Recent missile tests by Iran have captured public attention lately, and I’d like to say a few words about that.<\/p>\n
What we’re seeing here is a basic and natural mammalian territorial threat display not unakin to chest-beating. Also in that category I would put Israel’s long-range airstrike drills and a certain world power’s careful repositioning of naval battle-groups.<\/p>\n
Don’t get me wrong. In troops of chimpanzees, gorrillas, and baboons, for example, threat displays go quite a long way quelling disputes short of actual<\/em> violence. Even scaled up to the level of nation-states, primate chest-beating is a quite useful and fundamental tool of territorial diplomacy.<\/p>\n Do I wish that we all could skip the primitive and laughably fallacious “might-makes-right” primate diplomatic philosophy? Of course I do. However, when a number of humans are locked in a room with a number of baboons, it is absolutely necessary that everyone present know how to speak baboon. This is true even if there is only one baboon. I say this, diplomatically, without pointing any fingers at any baboons I feel to be present in the room.<\/p>\n It is up to the non-baboons to locate and apply any monoliths they might happen to have on hand until wasteful primate threat displays are no longer necessary or useful.<\/p>\n [*]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recent missile tests by Iran have captured public attention lately, and I’d like to say a few words about that. What we’re seeing here is a basic and natural mammalian territorial threat display not unakin to chest-beating. Also in that category I would put Israel’s long-range airstrike drills and a certain world power’s careful repositioning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1rL5j-2Q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/xal.li\/eri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/xal.li\/eri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/xal.li\/eri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xal.li\/eri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xal.li\/eri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/xal.li\/eri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/xal.li\/eri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xal.li\/eri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xal.li\/eri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}