"The stability–instability paradox is an international relations theory regarding the effect of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction.
It states that when two countries each have nuclear weapons, the probability of a direct war between them greatly decreases, but the probability of
minor or indirect conflicts between them increases.
This occurs because rational actors want to avoid nuclear wars, and thus they
neither start major conflicts nor allow minor conflicts
to escalate into major conflicts—
thus making it safe to engage in minor conflicts.
For instance, during the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union never engaged each other in warfare, but fought proxy wars in
Korea, Vietnam, Angola, the Middle East, Nicaragua and Afghanistan and spent substantial amounts of money and manpower on gaining relative influence over the third world."
"This effect can be seen in the India–Pakistan relationship and to some degree in Russia–NATO relations."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability%E2%80%93instability_paradox
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"Records obtained by the Guardian show that lobbyists working for major North American oil and gas companies were key architects of anti-protest laws that increase penalties and could lead to non-violent environmental and climate activists being imprisoned up to 10 years."
"Emails between fossil fuel lobbyists and lawmakers in Utah, West Virginia, Idaho and Ohio suggest a nationwide strategy to
deter people frustrated by government failure to tackle the climate crisis
from peacefully disrupting the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure
by enacting tough laws with lengthy jail sentences.
“Draft bill attached,” wrote a lobbyist representing two influential fossil fuel trade groups to the lead counsel for the West Virginia state energy committee in January 2020.
The law, which carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence, was later used
to charge at least eight
peaceful climate protesters including six senior citizens."
Civil disobedience is a form of political protest that involves breaking the law in a planned, symbolic way – which activists and rights experts say is part of the bedrock of a democratic society and in the tradition of civil rights movements.
Last year was the hottest on record, and wildfires, baking temperatures, deadly floods and rising sea levels struck communities across North America – and the rest of the world.
Under the Biden administration, the US has handed out more than 1,450 new oil and gas licences,
accounting for half of the total globally, and 20% more licences than those issued by Donald Trump, who has promised to “drill, baby, drill”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/26/anti-protest-laws-fossil-fuel-lobby
"Prosecuting non-violent climate protesters is “just legalised violence”,
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"He rejected the myth of progress long before most writers who self-identify as conservative did so.
Famously, he penned an essay in 1988 titled “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” in which he detailed his resolute—most called it stubborn and fundamentalist—refusal to adapt his work to the new technology. “Like almost everybody else,
I am hooked to the energy corporations,
which I do not admire,” he wrote.
“I hope to become less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible.
As a farmer, I do almost all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or pen and a piece of paper.”
Stegner captured what sets Berry apart:
"You never had a drinking problem or a drug problem; you have been as apparently immune to the Angst of your times as you have been indifferent to contemporary hedonism and the lust for kicks.
By every stereotypical rule of the twentieth century you should be dull, and I suppose there are some people, especially people who have not read you, who think you are. By upbringing and by choice you are a countryman, and therefore a sort of anachronism.
The lives you write about are not lives that challenge or defy the universe, or despair of it, but lives that accept it and make the best of it and are in sober ways fulfilled.
We have grown used to the image of the artist as a person more notable for his sensibility than his balance. We might go to that artist for the flash of insight, often achieved at terrible cost to himself, but not for sober wisdom. I don’t disparage these Dionysian writers; they have lighted dark corners for all of us, and will continue to. But I find your example comforting because it restores a lost balance—one doesn’t have to be crazy, or alcoholic, or suicidal, or manic, to be a legitimate spokesman to the world, and there is more to literature, as there clearly is to life, than aberration and sadomasochism. Your books
seem conservative. They are actually profoundly revolutionary,
and I have watched them gain you an increasingly devoted following over the years. Readers respond to them as lost dogs in hope of rescue turn toward some friendly stranger. The thought in your essays is so clear and unrattled that it reassures us.
Your stories and poems are good like bread.
I say that your books are revolutionary.
They are. They fly in the face of accepted opinion and approved fashion. They reassert values so commonly forgotten or repudiated that, reasserted, they have the force of novelty."
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/wendell-berry-at-90/
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Wendell Erdman Berry
(born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer.
Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in ....Activism
Berry delivered "A Statement Against the War in Vietnam" during the Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft on February 10, 1968, at the University of Kentucky in Lexington:
We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships,
or to 'win the hearts and minds of the people'
by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps;
we seek to uphold the 'truth' of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. . . .
I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war."
On June 3, 1979, Berry engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience
against the construction of a nuclear power plant at Marble Hill, Indiana.
He describes "this nearly eventless event" and expands upon his reasons for it in the essay "The Reactor and the Garden."
On February 9, 2003, Berry's essay titled "A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States" was published as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. Berry opened the essay
—a critique of the George W. Bush administration's post-9/11 international strategy—by asserting that "The new National Security Strategy published by the White House in September 2002, if carried out, would amount to
a radical revision of the political character of our nation"
Also in January 2009, Berry released a statement against the death penalty, which began,
"As I am made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life before birth, I am also made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life after birth."
And in November 2009, Berry and 38 other writers from Kentucky wrote to Gov. Steve Beshear and Attorney General Jack Conway asking them to impose a
moratorium on the death penalty in that state.
On March 2, 2009, Berry joined over 2,000 others in non-violently blocking the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C. No one was arrested.
On May 22, 2009, Berry, at a listening session in Louisville, spoke against the National Animal Identification System (NAIS).[25] He said,
"If you impose this program on the small farmers, who are already overburdened, you're going to have to send the police for me. I'm 75 years old.
I've about completed my responsibilities to my family.
I'll lose very little in going to jail in opposition to your program – and I'll have to do it.
Because I will be, in every way that I can conceive of, a non-cooperator."
On December 20, 2009, due to the University of Kentucky's close association with coal interests in the state, Berry removed his papers from the university.
On September 28, 2010, Berry participated in a rally in Louisville during an EPA hearing on how to manage coal ash. Berry said, "The EPA knows that coal ash is poison."
"Berry, with 14 other protesters, spent the weekend of February 12, 2011, locked in the Kentucky governor's office to demand an end to mountaintop removal coal mining.
He was part of the environmental group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth that began their sit-in on Friday and left at midday Monday to join about 1,000 others in a mass outdoor rally."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry
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