Frogs and Scorpions: Silly Bastards

Do you know the fable of the frog and the scorpion? People attribute it to Aesop but I just looked it up and his is called The Farmer and the Viper. The frog and scorpion came a century or so later.

Both stories share the same general idea, though. So let’s stick with the frog cos I like frogs and their mad jumpy boingy legs and funny burp language:

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Once upon a time, there was a frog and a scorpion next to a river. The scorpion wanted to cross over cause I dunno there was scorpion porn on the other bank or some shit. The frog, of course, could do so any time he wanted.

The scorpion asked the frog,“Lad, giz a backie lad gwan lad,” cause the scorpion was from Tocky. The frog went, “No way lad, yous’ll well sting me and we’ll both drown, ya big sausage.”

Scorpion replied: “Don’t be a div, lad, why would I do that? I’m not drowning today lad.”

So the frog started to give the scorpion a backie over this river and all was going well til about halfway there the scorpion’s tail flicked and stang the frog a proper good one right in his cock. The poison set in and the frog became paralysed and started to sink, taking the scorpion down with him toward a watery grave.

Before they both drowned to death, the frog said, “Fucks’ sake la, what did you do that for? Prick.”

And the scorpion said, “I’m a fuckin scorpion you absolute queg. What did you expect.”
Glug glug glug and that’s all she wrote as they both died of drowning, the frog feeling a bit shitty about the whole fucking deal.

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Now people usually take the moral of this tale to be that no matter how much a scorpion claims it’s gonna be nice and not sting you to death, it’s always bound to do exactly that. This is cause scorpions by nature are destined to lash out with their stinger. Therefore, never trust a scorpion. On your own head -- or frog cok -- be it.

But that’s not correct.

The scorpion wants to get over to the porn, which means he’s got a sense of delayed gratification. The frog is wary because of the scorpion’s reputation. So the frog can take previous information and extrapolate it onto an abstract potential future event, plus make a reasoned decision based on that, i.e. to tell the scorpion to get a lift elsewhere cause the latter is a stinging, killing machine and the frog would like to carry on living (showing a sense of self-preservation, position in embodied space, self-reflection and therefore complex sentience).

The scorpion replying means that he in turn can take all that in mind and then provide a rebuttal to the frog in that he appeals to the frog’s sense of fairness. It would be absurd would the scorpion then sting the frog, cause they’d both die. The scorpion doesn’t want that either, infers the frog. So on they go. Cue stinging, etc, and an unrepentant scorpion basically shrugging and mugging in a tight close-up to camera, like at the end of a crappy US character comedy called “Trust Scorpy”, then there’s a circular fade to black and cue credits.

The scorpion and the frog share language, so share that language’s cultural context and connotations. If the scorpion is capable of this level of abstract contemplation, then he is surely capable of seeing that the urge to sting is so strong that he’s possibly going to kill them both. Given that the stinger is a defence mechanism, or at least a food-gathering one, the most likely outcome is that the stinger won’t be used until and unless a) the frog attacks and/or b) the scorpion is hungry for a frogs’ legs butty.

The scorpion’s already said his goal is to reach the other side, and to read Big Thoraxes Over 40 Months, and the frog’s clearly a woolly liberal type who’s prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to one of nature’s most beautifully-calibrated killing machines.

So is the scorpion a liar, or is he bound by his deeper instincts to always sting the frog? If it’s the former, then the frog would seem to be at fault for falling for those untruths. We know the frog can reason and base its conduct on previous information and apply that to a potential situation.

The frog should tell the scorpion to shit off. In that case, if the scorpion is an instinctual killer when threatened, it’s likely that it’s stinging time anyway. The scorpion wouldn’t get his porn, but he would get a meal as well as the satisfaction of ridding the world of one more instance of woke left crybaby virtue signalling.

If it’s the latter, though, that a scorpion can’t help but sting a frog just because a scorpion is a scorpion, then the scorpion’s death by drowning was wholly avoidable. We’ve seen the scorpion in a complex exchange that dances around truths and possibilities, and ultimately the scorpion’s persuasiveness leads to the doomed journey cross-water. To persuade a frog whose thought processes are at a high level of cognition means that the scorpion is in one sense working at a higher level still, even if that’s just recognising the naivety of the frog’s stance and taking advantage of it.

Our tricksy scorpion, however, reveals his own flaws when he, on the way to his soggy grave, announces that it’s the frog’s fault for trusting him in the first place. Whilst we can’t completely discount the idea that somewhere in there the scorpion was suicidal, at least consciously the scorpion did want to have a future: sitting on the other side of the river leafing through the pornography.

So who is to blame?

The moral seems to be “Don’t trust a scorpion” – extrapolated to human interaction, usually – that if you get stung, that’s your fault. Or, to borrow another fable, if you leave your front door open it’s your fault if you get burgled. But it isn’t that, because in a burglary there is a distinct malice aforethought on the burglar’s part. Both are cases of victim-blame. At worst the frog is naive, and that’s not a crime.

The scorpion takes no blame on itself here, either. He appeals to a sense of inbuilt instinct: he was born to sting. A thief will always take the chance to thieve. That’s fundamentally reducing a cogniscant, persuasive, complex individual to a single perceived instinct or behaviour, and that’s problematic for all sorts of reasons. The scorpion is either a liar or overwhelmed by its need to sting, obliterating even the instinct for self-preservation. This seems unlikely given that the scorpion is clearly an old hand at persuading other creatures to take him places, because in none of those previous cases has he drowned to death as a result.

Nature’s a lot more route one than all this. There would be no pre-match discussion. Either the two creatures would have a short-lived altercation, they’d cross the river together, or most likely they’d both leg it from each other. Frogs are pretty damn good leapers. I reckon the frog’d get away pretty quickly, and have a long and dull career reflecting on this life event in the downtime during takes for the video for that Paul McCartney song.

No, I reckon the blame lies on the person telling the tale. They’ve recounted the whole story, but not understood it. And they probably vote Tory.¹

(Also that you should be more careful where you discard your scorpion jazz mags. This whole thing could've been avoided had the porn been left under a bush like what people did in the olden days.)

1I’d have said ‘Reform’ here but that implies they can actually reflect on fables, which requires actual abstract thought and has nothing to do with mistakenly painting the flag of Denmark on mini-roundabouts, or sticking fireworks up your arsehole.