Since any information among constituents in any tissue ecology is both direct and indirect, and is disseminated under conditions in which neither sender nor receiver is necessarily clear-cut, conflicts are initially diminished.
Preferring clear-cut moral conflicts between noble peasants and brutal despots to political complexities and competing doctrines, Ms. Yates almost revels in the spirit of simplistic revolutionary solidarity.
It is hard to imagine a more clear-cut example of a conflict of interest.
Our results could not make a clear-cut contribution to the conflicting data obtained from trials studying the effects of the different types of immunoglobulin preparations in septic patients.
Only the Palestinians appear to have a clear-cut strategy: to bring the conflict to the international arena through a United Nations General Assembly Resolution recognizing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, within the 1967 borders.
The problem with this struggle is that it's not a clear-cut, black-and-white sort of conflict.
"I don't think there is a clear-cut solution for the Israeli-Arab conflict in this generation".
But if the fighting is prolonged, if Gaddafi does not quit and run, if his more able sons take up his cause, if the intervention makes things worse not better for ordinary people (as in Iraq), if there is no clear-cut win but ongoing low level conflict and resistance (as in Afghanistan), then Arab opinion will turn against the westerners once more.
At least six randomised controlled trials comparing these two options have been performed; they show conflicting results without clear-cut evidence for superior effectiveness of any of the evaluated interventions and could not address whether treatment effect varied across patient subgroups.
But since then our conflicts have become less clear-cut -- most famously Vietnam, but also to some extent Korea and even Mr. Bush's Desert Storm.
As much as New Yorkers like to think of their neighborhood struggles as studies in good versus evil, few real-life conflicts are so operatically clear-cut.
