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.
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.
* 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.
You should feel free to contribute to the Wikipedia article.
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).
ooooh, so that's what https://www.bellingcat.com/ is called this way!
I just realized this too. Gosh this brings a much darker and courageous meaning to their organization.
The very same. Folks did yeoman's work nailing Russian separatists' Buk for MH317.
And also sold out an American whistleblower to the FBI... A WikiLeaks it is not.
It seems this cat is self-belling.
Congratulations on being one of today's ten thousand!
Wow, people here clearly don't like it when I express delight in learning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bingo. Same reason “congrats” comments are downvoted. A comment page full of empty congratulations is thoroughly uninteresting.
I think it's usually used for stuff that is assumed to widespread or even common knowledge.
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 ;)
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...
Yes, it was. And now you have! That's great. New intellectual tools for you!
I feel honored to be one of the 10,000 people who just learned of this particular xkcd reference today!
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.
it's an XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/1053/
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.
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.
Also known as bikeshedding: http://bikeshed.org
(if the color scheme is hard to read, hit reload. You'll understand after reading the piece)
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.
The cat can represent many things, one of which is a government easily able to mobilise against such organisation.
Inspired 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"People will not just" is a good mantra to keep in one's head
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
The strategy is to draw Russia into a protracted conflict where they lose their Soviet inheritance, not scared them off.
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.
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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?
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.
> 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.
Also: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2024-07/news/ukraine-strikes...
It is quite clear what "the West" doesn't limit themselves.
> 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.
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.
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.
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> showing us what a big fat joke Russia is.
The only joke in your statement is how naive you must be to believe that.
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.
I mean the US also lost to the Taliban after trillions of dollars and 20 years.
> 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.
Short attention spans are incapable of appreciating a slow burning low effort war of attrition.
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Russia is a nuclear power and direct NATO involvement could quickly lead to nuclear war. Doesn't sound like a joke to me.
'Little School Mouse' episode from Tom & Jerry contains an incident of belling the cat: https://tomandjerry.fandom.com/wiki/Little_School_Mouse
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.
I'm surprised that medieval Europeans apparently put bells on cats sometimes. Did they care about the lives of small fluffy animals?
Or small feathered animals. Because they tended to thwart hunting, the bells could also discourage domestic cats from wandering.
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.
I'm guessing it was more about stopping the cat from getting worms
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.
Love it. It's Homer Simpson's "Can't Someone Else Do It?" without the self-awareness.
Can anyone recommend an illustrated translation of La Fontaine's Fables for children?
Hard to do better than Gustave Doré: https://archive.org/details/fablesoflafontai0000lafo_y7d3/pa...
This also happens to be the illustrator for the art in the Wikipedia article of the parent story.
Doré, Grandville:
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
project gutenberg has one https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7241/7241-h/7241-h.htm
Not illustrated. (Are any of Project Gutenberg's texts? I kind of hate that, ha ha.)
Sure, for instance:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25357/pg25357-images.ht...
(They also have the Doré version, but you found that already.)
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.
"Belling the Cat" (2022), 20 comments, 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
oy, clicked thinking was Bell Inequality meets Schrondinger's cat post
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Why 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.
Reminds 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.
Did HN appear on some MAGA grifter podcast or something and it's attracting political loonies?
Their 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.
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> 80% of Israelis voted to continue bombing Gaza until everyone was dead
No, they did not.
A single poll given by an Israeli newspaper found that 82% of people who took the poll supported the "expulsion" of Palestinians.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-05-28/ty-article-ma...
They even explicitly noted that those specifically calling for death was a minority.
Well that's the gist of the conversation I had with the guy. He often pushed the point, "if what Israeli is doing is so bad, why don't any countries come to take away all the Palestinian refugees?" I'm happy to hear Israeli citizens don't want to hunt Palestinians down, but wanting them expelled and not caring how it happens is barely better.
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