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Those Martian Politicians

Friday 7 August 2026 at 11:40
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Edited by Martin Cadwell, Saturday 8 August 2026 at 12:20

Martian Politicians

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Those Martian Politicians

[4 minute read ] 

opinion

Dogs will roll over onto their backs and expose their bellies as a gesture of submission, or in the case when the pack leader is a human with no teeth on their hands, when they are happy or want to be tickled. Different strokes for different folks. My brother had a dog that would smile at me because I often saved her from attacks from her vicious sister. A dog showing its teeth, in their dog-world, is usually a threat or warning, yet they show their long canines outside of a closed mouth to smile at humans. I suppose they have learnt that humans smile without opening their mouths but do show their teeth; and that is the difference. Dogs exposing their under-bellies are trusting that they will not be attacked while in an indefensible position. 

       'Don't run, we are your friends!' The Martians say in 'Mars Attacks!' holding a translator in one hand while shooting with the other. 'Don't run, we are your friends!' Have we heard that before? Did we instead translate something similar into 'Trust in me'? such as Kaa, the fictional snake from Rudyard Kipling's 'Jungle Book' stories, says to Mowgli, the man-child.

I can think of so many instances when a confident person has tried to impose their opinion on others and caused them to act inappropriately, Husbands do it to wives and wives do it to husbands. Adulterers do it to other people's partners; and bored people try to impose new ideas on themselves, by justifying their behaviour with inadequate information.

Every time the American Government, run by Jack Nicholson as President in 'Mars Attacks!' charitably forgives the Martians for killing swathes of people because there may be a cultural misunderstanding , the aliens apologise and say 'Quite right! We come in peace, we come in peace' and then they kill a whole bunch more people with their ray-runs. They do this at least three times in the film before Jack Nicholson gives a heart-warming speech of togetherness. The listening alien ambassador sheds a tear and immediately kills him.

I am reminded of a fable of a scorpion and a frog, which Wikipedia tells me first appeared in writing  in Russia in the early 20th century. Hmmm. I might not believe that as the origin. I think the scorpion wants to cross the river but it will drown because it cannot swim so it asks to be carried across on the frog's back, but the frog is frightened that the scorpion will sting it. The scorpion swears it will not do so, and the frog agrees to carry it across the river. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog despite knowing the frog will die and itself will drown.

       'Why did you sting me, you will drown?' asked the frog.

       'It is in my nature. Sorry.'

The voice in the Wikipedia says: 'The fable teaches that vicious people cannot resist hurting others even when it is not in their own interests and therefore should never be trusted.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

I am not at all comfortable with that conclusion; not one bit. It is the use of the word 'vicious'. I can't help but think that the voice belongs to a wounded and biased person. Scorpions are not vicious. They sting to survive; defensively or to kill prey. I am pretty sure they have no intent to injure just because they are psychotic or psychopathic. Scared or hungry fits a scorpion sting I suggest. I realise that the fable is warped to present a message not dissimilar to 'A leopard cannot change its spots.' which has the same moral message to it, but a scorpion is not vicious.

       'Thank you, Martin. let's go to Roget's Thesaurus to see what word could be better used.'

       'What do you have?' asked another.

       'Starting with the word 'vicious' the index has 'furious'; 'evil'; 'disobedient', 'malevolent', 'wrong'; and surprisingly also 'vicious' ,' 

         I had to butt in, 'None of those words are right. We are imbuing sentiment on a scorpion; anthropomorphising it in ways that are only applicable to humans when they find themselves in the direst of circumstances. You know, cannibalism when they are starving, and the like. We might as well say it is vindictive and hates all frogs for some prehistoric affrontery. I might say, there is a huge difference between stealing food because the thief or their family is hungry which is to survive, and stealing luxury goods to sell to gain riches, which is vicious.'

       'What word would you substitute for 'vicious' in the Wikipedia entry, then?'

       'Well, the entry in Wikipedia might be more accurate if it says that people who act instinctively and hurt people should not be trusted to act benevolently or be considered to be benign. This talk of vicious people being unable to resist hurting others, is nonsense.' 

Psychiatric problems may lead to having no compunction to refrain from violence but that is a different kettle of fish to something like accidentally drowning the rescuer by climbing onto them. The drowning person is acting instinctively. So it is a question of rationale and reasoning in a time of extreme stress or utter terror that overrides all sensibility. I wouldn't trust the same drowning person to not accidentally drown the next rescuer, but I might trust them with my family at a picnic; even if there is a nearby pond I would not expect them to throw my family into it and sit on them. I would expect them to stay well away from the water and wild horses would not get them near. No, the person who wrote the Wikipedia entry has a vindictive axe to grind, or at best is extremely clumsy with their words. The third option is 'sensationalism'. This is vicious in that the writer cannot resist 'bigging' themselves up by writing in a manner that is exciting and divisive, and in so doing disrupts other people's understanding of something that is really quite simple to understand. The fable is about instinct not cruelty.

A little further analysis of the Wikipedia entry reveals an obvious flaw. In the first paragraph it says the fable originated in Russia in 1933, and then in the third paragraph it says the earliest known appearance, which means written, was in Russia. The fifth paragraph mentions a story called 'The Scorpion and the Turtle', which appeared in Persian texts in the fifteenth century, as a precursor to the (Russian) Scorpion and the Frog. (Note I used the word 'precursor' and note how many websites on the subject also do). The whole entry is suspect and rather than being factual is, it seems, initially written in an emotive way. This catalogue of significant deviance is not instinctual, it is either by design for which 'evil' might fit, but 'wrong' definitely does; or it is clumsy and offered as fact which is 'wrong' but not malevolent; or the writer is viciously attempting to pervert the course of a transference of knowledge.

It all started with a single misuse of a word, 'vicious'. It should be noted that there quite a few websites that are closely similar to the Wikipedia entry in their content; 'AmericanLiterature' being one of them.

'Don't run, we are your friends' and then shooting the people if you are a Martian, is no different to deliberately giving false information to anyone, as far as I am concerned; but only if you are a Martian.

silhouette of a female face in profileFact or fact-based

English courts long ago recognised that it is the value of the theft that is the tell of the character of a thief and stopped hanging beggars but not highway men or burglars and robbers; as is suggested in an interesting article 'The History of Judicial Hanging in Britain 1735-1964' under the subheading, 'Multiple executions at Newgate in 1820.' https://capitalpunishmentuk.org/the-history-of-judicial-hanging-in-britain-1735-1964/

Hungry thieves were sent to America, and then Australia after the American War of Independence. 

From another Wikipedia site:  '[...] before abolition of the death penalty for theft in 1832 [...] In 1808, the lawyer Samuel Romilly KC successfully had the law changed to remove the death penalty for pickpockets and lesser offenders, starting a process of reform that continued over the next 50 years. The death penalty was mandatory (although it was frequently commuted by the government) until the Judgement of Death Act 1823 gave judges the official power to commute the death penalty except for treason and murder.' 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_Kingdom

From Hansard, 'ABOLITION OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENTS', HC Deb 27 March 1832 vol 11 cc948-55: 'Mr. Ewart rose to move for leave to bring in a Bill abolishing Capital Punishment in the cases of horse-stealing, sheep-stealing, and cattle-stealing, also in cases of stealing in a dwelling-house, no person being put in fear therein.'

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1832/mar/27/abolition-of-capital-punishments

Tags: false, lying, instinct, scorpion, frog, fable, malevolent, vicious, knowledge, Martian, politician
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Vicarious Mistake, Lying and Paltering

Sunday 28 December 2025 at 03:24
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Edited by Martin Cadwell, Sunday 28 December 2025 at 14:52

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[ 6 minute read ]

Vicarious Mistakes

I have so much more to learn

I am fairly certain I made a mistake in the previous post I wrote yesterday morning; on the subject of third person narrative, most commonly found in self-help books and such; though successfully used in fiction: 'Bright Lights, Big City' by Jay McInerney in 1984, which was adapted into a film starring Michael J Fox in 1988. All that is true and can be found at:

https://reedsy.com/blog/guide/point-of-view/second-person-pov/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Lights%2C_Big_City_(film)

and if you want to waste a lot of your data download allowance:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094799/

The mistake I made was through what I call a 'vicarious mistake'. A vicarious mistake, in my mind, is the repetition of someone else's mistake while believing that there is no mistake. It comes down to 'Who do you really trust?' A weak example of a vicarious mistake is to use a double space after every full stop when you write. That used to be the norm in Britain. I had a girlfriend who taught MBA's at Exeter University and most of her classes had foreign students. My girlfriend insisted upon her students to always use a double space after every full-stop, so they did. I told my girlfriend double spaces are archaic. It is an archaic practice. It is true. She stopped telling her students to use a double-space after full-stops. However, if any person was told by one of her students to always use double spaces after every full stop because they themselves were told by my girlfriend to do so, they, the person advised by her student, would be repeating her error and making a vicarious mistake.

Vicarious mistakes happen all day every day across the world and our attention is drawn to them when someone realises they have been doing things wrong and says, 'Oh! I have always done it this way!' because they were shown to do it  that way. (There is actually a double space after the italicised 'it' - for letter spacing purposes; learnt in calligraphy lessons)

I made a vicarious mistake by omission in yesterday's post. The source I had for learning about 2nd (second) person narrative was a person who failed to explain that, as with first person narrative:

'I went to the shops. It started to rain. I got wet' 

and third (3rd) person narrative:

'He/She/They went to the shops. It started to rain. He/She/They got wet'

2rd (second) person narrative can also include the centre sentence 'It started to rain'.

I failed to include any sentence in my earlier example in yesterday's post that was merely descriptive. Not every sentence needs to have a character in it, such as, 'It started to rain'.

If you want to read about POV and narratives you might go to:

https://reedsy.com/blog/guide/point-of-view/

Some of the following uses a fourth (4th) person point of view 'we' and 'us'.

Lying and Paltering

Suppose someone is asked, 'Did you eat the last piece of pizza in the fridge?' There are a range of answers that we might consider to be not honest.

Let's assume a single person answering did eat the last piece of pizza in the fridge. 'Not me' is an intentional lie by commission; 'I ate some' is an intentional lie by omission because it does not include the information that the 'some' is the last piece. 'I ate the cake' is an intentional lie by obfuscation because if it is true directs the questioner away from their question. This means it is paltering. The last, 'What pizza?' is not lying at all but is using obfuscation, diversionary tactics and delay to avoid confessing anything.

In economics, 'needs and wants', amorphous as they are, are regarded to have more value for different people and at different times. In order to be able to keep track of the value of these needs and wants they are given values known as 'utils'. See the Diminishing Margin of Utility in economics for an accurate explanation. The American (no cookie opt out) Investopedia (https://www.investopedia.com should be able to give a succinct definition. Use the drop down menu at the top left of their page to be able to search, otherwise: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility.asp

Diminishing Margin of Utility If I am hungry, I place more value on the first pork pie in a pack of four than on the second; more on the second than the third; and so on. By the time I have eaten the third, I may have had enough or I am just bored with pork pies. This means that I could give significantly more 'utils' to the first pork pie then the fourth pork pie. The utility of filling me up has been accomplished by eating the first three pies.

In my local shop I discovered mince pies in multiples of three. There were packets of 18 and 27. Odd number, twenty seven isn't it? I suggest, most people might stop at eating three mince pies one after the other, so packaging four mince pies together is a waste of a unit from the manufacturers point of view. Is it a vicarious mistake to put four mince pies in a box, after commodification of products was universalised? I think so. Yet, is a triangular box more expensive to produce than a rectangular box? (a square is a special kind of a rectangle because it has four right angles and two opposite sides of equal length twice). I am slightly digressing in that I am drifting away from how much value we place on eating and what preferences we have. However, the number of mince pies in a box links two things: utility; and a suggested move away from making the same marketing mistake (vicarious mistake or inherited mistake).

If the owner of both the pizza and the cake places more value (utils) on the pizza than on the cake, it may be preferable to confess to eating their cake and withstand their wrath in the hope they will go away after venting their anger and forget about their much more precious pizza. In fact, what might actually happen is that the person who ate the cake may get vicariously blamed for also eating the pizza, if someone else ate it. Yet, with no confession for eating the pizza from any party the heightened anger felt by the owner of these foods for the loss of the cake is less than the sum of the loss of the cake and the pizza directed at two separate individuals, or even a single individual if it occurs as a single event.

So, if someone eats someone else's pizza and cake, it may pay to 'palter' by confessing to eating the cake in response to 'Did you eat my pizza?' or the last piece of pizza. A manipulator, despite never be asked about the cake, may reason that it is best to take the hit for eating the cake so everyone can move on, even if someone else ate the pizza.

The American Psychological Association says in an article 'True Lies: People Who Lie Via Telling Truth Viewed Harshly, Study Finds' (2016) that when people are asked an uncomfortable question they often will continue to tell the truth but without answering the question itself to create a mistaken impression.

References

The American Psychological Association (2016)

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/12/true-lies

Tags: vicarious mistake, lies, lying, paltering, second person narrative, 2nd person narrative, creative writing, Diminishing Margin of Utility
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