6 ms·
Belling the Cat
- aghilmort 1y agooy, clicked thinking was Bell Inequality meets Schrondinger's cat post
- DaveZale 1y agohttps://www.bellingcat.com/ https://www.bellingcat.com/
- walterbell 1y agoInspired by 800 years earlier parable? > 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 1y agoIt'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 1y agoAnd 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.
- HelloUsername 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/@thechristofiles https://www.youtube.com/@thechristofiles
- ursuscamp 1y agoI 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.
- Traubenfuchs 1y agoReminds 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 1y agoFrom 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.
- ben_w 1y agoYes, 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?
- thyristan 1y agoI'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.
- amelius 1y agoAs 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- esafak 1y agoCan anyone recommend an illustrated translation of La Fontaine's Fables for children?
- homarp 1y agoproject gutenberg has one https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7241/7241-h/7241-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7241/7241-h/7241-h.htm
- JKCalhoun 1y agoNot illustrated. (Are any of Project Gutenberg's texts? I kind of hate that, ha ha.)
- card_zero 1y agoSure, for instance: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25357/pg25357-images.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25357/pg25357-images.ht... (They also have the Doré version, but you found that already.)
- JKCalhoun 1y agoHard to do better than Gustave Doré: https://archive.org/details/fablesoflafontai0000lafo_y7d3/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/fablesoflafontai0000lafo_y7d3/pa...
- danesparza 1y agoThis also happens to be the illustrator for the art in the Wikipedia article of the parent story.
- aredox 1y agoDoré, Grandville: https://essentiels.bnf.fr/fr/article/73d641d9-bbf0-4334-ae2b-a3f93979ecf3-fables-la-fontaine-illustrees-par-gustave-dore 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 https://www.polkadot.fr/content/21-les-fables-de-la-fontaine
- onionisafruit 1y agoThis 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 1y agoIn 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. * https://www.jstor.org/stable/2915573 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 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4172513
- jacobolus 1y agoYou should feel free to contribute to the Wikipedia article.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoYeah, 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).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- card_zero 1y agoI'm surprised that medieval Europeans apparently put bells on cats sometimes. Did they care about the lives of small fluffy animals?
- bitwize 1y agoOr small feathered animals. Because they tended to thwart hunting, the bells could also discourage domestic cats from wandering.
- thinkmassive 1y agoAlso 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 1y agoI'm guessing it was more about stopping the cat from getting worms
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoConsidering 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.
- praptak 1y agoIt'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 1y agoThe cat can represent many things, one of which is a government easily able to mobilise against such organisation.
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- renewiltord 1y agoAmusingly 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 1y ago"People will not just" is a good mantra to keep in one's head
- riffraff 1y agoooooh, so that's what https://www.bellingcat.com/ https://www.bellingcat.com/ is called this way!
- tuatoru 1y agoCongratulations on being one of today's ten thousand!
- tuatoru 1y agoWow, people here clearly don't like it when I express delight in learning.
- Loughla 1y agoI'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 1y agoIt'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.
- dev0p 1y agoI don't think it was intended to be negative, just a reference to this XKCD https://xkcd.com/1053/ 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...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI 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]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- yesiamracist 1y ago[flagged]
- wewtyflakes 1y agoWhy did you take the time to create your HN account then only post about how you hate immigration? Why do that? Your account is 30 minutes old.
- immibis 1y agoReminds me of HN commenters who want freedom of expression but get mad when I break into their house and write all over the walls of their bathroom.
- athrowaway3z 1y agoDid HN appear on some MAGA grifter podcast or something and it's attracting political loonies?
- yesiamracist 1y ago[flagged]
- komali2 1y agoTheir comment got buried but they're right about one thing - they do exist, in numbers. I think less than they suspect, but still. I'm still reeling from a conversation I had with an Israeli man 3 days ago where he repeatedly insisted to me that "everyone is racist" and that I just wouldn't admit I'm racist because I'm woke. He assured me that Israel knows what it's doing in Gaza is bad but it won't stop because all Israelis are racist (his words). I have never visited Israel but such a claim seems absurd to me on the face but he was so confident that it did make me wonder - there probably are a great many racists in Israel, trained from generations of propaganda to hate their neighbors and believe in zero sum tribalist thinking. It made me realize I probably should learn about deradicalization. I'm also now thinking a lot about how to handle racists. He kept pressing one particular question to me - "Israel won't stop. So what do you do?" As an optimistic anarchist my hope was always deradicalization leading to, you know, Israel stopping. Or convincing the Americans to stop giving them weapons which forces them to actually be friendly to their neighbors rather than to try to kill them all. But when I brought this up to him he said "no, Israel will never stop. I didn't know Palestine existed until I was twelve, I always was taught Israel is a big square." So, I don't know what to do about weaponized racists, but I think I should like to figure it out before the radicalization methods applied to the Israeli population are adopted elsewhere.
- loquisgon 1y agoThanks 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.
- TallonRain 1y agoInteresting, 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.
- walterbell 1y ago"Belling the Cat" (2022), 20 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30466207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30466207 > a useful question to ask when you find yourself in a situation where a group has decided on something but nobody is acting
- akoboldfrying 1y agoLove it. It's Homer Simpson's "Can't Someone Else Do It?" without the self-awareness.
- sandshaker_au 1y ago[flagged]
- notepad0x90 1y agoI 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.
- move-on-by 1y agoYeah, 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.
- chunkyks 1y agoAlso known as bikeshedding: http://bikeshed.org http://bikeshed.org (if the color scheme is hard to read, hit reload. You'll understand after reading the piece)
- vismit2000 1y ago'Little School Mouse' episode from Tom & Jerry contains an incident of belling the cat: https://tomandjerry.fandom.com/wiki/Little_School_Mouse https://tomandjerry.fandom.com/wiki/Little_School_Mouse