appears as a parable critical of the clergy in Odo of Cheriton's Parabolae. Written around 1200, it was afterwards translated into Welsh, French and Spanish.
thrance · 22h ago
It's no secret. Jean de la Fontaine was an Academician (as in, the French Academy) around the time of the ancients vs moderns quarrel. As a member of the former, la Fontaine believed everything good had already been written and all they could do was retell old stories.
He himself claimed to have based his fables on the writing of, among others, Aesop.
bigmattystyles · 17h ago
And he was the bane of fables to memorize and recite when I was a kid. Always struck me later on with ‘la cigale et la fourmi’ was always praised as a good lesson but that it was a bit cruel. I always preferred maitre corbeau avec son fromage.
ursuscamp · 19h ago
I never looked up the origin of the name before. Interestingly enough, I associate Bellingcat with permanent cold warriors, a group of people who seem determined to fulfill the moral of the tale.
card_zero · 21h ago
I'm surprised that medieval Europeans apparently put bells on cats sometimes. Did they care about the lives of small fluffy animals?
bitwize · 21h ago
Or small feathered animals. Because they tended to thwart hunting, the bells could also discourage domestic cats from wandering.
3eb7988a1663 · 18h ago
Considering how much more expensive food used to be, allowing pests to run rampant and get into the food stores seems unlikely. Although, I believe they were more likely to rely on dogs to kill rats.
thinkmassive · 19h ago
Also possible they wanted to reduce the number of small animal carcasses to clean up, whether from the doorstep or interior of the home. Cats love to bring these as gifts to their keepers.
behringer · 19h ago
I'm guessing it was more about stopping the cat from getting worms
esafak · 22h ago
Can anyone recommend an illustrated translation of La Fontaine's Fables for children?
Amusingly the part of the story that refers to the partially solved problem is also on its own just as evergreen.
"All you have to do is" is such a common phrase online. "why didn't they just". If one is a solo builder, yes, by all means. But why didn't the SFMTA "just build side bike lanes instead of center running bike lanes in the first place?"
Betrays a fundamental lack of knowledge of how democracies make decisions: it is the center of gravity of an object with varying mass distribution.
derektank · 19h ago
"People will not just" is a good mantra to keep in one's head
aghilmort · 16h ago
oy, clicked thinking was Bell Inequality meets Schrondinger's cat post
loquisgon · 17h ago
Thanks for the reference. Never heard about the "belling the cat" concept before (I am not european/american). However me and another colleague at work always joke/inquiry (sarcastically?) about "who is going to do it" whenever the "team" (in retros, planning, etc) brings up some idea that it would be very nice to execute.
This reference will be very useful to articulate what so far it's been sarcastic comments at best.
> a useful question to ask when you find yourself in a situation where a group has decided on something but nobody is acting
Traubenfuchs · 22h ago
Reminds me of us europeans expecting Ukraine men to defend us from Russia.
Which they have kind of been doing for years now, showing us what a big fat joke Russia is.
amelius · 22h ago
From EU perspective it seems like the decisions are purely based on short-term economics. I.e., just enough weapons are supplied to Ukraine to extend the war indefinitely, as opposed to supplying enough weapons to stop it now.
wisty · 14h ago
The strategy is to draw Russia into a protracted conflict where they lose their Soviet inheritance, not scared them off.
ACCount37 · 19h ago
US aid seems bound by the willingness to spend money and escalate. EU aid seems bound more by the industrial capacity and willingness to escalate.
Still, just "willingness to escalate" would move the needle by a lot, and I'm of the opinion that the only language dictators truly understand is violence. Anything short of that is far too often interpreted as a show of weakness.
Nevermark · 8h ago
This.
We need a grey flag to clearly represent "we don't accept your win yet, but we are not trying to win either, so keep trying". Just as the white flag clearly represents full surrender.
It is, unfortunately, the optimal path for maximizing the length of the war.
Nobody wins wars without prioritizing the goal of winning the war.
Other massive disadvantage: The unending financial arm twisting is pushing allies with closer ties to Russia away. I.e. India. The longer the war goes on, the more global adaptation there will be away from the systems that create US leverage. Leverage should be used strategically, within a decisive plan, not chronically and aimlessly while its targets build up immunity.
ben_w · 19h ago
Yes, but not only economics, I think.
Russia cannot be allowed to win.
But also, Putin cannot loose so hard that he actually reaches for the nukes (meaning either he needs to die or those weapons are first removed from use), and even without Putin there's a fear a collapsing Russia would disperse nukes on the black market and/or oligarchs would fruit into atomic warlords.
This does mean Ukraine destroying Russian nuclear delivery systems a while back was directly useful, makes it easier for everyone else to help them.
But even so, I have no idea how this plays out: Russia's death throes spraying nukes at the west is still entirely possible; as is Ukraine developing a nuke, pointing it as stuff Russian oligarchs like, and getting them to defenestrate Putin without Ukraine even launching the weapon.
-
Other things to consider: qhich power grids, if any, can cope with a single nuke triggering a high-altitude EMP? Most extreme estimate I've heard says it would take only one to kill 90% of the USA in a year just from loss of electricity in too many places at once to repair fast enough.
How sure can we be that all post-Russian nukes get accounted for?
amelius · 17h ago
As long as the West just limits themselves to kicking Russia out of Ukraine, then I don't see how that becomes an existential threat to Russia, and why it would warrant nukes.
We shouldn't be susceptible to intimidation tactics, because where does it end.
Anyway, before anything else I want more pressure on Trump to get those abducted children back to Ukraine.
justsomehnguy · 17h ago
> As long as the West just limits themselves to kicking Russia out of Ukraine, then I don't see how that becomes an existential threat to Russia, and why it would warrant nukes.
Literally in the comment you are responding to:
>> This does mean Ukraine destroying Russian nuclear delivery systems a while back was directly useful, makes it easier for everyone else to help them.
It is quite clear what "the West" doesn't limit themselves.
ben_w · 17h ago
> I don't see how that becomes an existential threat to Russia
Russia loosing is an existential threat to Putin, it is presently unclear how the other oligarchs would respond to the power vacuum.
thyristan · 19h ago
I'd wager that we couldn't be, even back in the 1992 USSR collapse. I'd guess a few are gone missing, and they didn't tell the world, or didn't even notice.
wbl · 17h ago
So long as we make clear the war ends with his troops removed nukes will never help him no matter how hard we hammer the bear.
pengaru · 21h ago
> showing us what a big fat joke Russia is.
The only joke in your statement is how naive you must be to believe that.
AnimalMuppet · 20h ago
As a conventional military power, Russia has definitely shown itself to be something of a joke.
As a nuclear power, a cyber power, or a disinformation provider, not so much.
cedws · 20h ago
I mean the US also lost to the Taliban after trillions of dollars and 20 years.
JumpCrisscross · 10m ago
> the US also lost to the Taliban after trillions of dollars and 20 years
The Taliban (and Viet Cong) showed the American military is crap at anti-guerilla warfare. Neither hit either American military or industrial capabilities, both of which expanded during those wars.
In contrast, Russia has shifted into a full wartime economy and is still on the net losing assets. It’s an objectively weaker martial and economic force than it was before. That couldn’t be said about the American military post-Afghanistan.
pengaru · 19h ago
Short attention spans are incapable of appreciating a slow burning low effort war of attrition.
nwellnhof · 21h ago
Russia is a nuclear power and direct NATO involvement could quickly lead to nuclear war. Doesn't sound like a joke to me.
akoboldfrying · 13h ago
Love it. It's Homer Simpson's "Can't Someone Else Do It?" without the self-awareness.
My mother told me a version that had the mice building some rube goldberg contraption to get the bell on the cat. It’s a very different lesson from what’s described here. I wonder if she got her version from someone else or if it was her addition to avoid teaching me a cynical lesson.
The Wikipedia writers here have not plumbed the full depths of this, and have not yet reached Paul Franklin Baum.
* https://www.jstor.org/stable/2915573
Nor have they incorporated that one Piers Plowman text had a proposal to kill the cat, not to bell it.
* https://www.jstor.org/stable/4172513
I think it's hard to draw any other conclusion (at least from the versions I found online) that it's really about individuals wanting someone else to do a thing that they are afraid to do. "Talk is cheap" could be the moral they append to the end (I hate those though and am stripping those off for the fables that I am re-printing).
No comments yet
It also has a low tolerance of what it perceives as reddit- style in-group signaling via repetition of a common meme (xkcd, in this case). Again noise vs signal but also suspicion of karma farming.
Even when something is known by "everyone", there's still going to be someone who doesn't know it yet.
I never heard about this fable before, either...
No comments yet
In my experience, the same people that have ideas similar to belling the cat, are the same people that are major critics and with opinions about how something can't be done even though someone is actively in the process of doing it.
I guess the moral is about how ideas and opinions (positive or negative) are empty when one is unwilling to be involved in their implementation.
(if the color scheme is hard to read, hit reload. You'll understand after reading the piece)
I enjoyed this reference from the Wikipedia article[0]. Sort of the flip side of the Abilene Paradox[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
> One of the earliest versions of the story appears as a parable critical of the clergy in Odo of Cheriton's Parabolae. Written around 1200, it was afterwards translated into Welsh, French and Spanish.
He himself claimed to have based his fables on the writing of, among others, Aesop.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25357/pg25357-images.ht...
(They also have the Doré version, but you found that already.)
https://essentiels.bnf.fr/fr/article/73d641d9-bbf0-4334-ae2b...
But there has been a lot of others: https://www.polkadot.fr/content/21-les-fables-de-la-fontaine
"All you have to do is" is such a common phrase online. "why didn't they just". If one is a solo builder, yes, by all means. But why didn't the SFMTA "just build side bike lanes instead of center running bike lanes in the first place?"
Betrays a fundamental lack of knowledge of how democracies make decisions: it is the center of gravity of an object with varying mass distribution.
This reference will be very useful to articulate what so far it's been sarcastic comments at best.
> a useful question to ask when you find yourself in a situation where a group has decided on something but nobody is acting
Which they have kind of been doing for years now, showing us what a big fat joke Russia is.
Still, just "willingness to escalate" would move the needle by a lot, and I'm of the opinion that the only language dictators truly understand is violence. Anything short of that is far too often interpreted as a show of weakness.
We need a grey flag to clearly represent "we don't accept your win yet, but we are not trying to win either, so keep trying". Just as the white flag clearly represents full surrender.
It is, unfortunately, the optimal path for maximizing the length of the war.
Nobody wins wars without prioritizing the goal of winning the war.
Other massive disadvantage: The unending financial arm twisting is pushing allies with closer ties to Russia away. I.e. India. The longer the war goes on, the more global adaptation there will be away from the systems that create US leverage. Leverage should be used strategically, within a decisive plan, not chronically and aimlessly while its targets build up immunity.
Russia cannot be allowed to win.
But also, Putin cannot loose so hard that he actually reaches for the nukes (meaning either he needs to die or those weapons are first removed from use), and even without Putin there's a fear a collapsing Russia would disperse nukes on the black market and/or oligarchs would fruit into atomic warlords.
This does mean Ukraine destroying Russian nuclear delivery systems a while back was directly useful, makes it easier for everyone else to help them.
But even so, I have no idea how this plays out: Russia's death throes spraying nukes at the west is still entirely possible; as is Ukraine developing a nuke, pointing it as stuff Russian oligarchs like, and getting them to defenestrate Putin without Ukraine even launching the weapon.
-
Other things to consider: qhich power grids, if any, can cope with a single nuke triggering a high-altitude EMP? Most extreme estimate I've heard says it would take only one to kill 90% of the USA in a year just from loss of electricity in too many places at once to repair fast enough.
How sure can we be that all post-Russian nukes get accounted for?
We shouldn't be susceptible to intimidation tactics, because where does it end.
Anyway, before anything else I want more pressure on Trump to get those abducted children back to Ukraine.
Literally in the comment you are responding to:
>> This does mean Ukraine destroying Russian nuclear delivery systems a while back was directly useful, makes it easier for everyone else to help them.
Also: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2024-07/news/ukraine-strikes...
It is quite clear what "the West" doesn't limit themselves.
Russia loosing is an existential threat to Putin, it is presently unclear how the other oligarchs would respond to the power vacuum.
The only joke in your statement is how naive you must be to believe that.
As a nuclear power, a cyber power, or a disinformation provider, not so much.
The Taliban (and Viet Cong) showed the American military is crap at anti-guerilla warfare. Neither hit either American military or industrial capabilities, both of which expanded during those wars.
In contrast, Russia has shifted into a full wartime economy and is still on the net losing assets. It’s an objectively weaker martial and economic force than it was before. That couldn’t be said about the American military post-Afghanistan.