Belling the Cat
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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.
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).
It seems this cat is self-belling.
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...
In this case it's about a not-mainstream publication with a non-obvious reference as a name. (also fwiw, I'd bet the knowledge of the term for non-native speakers is even more obscure). So I would interpret the downvotes as "misuse of expression" but I can only guess ;)
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)
> 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.
"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.
I enjoyed this reference from the Wikipedia article[0]. Sort of the flip side of the Abilene Paradox[1].
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.
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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.
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.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25357/pg25357-images.ht...
(They also have the Doré version, but you found that already.)
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