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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
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For the sake of separation, this site has always been
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I am thinking of making another trip to Europe during February - April. If you would like to invite me to speak during that trip, please write to me at rms-invitation@gnu.org with "feb-apr" as the subject.
If you want to send me GPG-encrypted mail, do not trust key servers! Some of them have phony keys under my name and email address, made by someone else as a trick. See gpg.html for my real key.
Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphoma. Treatment put it into remission, and he can expect to live many more years. However, he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people to
US citizens: call on US media to take seriously the threates by the saboteur in chief and his henchmen to sabotage the 2026 congressional election.
Everyone: call on news organizations to cover the SAVE Act clearly and directly as a voter suppression measure — examining who would be blocked from voting, how implementation would work, and why these requirements are being advanced now.
How section 702 of the PAT RIOT act allows the US government to collect and search Americans' communications without warrants.
Section 702 will expire soon unless renewed.
Please phone your senators to call on let this section expire, by refusing to extend it.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the deportation thugs' mass surveillance and use of widespread face recognition.
I'm looking for a cartoonist who would like to draw cartoons for me once in a while. If you're interested, please write to rms, which refers to me, at the location gnu period org.
Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger.
* Abandoned coalmines and oil and gas wells are now one of the biggest sources of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, new data shows, and little effort is being made to clean them up.*
I expect that the fossil fuel companies to divest themselves from old mines and wells in ways that will avoid liability for them — just as they sometimes disconnect themselves from responsibility for supporting former workers.
So I suggest making it a felony to implement a restructuring of business or assets in a way that is likely to result predictably in strand assets that carry financial responsibilities with no one capable of shouldering the responsibilities.
A pitifully weak attempt to solve a real problem: asking for a federal law that would permit victims of domestic abuse and stalking to demand that data brokers delete information about them.
Data, once collected, will be abused. The way to prevent that abuse is to facilitate refusing to hand it over in the first place.
Here is my proposal for protecting the specific people known to be in particular danger, and everyone else who could be harmed if individuals, businesses or governments use their personal data against them without a search warrant: require services to be available anonymously.
The selfish interest of those who keep trade secrets is rational but antisocial. In many cases the only harm it does is to hold back the general advance of technology. But sometimes it does really nasty things. For digital hardware and software, it often gives companies a way to subjugate their users. Regarding use of toxic chemicals, it endangers public health.
Why would legislators pass laws to "protect" companies instead of protecting the people they harm? I suspect it is partly because these companies are influential and the legislators seek their support, and partly because the legislators ask them for campaign funds.
But it is also partly the result of the mindset of "trickle down", which assumes that the only way to get more funds for the state is to let increase the size of the economy by letting companies have what they want. Unfortunately, what they want is often to be allowed to harm the public.
Most Democrats in Congress got corrupted this way in the 80s and 90s. (The exceptions are the progressive Democrats.) Now in the UK Starmer is guiding Labour into that sort of corruption.
Clearly our laws should say that any public need to know about the presence of toxic substances in a business facility overrides the desire to keep them secret.
Whether the owners are Chinese is a question that there is no need to ask, because the state should never give money to a business "to support it." Instead it should offer to lend money to the company for suitable repayment, or else buy equity at a fair price.
These two ways of supporting a company avoid giving the owners an opporunity to rip off the state -- which the company's owners are likely to try to do, if they can, regardless of which country they are from.
With a policy like this, it wouldn't matter which country the company's owners are from.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
Henchman Hegseth ordered "no quarter" at war, which means to execute any enemy soldiers that surrender. Doing that would be a war crime: killing prisoners.
In the US: call on the media to call the war with Iran a "war".
*Why would the bully launch a foreign war when he is so domestically weak? Precisely because he is weak.* The article presents the war as a distraction from how weak he is, and from his plans to rig the election in November.
*[Pretend Intelligence]-generated Iran images are widespread. How do we know what to believe?*
I think the advice in that article is wise.
*Israel did not have a realistic plan for regime change when it attacked Iran, multiple Israeli security sources have said, with expectations that airstrikes could lead to a popular uprising having been driven by "wishful thinking" rather than hard intelligence.*
*Dismay as ancient heritage sites across Iran damaged in US-Israel bombing*
The most serious confirmed damage to date has been to Tehran’s Golestan Palace, dating back to the 14th century, and the 17th-century Chehel Sotoon Palace in Isfahan.Why aim a missile that close to a unique ancient treasure? Whatever legitimate target was near either of those palaces, it could not have been so militarily important as to justify the risk of damage to them, nor the risk of alienating Iranians.Judging from videos and public statements, neither historic building was hit by a missile directly but the shock wave from nearby blasts and possibly some missile debris shattered glass and brought down tiles and masonry.*
Robert Reich: *The best way for us to respond to the devastation of this war … is to strengthen the mechanisms that should never have allowed it to occur in the first place.*
Dubai is especially repressive about posting photos or videos of anything related to the war, and even commenting on such postings. Foreigners are shocked when they face many years in prison for that.
Iran's rulers believe that they can hold out despite US attacks, and are unwilling to agree to any concessions.
The article reports an expert as saying that Israel bombed Iran's infrastructure, with that the people now see this war as an attack against their country rather than as an attempt to liberate them from religious tyranny.
I speculated a few days ago that Iranians would be torn between these two perspectives.
Predicting this result, *Iranians living in UK tell Starmer that war will only strengthen Tehran regime.*
Thus, it seems that Netanyahu and the wrecker were carried away by foolish overconfidence and defeated themselves: they turned a potential ally, the Iranian people, against them.
Available evidence shows that the Minab school was attacked by the US, as part of an attack on the Iranian military buildings right nearby.
I think this convincing proof that US fired at a missile at that school, not intentionally, but through assuming erroneously that it was a military structure.
The US military had pictures that should have indicated the building was a school, so it had the responsibility to recognize this and spare the school. I think that makes the attack a culpable error, but that is not as bad as an intentional atrocity.
The gnome has been fired as head of the Department of Hatred and Sadism. *She committed the cardinal sin of making [the bully] look stupid.*
The US and Israel are using in Iran the terrorist tactic of dropping a second bomb just when medics have had time to attend victims of the first bomb.
Arguing that the bully and Netanyahu have misunderstood Iran's governmental system and Iranian people's attitudes.
The writer suggests they are not likely to collapse. If Iran does at last fall apart, it won't be the way they expect.
I have a hunch that any non-Persian group in Iran that allies itself with the US will arouse hostility among Persians.
The wrecker's bombings have made Iran unstable, but he and his henchmen have no clear idea of how this will end, or even how they wish it will. At some point he will say, "It's over, we won."
But it may not be "over" in any meaningful sense. The repressive Revolutionary Guards, the Iranian people, the Gulf states and Israel have conflicting ideas of how they want Iran to end up, and they may fight over this for months or decades.
The US is encouraging Kurdish and Balochi separatists outside Iran's borders to enter Iran and destabilize the border areas.
Perhaps the US commanders see this as a way to make the situation even more tactically complex for Iran's military. But it could also give the Revolutionary Guards a way to rally the support of Iranians whose sense of nationalism takes offense at the possibility of "dismembering" Iran.
To come out of this crises with peace and respect for freedom calls for someone with the understanding of statemanship together with the political strength to win people over to an outcome. I don't see who that could be, or what the outcome might be.
*[The bully and his henchmen have] still not settled on reasons for going to war with Iran.*
The wrecker and Iran have different escalation paths available, and both include making the war broader and harder to halt.
*UK Society of Authors launches logo to identify books written by humans.*
I support this specific campaign, because it is a campaign for honesty and against worthless Pretend Intelligence. It may help people reject PI slop.
However, I continue to reject the selfishness of most of the same authors, when they demand the power to stop human readers from honestly and truthfully sharing copies of human-authored books with other humans.
*MP [Charlotte Nichols] tells Commons she waited 1,088 days for her rape case to reach court. [Nonetheless,] Charlotte Nichols opposes plan to cut jury trials in England and Wales and calls [instead] for creation of special courts to hear rape cases.*
I basically agree with her: prosecuting crime is vital and so is the right to a trial by jury. There is no fundamental conflict between them — all that's needed is to tax the rich enough to pay for these and the other things that even non-rich people deserve.
A county in Florida has replaced some bus routes with an ULU system (Unjust Like Uber) that requires an individual user to make a request via a snoop-phone.
The four factors of the apocalypse:
global heating, global hating,
global eating, global mating.
Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth) to express your rejection of Facebook.
Non-oppressive Commercial E-books
Facebook's face recognition demonstrates a threat to everyone's privacy. I therefore ask people not to put photos of me on Facebook; you can do likewise.
Of course, Facebook is bad for many other reasons as well.
I'd like to make a list of countries that do not require a national identity card, and have no plans to adopt one. If you live in or have confirmed knowledge of such a country, please send email to rms at gnu.org.
Here's my list of countries with no national ID cards and no plans for one: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK. Australia's previous government tried to institute national ID cards, but the Labor government dropped the plan.
India has mostly finished imposing a national biometric ID number in a grand act of oppression.
Switzerland has national ID cards which are optional, but they or some other government ID card are needed for some purposes.
Iceland doesn't have ID cards as such, but they have ID numbers that citizens are forced to use frequently. For example, the national ID number is often required to rent a video or use a gym.
Denmark issues non-photo ID cards with a "person number", and many services use this card to identify people.
Norway will impose a national biometric ID card.
Ireland - national ID card by stealth.
ACLU: the five dangers of national ID cards.
Wikipedia has a list of identity card policies by country.
Stay away from certain countries because of their bad immigration policies.
Avoid flight connections in these airports because of their treatment of passengers.
People often ask how I manage to continue devoting myself to progressive activism (such as the free software movement) for years without burning out. The best way I can answer is by recommending a book, The Lifelong Activist by Hillary Rettig.
I disagree with the book on one theoretical point in the last part of the book: we shouldn't think of political activism as being marketing and sales, because those terms refer to business, and politics is something much more important than mere business. However, this doesn't diminish the value of the book's practical advice about borrowing techniques from marketing and sales.
Disclosure: I am friends with the author.
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
I have reposted some of Rick Falkvinge's articles. As posted on his site, you can't see them in a browser without running some nonfree Javascript code which is apparently non-free. These versions show the same text, without the obstacle.
These are my political articles that are not related to the GNU operating system or free software. For GNU-related articles, see the GNU philosophy directory. You can also download copies of my book, Free Software, Free Society, 3rd edition.
"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist, Letter to an associate, 1849
Here are notes about various issues I care about, usually with links to
more information. The current notes are
here. For all previous
notes, see this page.
See this page for information on efforts to maintain links in the political notes.
Political notes about the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy are being archived on their own page.
Richard Stallman's bio and publicity photos, and other things of interest to the press, have been moved to a separate page.
The Free Software Song, by Richard M. Stallman. You can listen to a performance of the song: Free Software Song performed by Thor Here is a variant of this song called "The Free Firmware Song".
Earth under attack from planet Koch.On doxing, and how to spell it.
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española. 
Here I am wearing my "power tie".
Wine snobs get their comeuppance.
Here I am struggling to open a bottle of water.
My application to an join Marian Henley's ex-boyfriends list.
My funny poetry and song parodies.
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
The text to a filk song, Johnny v. N., by Paul Rubin.
My Puns in English (Little Leaguer, August 2019).
My Puns in Spanish (New pun: Apostasía April 2019)
My Puns in French (New pun: Microsoft à l'école July 2019)
My Puns in Italian (New pun: Quale pesce fa starnutire? New 10/2018)
My Puns in German (New 02/2016)
Linguistic Swifties (Now with: Wintu, Penutian, Cochiti, Taos, and Towa.)
--Saint
IGNUcius-- The Church of Emacs will soon
be officially listed by at least one person as his religion for
census purposes.
There are no godfathers in the Church of Emacs, since there are no gods, but you can be someone's editorfather.
Stallman Does Dallas: "I have to warn you that Texans have been known to have an adverse reaction to my personality…"
The Dalai Lama today announced the official release of Yellow Hat GNU/Linux.
I found a funny song about the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act (officially the Sonny Bono Copyright Act) which extended copyright retroactively by 20 years on works made as early as the 1920s.
If you are a geek and read Spanish, you will love Raulito el Friki, who said "Hello, world!" immediately after he was born. Here's an archive of this now-defunct comic strip.
Sleeping with Stallman at MIT.
ESR's favorite programming language: Objectivist C.
No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)
Made for You (December 2012) (local copy) Esperanto translation
A science fiction story: Jinnetic Engineering (in Portuguese, Farsi, Spanish, Armenian, Russian, French, and Italian).My book of essays about the philosophy of Software Freedom, is available from the GNU Press.
Avec des chapeaux French song parody.
My radio program of Music from Georgia, originally broadcast on WUOG in Athens, Georgia on Oct 13, 2014.
Quantum Theory and Abortion Rights
A proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both speech and writing.
On Hacking: In June 2000, while visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly illustrates the original and true meaning of the word "hacker".
Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor
I would like to thank:
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