Forsooth, That was a gem!! That is, i still dont know whether youd be happy to steer clear from invoking violence when discoursing economic approaches to moral issues…
Mongoose vs (king) cobra, thats a pairing from asia i could be curious about..
[I note another horseshoe-like effect where foxes mporp lions, realtime, get themselves confused..]
Anabasis is _the_ counterexample i’d like to have remembered.. fully vulpine Commanding Officer
(I mentioned assassinationtargetstateofmind because… inferred internal states tend to be insanely effective when identifying .. familiars?)
I've been invoking violence because that is ("keeping the lion-fox defos close to where they have always been") the historical leonine[0] trait.
Fox-lion confusion by a third party also occurs in one of the Panchatantra stories, where a mother leaps to the conclusion that the mongoose with blood on its mouth has betrayed her... (compare "Rikki-tikki-tavi")
From the violence-dealing viewpoint, wasn't the CO in the Anabasis designori? A 10'000 strong combined arms unit, even if default dead, is still well capable of holding its perimeter against wolves. (both here and in Persia)
That said, if you'd prefer to rotate the microscope lenses and narrow down to even-more-metaphorical lions and foxes, I'm happy to do so (if I may footnote the occasional ultima ratio[1] from time to time?) going forward.
[0] in the Tanakh lion is used metaphorically for scholars, but only as part of a total order, and there's plenty of violence in the (t <= R. Meir) fox and lion stories. (open Q: was the hebrew word, which gets translated fox, a fox or a jackal?)
[1] making people offers they can't refuse?
EDIT: this is probably the reason for our different distributional preferences: as metaphors for strategies, I'll grant a non-bimodal distribution, but as long as the lion stands (rampant?) for violence, doing gangsta shit effectively (which includes irreversible decision-making under the influence of adrenaline) implies a significant time sunk cost in having earlier practised doing gangsta shit; similarly all the skulking about meeting with (potential) informants is a significant time sink for the case officer: we can't all just have Hugin and Munin show up each morning with the news.
EDIT2: to what extent does Hercules' use of the Nemean Lion's claws to skin itself anticipate Cantor's use of diagonalisation?
Someday I'll have to actually read his story, because he took the Kolmogorov Option: his friendly suzerain died and an enemy inherited, so he wound up in exile, yet was able (while maintaining feudal proprieties) to capture Valencia, at which point (for story purposes) said hostile suzerain married the suzerain's sons to El Cid's daughters, leaving him sandwiched by inimical interests, and yet he still maintained his Kolmogorov bubble until death (and even some time after).
[note that capitalism via *kaput (head) and feudalism via *fehu (cattle) stand in a metonymic relation. compare https://adebiportal.kz/kz/translation/view/595#:~:text=We%20... ]