STRATEGIC VAGUENESS
Mme Commelynck says “Your ‘sort of’ is annoying…Sort of says ‘I am ashamed by clarity and
precision’”
Ashamed, as if it would be uncool to nail down that result B has cause A and no messing.
This product is environmentally friendly
Donald Pearlman lawyer representative of the Global Climate Action Coalition -the good guys are
always in coalitions- made up of oil and coal corporations -has been a regular on the Climate Change
circuit for years. His work? To ensure the climate protection negotiations end in the nevernever land of
vague declarations.
“The World Trade Organisation is vague at points where vagueness benefits the developed countries,
and precise at points where precision works against developing countries. Vagueness allows the developed
countries to raise the level of threat to developing countries - threats to bring a case before the Dispute
Settlement Mechanism (a committee of unaccountable ‘experts’). and threats to take other punitive actions
justified on the claim that the developing country is breaking the (vaguely defined) rules of the WTO … (it)
should be pressed to reduce the vagueness of the capstone agreements ; to adopt clearer operating rules
and procedures; to publish a record of voting and discussions; to require the chairs of negotiating
committees to explain why they include some proposals and reject others from the text of the draft
declaration rather than at present being able occultly to make a “magic text”.
WHAT HO
THE MAGIC TEXT
“Stunned sources close to financial sources will reveal what police sources will
refuse to comment, cabinet sources will shadow box with ghost writers of sources
close to the treasury and spokespersons of secret city sources will persistently
deny persistent rumours.”
Or are played with, the hint of threat from behind the curtain of Strategic Defense
Initiatives, how the leaked rumour that Israel might attack in Iran keeps Iranians in a state of anxiety,
unable to concentrate on their own hopes and desires.. “In 2007 the Arab Times of Kuwait reports
‘from a reliable source’ predicting USA might strike Iran launched from the sea while Patriot missiles
would guard Arab countries in the Gulf. Why would the Kuwaitis know? The question “remained on
the borderline of un/certainty , where the state of war is habitually intensified. 2021, now, and
they’re still at, reliable sources and the same threat as if exempt from stale repetition
But then
“...whenever we dilute the clarity of restraints on force we almost Certainly lend encouragement to
geopolitically shaped decisions expressed through the Selective application of Legitimacy Criteria and an
acceptance of the implication of double standards.”
Elsewhere, the Commander tells the Inspector with a wink what the inspector then says to the sergeant
with a wink, “Appropriate response Sarge, Appropriate” This is what we call an orange light and the sort of
outcome in this kind of case? Triple units of riot squad out on the street when the visibility of red flags has
annoyed someone in a high window. When it comes to orange there are a thousand shades all recognisable
to those with their ears to the ground and who will go far.
The Radical party president of Argentina in 1921 Hipolite Yrigoyen did not spell out on how the Butcher of
Patagonia Lieut-Colonel Varela was to proceed in the smashing of an uprising of the ultra-exploited peons
on the estancias of the region.. No distinct orders were given, there was a job to be done. 1500 of the
workers were killed without trial . In the reports by the military in which they cover-up the executions of
unarmed prisoners, they are suitably vague so that when it comes to the ‘well-armed’ rebels we read only
from Varela and his deputy Viñas Ibarra of ‘various revolvers’. And as for the executions, as is the template
then and now: they were killed while resisting arrest.
In Gothenberg in 2001when the alter-globalization movement picketed an EU Summit meeting with joy a
young man was shot and critically injured with live bullets Despite the initial shocked disbelief of one or two
mainstream media opinionists, it was normalized from the next day onwards. Regrettably these things
happen, was the message. It gave an orange-to-green light to police brutality when the movement came
together in Genoa six weeks later at a G8 Summit. One young man Carlo Giulliani was shot dead. For British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, it was "tragicbut". The 'but' normalized brutal repression one step further, was
one of many orange-to-green lights shone out two days later for Sunday morning's police attack on the
Independent Media Centre where young people 'shook with fear', and everyone else beaten shitless,
dragged to armoured hospitals and then hospitalized jails with their injuries, or taken by the police into '”a
room covered with pictures of Mussolini and pornography, and alternately slapped around and then stroked
with affection."
“Inhuman treatment is … treatment causing severe suffering. Torture is an aggravated form of inhuman
treatment and degrading conduct is conduct which grossly humiliates” declares Lord Justice McGonigal so
as the electrodes are applied to the tender spots you will not be sure what it is you are experiencing when
you scream.
In the first Gulf War led by the USA government of George H.W. Bush against Iraq under President Saddam
in 1991when his forces invade Kuwait with a light somewhere between green and orange with or without,
one way or another, any ignition from the US ambassador April Glaspie. They were quickly forced to remove
themselves from the same Kuwait “swiftly and absolutely at once and fucking immediately” by the forces of
the same USA. The retreating conscript soldiers then became a ‘duck shoot’ for US airborne gunships and
cluster bombs. On March 1st 1991 the Sunday Telegraph reported that the Iraqi death were so high that
nobody wanted to put a figure on them. By March 2nd the Pentagon was talking of 200,000 dead but no
official figures were to be issued and no formal study to be made to produce them. Instead it was said that
the ‘allies’ (ie the USA with the addition of the UK and other odds and sods of military) intended to keep the
statistics as vague as possible because they were so horrific. Some three weeks later the USA had either
guaranteed the safety of Kurds against Iraqi air attacks or perhaps it hadn’t. On the 25th as the attacks
started by Iraqi forces against Kurdish territory and people the Daily Telegraph quoted Presidential Press
Secretary Fitzwater saying on this issue. “There’s an element of murkiness we want to preserve.”
“Missing in Action” 1916 Private John Barker and hundreds of thousands of others, Missing in Action: sort of
got lost.
In the immediate aftermath of the second Gulf War the UK New Labour government of Tony Blair and the
Republican Administration of George W.Bush which took the lead in invading Iraq both rejected estimates
of death numbers in Iraq from the Lancet, though they provided no alternatives. Mr Blair, mimicking those
‘conspiracy theorists who assert that you cannot PROVE that the world is not under the thumb of elitists
who are really giant lizards, continues to refuse to accept that there were no ‘weapons of mass destruction’
stored in Iraq, whose supposed existence was the justification for the invasion of the country.
Scott Ritter, a weapons inspector in Iraq in 2002-3 was relentlessly smeared before the Iraq invasion for
detailing how there were no “Weapons of Mass Destruction” , after the destruction of liquid biological
weapons by the UN Inspectors in 1995. He relates how an American on the team, Dick Spertzel, would not
do sampling there because he did not want to give the Iraqi state the benefit of a negative reading.
Our ingredients are non-toxic and sustainable
“Two Federal agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease
Registry (ATDSR), bear primary responsibility for safeguarding the nation’s environmental health. They are
responsible for studying communities exposed to toxic pollution and wastes and making recommendations
for public protection. Instead of ensuring a margin of safety and recommending measures to end public
exposure to toxics, both of these agencies have routinely funded and conducted studies of effects of toxic
pollution on public health which are INCONCLUSIVE BY DESIGN. These intentionally inconclusive studies
have been used by polluters and govt officials into believing further measures to prevent toxic exposure are
unnecessary” (1992 report by Environmental Health Network)
“In judicial politics literature scholars find that court justices increase strategic vagueness and appease
conflicting views among judges. But where a variety of ideological biases in a community researchers find
that an increase in partisan conflict is associated with an increase (rather than a reduction) in clarity.
Arguably the public has a deep interest in delegating authority to institutions that hold its members to
account including a higher standard of clarity. This is especially true where members are appointed rather
than elected.”
We pride ourselves on our biodegradability
In the glow and the glare of the orange light all cats look alike some statistics exist whose glow can be
turned light and readable so at least there is the possibility of the powerless being able to say loud and
clear, they were right and thereby establish a temporary half-way ground at which you could at least look
the bastards in the eye.
Child poverty, here’s the figures: 16,500 children die every day from malnutrition while there is ‘a war in
poverty’.
In an epic novel of manipulation by the world of power, the one character who holds out against it is a
statistician, Roger Mexico. He knows how statistics themselves may be manipulated and still stands by them
against those would interpret with bad faith and stands by what they say even at the cost of his girl Jessica
who until then, when it mattered, you never would have believed had a bourgeois heart when it came to
the crunch.
And what the stats say is that in the world we know and those we know only by repute the rich have got
much, much richer and the poor have got poorer, proper wage earners and the survivors. Based on data in
Piketty (2014) as well as supplied by Credit Suisse and Forbes – it is pointed out that about 46 per cent of
the world’s measurable wealth (some 110 trillion US$) is in the possession of one per cent of the world’s
population. This is 65 times as much as the lower half of the world’s population has to share with about 0.71
per cent of the global wealth. The super rich one per cent in 24 of 26 countries measured between 1980 and
2012 increased their share in the wealth further, while 70 per cent of the global population lives in
countries, in which inequalities further increased during the last 30 years Statistics now show this trend to
have been accelerated by the COVID pandemic.
These days the matter of how come family X has had these thousand acres and the manor house with its
soft stone showing a pink tinge in the sunset, got possession of them in the first place/ and has had them
for generations is Lost in The Mists of Time. Once upon a time it was possible to make a remark on the
subject, ask a question like was it the spoils of some violence exerted, not now. Why dig it up, what good
does it do anyone and besides the record is ambiguous and out of the mists of time, a narrative is made:
Lord Henry you see was married to Lady C, and she, his lady wife, was from a family of the greatest renown
and a dowry brought and surely you’re not going to ask about the origins of Lady C. and her family, what
are you, a fanatic? And besides, we’re modern now, and today’s Lord Henry has worked incredibly hard for
incredibly long hours in order for his family and in addition to which he is a genius and fully deserving of his
cast-iron intellectual property rights.
Inequality is life-squashing within and between countries and statistics have their limits, remaining as they
are mostly at the whim of those who pay for them. The shift to GDP(Gross Domestic Product) from GNP
(Gross National Product) has been quite a piece of dismal conjuring: GDP means that “the income generated
by foreign companies is ‘formally’ attributed to the country where it is generated even though the profits
may well not stay there.” In fact they are unlikely to stay depending on the state of play when it comes to
paying as little tax as possible “This statistical abstraction -GDP - hides a basic fact: the nations of the North
are walking off with the South’s resources and calling it a gain for the South.” At the end of the Cold War
GDP became ‘the only game in town’.
But still that’s not enough and when capitalism can no longer promise jam tomorrow, not even that,
better to have no numbers but instead there is Well-Being. In April 2012 UN chief Ban-ki Moon participates
in a conference called “Happiness and Well Being: Defining a new Economic paradigm.”
SO WHAT’S THAT THEN?
“His experience with her had taught Birt that she took refuge in a vast quagmire of vagueness when at all
pressed”
In the ‘mists of time’ everyone can have their own opinion and all squirrels look alike, red or grey. Here
anything could happen, could have happened however vile, and been “a restoration of order.”
….”vagueness can also be a ‘resource’, that is, a strategy used by actors in adverse circumstances. A
systematic analysis of the texts and illustrations of 36 urban transport plans shows that vagueness is an
essential ingredient. It is used mainly as a way to hedge against unwanted public commitments in the
context of major uncertainties and tension between actors”
The Sharm El-Sheikh Declaration Investing in Biodiversity for People and Planet
(15 November 2018) acknowledges, promotes, notes, facilitates, recognizes. mainstreams, emphasises
and urges
A United Nations sub-committee calls for human rights norms to be implemented and observed by trans-
national corporations. NORMS, how spongey can you get. In dismissing the call for norms, Britain, Australia
and the USA call it A Solution without A Problem.
“According to one logic vagueness is a by-product of accommodating conflicting views or
what we call strategic vagueness. On the other hand a more diverse committee might lead
members to ask for greater clarification, holding one another to account for details and
meaning. Personal gains from being vague may include shirking responsibility.”
2020 March Our aim is to reduce the peak not suppress it completely. “Avoid all unnecessary social contact “
People do tire of these sorts of social distancing measures if we start them too early. There is the risk that
people will get understandably fatigued….Social distancing distance? Unknown. April Stay alert. Stay at
Home. You may exercise twice a day and interact with others while maintaining a social space. Social space
distances? Unknown. Lord Skidelsky: “herd immunity a goal silently under a cloud of obfuscation.”
Government “Staying safe outside your home.”. Principles we should all adopt …wherever possible. Wear a
mask but not where impractical. No longer “an appropriate mechanism as we go forward. May 11 th Daily
Mail “The roadmap has only a few vague directions”. Government Those who cannot work at home should
be actively encouraged to return to their jobs. Encouraged by whom? Unknown. We should basically just go
about our daily lives. September : The rule of six excluding work or educational settings. Whilst the vast
majority have complied with the rules there have been too many breaks, too many opportunities for our
invisible enemy to slip through undetected. This approach robust but proportionate.
2021. April Doctors and scientsists “Boris Johnson’s promise of a public inquiry into the handling the
pandemic is welcome, but tardy and vague. May Health minister has a ‘high degree of confidence’ that
vaccines will work against the Indian variety but urges caution. Health minster stressed that the govern
ment was moving towards a “mantra” of personal responsibility. Government advisor. “My advice is that just
because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should, and if you’re going to hug, hug
cautiously.” We’d rather you didn’t fly to Greece this summer, but we won’t stop you – so enjoy that week
sunbathing on the island of Petridish! Your area is in lockdown, except we wouldn’t dream of telling you.
You can hug, but only if absolutely necessary.
Meanwhile out in the world of trying to make a living in hard times and you’re starting out, or just as
likely you’re still starting out and you’ve brushed up with whatever you’ve got, the one shirt you bought in a
Vintage shop, a silk scarf one lovely person once gave you as a present, and you make your pitch. If the
important person is English, and a bastard, they’ll say, Interesting. Or if they’re less of a bastard, Let me
Think On It, or let me Sleep on it. Or, I could have a word with a colleague or a pal, they might think it’s got
something, might know where to place it. We’ll see where we get to. And there’s no comebacks because
Hey, I never promised anything or yes, I kind of remember something, what was it an opera said when it was
nothing, but nothing of the kind.
Other places where there are no Vintage shops this kind of crap has misery-perpetuating consequences.
“Speaking metaphorically the inclusion of ambiguous expressions in peace agreements is
comparable to re-opening a repository of arms to the parties to re-arm themselves with a kind
of intellectual weaponry [,,,] Ambiguities then, in all probability, prompt the parties to set in
motion a new spiral of physical violence or at least put between them a barrier to keep their
positions firmly apart. Ambiguities are a kind of Machiavellian manipulative device that brings
but temporary satisfaction to the parties as it deceptively but not really meets their demands.”
“UN diplomatic texts may use vague words quite extensively. Such terms, whose meaning is
very flexible, variable and strictly dependent on context and interpretation, The use of vague
terms could be connected to the genre of diplomatic texts, as resolutions should be applicable
to every international contingency. However, excessive vagueness could also lead to biased or
even strategically-motivated interpretations of resolutions, undermining their legal impact and
triggering conflicts instead of diplomatic solutions.” An example is UN SC Res242 after the
1967 war. One clause asks for Israeli armed forces to leave “Territories occupied in recent
conflict”. Without a ‘the’ (which the French translation had) . The sponsor of the Resolution,
Lord Cardon (UK) had no intention of inserting the definite article. By implication Israel did
not have to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders giving room for Israel to interpret the Resolution
to its own advantage.
Members of armed groups in the Central African Republic so often feel shorted by programmes that had
seemed to offer a promise of even greater largesse: “deliberately or not the language of promises of
transformation are often used even when the resources, implementation and forms of control employed are
those of expedience... The problem is when vague, platitudinal or contradictory understandings of
reintegration translate into ad hoc and disengaged planning processes and programs, lacking a clear
strategy and generating overblown expectations.“ The armed groups then regroup on order to make a
living.
Elsewhere complaints may carry less menace: But I had thought, I thought it had been clearly understood
that I was to be deputy headmaster. Only to find that seniority has lost weight and the junior Department
head who is said to have panache, flair, charisma even, has got the job. But these days there’s no guarantee.
Where guns are easily available the manager shorn in a wave of cost-cutting may turn nasty, secretaries in
the office who may have spurned his advances, not shown due deference as if they had been in on the
knowledge that he was for the chop. Its intolerable, justice is his right. Bang bangbangbangbangbang until
them spurting blood on the floor understand that they had underestimated him.
Of course we’re tougher now, in the headmaster’s study, in front of the committee your phone is
recording everything. But not enough, even a camera, when it’s all a matter of interpretation, words taken
out of context, the recording’s been manipulated. Not infallible, but better a lawyer writing the contract for
you, one stipulation after another, penalty clauses to be applied. Except even then…
“ Vagueness on the other hand, is prevalent in legislation and commercial contracts.1Clauses such as “best
efforts” or “commercial reasonableness” are common in commercial contracting from franchising to
mergers and acquisitions…Contrary to what legal scholars and practitioners assert based on the principle of
legal certainty, contract parties are not better off in all cases with writing as specific as possible clauses.
Legal scholars and practitioners seem to confuse the distinction between using the law as a guide and using
the law to dictate one outcome in every possible case.”
OK, we’re all grown up sophisticated adults here, the “one outcome”, what kind of reductionist shit is
that when however sophisticated the clauses and the rulings they cannot cover all eventualities, all possible
occurrences.
So what’s wrong with that? What, we’re children demanding certainty when there can be none?! Grow
Up!
Only the courts even in this day and age could drag on and the greater the degree of vagueness and the
certainty of information asymmetry the longer it will drag on which is time and money don’t have.
“Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated
that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that
no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all
the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married
into it; innumerable old people have died out of it… there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth
perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but
Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.”
And yet and yet, the law and its courts should be a place where an answer will be found. To the question
of “Where were you on the night of June the third?” Oh yes, certainty no problem. Nowadays pinned down
by the cross reference of the mobile phone and the travel card, evidence irrefutable. You were that man on
June the third at the skunk warehouse beyond reasonable doubt, a pinpointed crossroads of time and place
in the chip. That’s when it’s crime. But there’s crime and crime and coirtdnot places to look for a guarantee
as in inquiries into the Iran-Contra conspiracy…
“…sixty three days of testimony arresting not only for its reliance on hydraulic imagery (there were
conduits, there was the pipeline, there was of course the pipeline) but for its collateral glimpses of life on
the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine. There was for example the airline that operated out of St Lucia but
had its headquarters in Frankfurt…and either was or was not (conflicting testimony on this) ninety nine
percent owned by a former Air West flight attendant who either did or did not live on St Lucia. There was for
example the team of unidentified men…who either did or did not (more conflicting testimony) arrive on the
northern Coast Rican border to burn the bodies of the crew of the unmarked DC-3 that at the time it
crashed appeared to be registered to the airline that was or was not ninety-nine percent owned by the
former Sky West flight attendant who did or did not live on St Lucia.”
As things are in the world “there is no room for verification.”
‘Greenwashing’: lofty pledges that can’t be measured and claims that can’t be verified. Net-zero
emissions, promises thereof in the distant future won’t do. It’s all in the detail but “the global public needs
benchmarks as simple as is possible without waiting to check some final result at mid century and then be
disappointed.”
In his courageous decision not to support a second UN resolution to ‘justify’ the invasion of Iraq in
2003President Lamine Sidime of Guinea, with a temporary seat on the Security Council, demanded
something definable and measurable about what constituted Iraqi compliance. This was intolerable to the
US-UK axis but Sidime stood his ground while knowing the diplomatic and financial punishment that would
follow.
“As for you, fellow independent thinker of the Western bloc, if you have anything sensible to say,
don’t wait. Shout it out loud right this minute.”
With help from David Mitchell, Black Swan Green; Yda Schreuder, Corporate Greenhouse; Christine
Brooke-Rose, Amalgammemnon; Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think?; Richard Falk, Power
Shift: The New Global Order; Osvaldo Bayer, The Patagonia Massacre 1920; Starhawk, ‘Report on
Genoa’; Environmental Health Network, 1992 report; ‘Nicholas Rae, ‘Divided Communities and
Strategic Vagueness’; Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow; Henry Green, Caught; Thomas Buhler,
‘When Vagueness is a Strategic Resource for Planning Actors’; Drazen Pehar, ‘Use of Ambiguities in
Peace Agreements’; Giusy Scotto di Carlo, ‘The Language of the UN: Vagueness in Security Council
Resolutions Relating to the Second Gulf War’; Louisa Lombard, State of Rebellion: Violence and
Intervention in the Central African Republic; George Triantis, ‘Strategic Vagueness in Contract Design’;
Charles Dickens, Bleak House; Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted; Grace Paley, Faith in the
Afternoon in Collected Stories.
