The photo comes from wikimedia.org
"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
The photo comes from
wikimedia.org
"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
Political Articles | Political Notes | Talks | Airlines | Anti-Glossary | Archive | Ban face recognition | Books | Comics | Empire of the Megacorporations | Fiction | Glossary | GPG Key | Humor | Humorous Bio | Links | Media/Press/Bio | Non-Political Articles | The Four Factors of the Apocalypse | There Ought to Be a Law | Travel Experiences | Travel Photos | How I Do My Computing | RMS personal FAQ | Sayings | Scientific Links | Stallman on Love | Thanks |
Send comments/questions about the search engine to: rms at gnu dot org
RSS site feed for the most recent
political notes and new material.
This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
the Free Software Foundation or
the GNU Project.
For the sake of separation, this site has always been
hosted elsewhere and managed separately.
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 Congress to investigate the deportation thugs' mass surveillance and use of widespread face recognition.
US citizens: call on state attorneys general to stop Paramount's mega-media monopoly.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
The war in the Middle East is having major repercussions, including strengthening ties between Russia and China. Robert Reich calls on Americans to phone their members of Congress in support of invoking Congress's power to stop the US intervention.
There is no need to worry about how this might affect subsequent events in Iran, because nobody in the US government has a plan anyway. One more random shuffle won't make it any more random than it already is.
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 transfer military spending to human needs.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
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 shut down the US deportation prisons rather than permit them to continue torturing.
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.
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.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the deportation thugs' mass surveillance and use of widespread face recognition.
Iran's government has a planned long-term strategy for winning the war. US officials didn't bother to think about one, assuming that resistance was impossible.
Since the Iranian regime and the US regime are both cruel and repressive, it would be unjust for either of them to control Iran. But there is no evident way for Iran to avoid both of those outcomes.
*Democrats must defund [the fascist's] Imperial war.*
A US mining company has been cutting down endangered native forest in Australia. The Australian government secretly made a deal to allow it to continue this, to placate the wrecker.
*Corruption is no longer envelopes of cash – now it is about who Washington is shielding and who it is sacrificing.*
*The secret Afghan women's book club defying the Taliban to read Orwell [and other important writers].*
The UK requires police to declare whether they are freemasons, because a masonic lodge "is hierarchical, has confidential membership and requires members to support and protect each other."
This policy is necessary because masons in a police department will come across the requirement to support each other against the perpetrators and/or victims of crimes or bad policies.
Australian censorship thugs seized *art posters depicting [the persecutor, the muskrat], Putin and Netanyahu in Nazi uniforms.*
Because Nazi symbols stand for hate, it is now perhaps prohibited to condemn acts and policies embodying hatred by comparing them to Nazis. This would be good for a laugh at the cops' expense, if it weren't seriously dangerous.
*Study finds global increase in hot, dry days ideal for wildfires.*
Over the last 45 years, the frequency of such days has increased from around 20 days per year to around 60 days per year. About 60% of that (36 days per year) are caused by fossil fuel, but some of the rest is caused by other human activities such as deforestation.
As long as we keep driving global heating, we will increase our vulnerability to fire. This is why I reject the idea that today's fires, floods and storms are "natural disasters".
A secondary problem of this increased temperature level is damage to coffee cultivation, in the main coffee-producing countries.
An influential PI company is manipulatively urging officials and voters to worry about being "left behind" if they don't embrace Pretend Intelligence. Therefore they should race to give PI companies tax breaks, waive environmental regulations for them, and teach students to disregard the danger of letting companies get your data and store it in cloudy systems.
A company that does biometric identification (on behalf of LinkedIn) collects 12 kinds of biometrics and consults 6 kinds of government and commercial databases. Then farms out processing of face data to 17 other companies.
Those companies are North America, so in practice they can ignore the EU's "data protection" regulations, and the US government can seize any and all of that data.
This example shows the concrete meaning of dis-services operating in cloudy servers. Don't trust them! I never do.
Of course, I would never ask to be identified on LinkedIn. I do not use LinkedIn at all, because it too is cloudy processing, not to mention the other unjust things it does to its users. But LinkedIn is just one example, and the broad conclusion applies to nearly any business that wants personal data from you.
Metropolitan [British] police using [machine learning] tools supplied by Palantir to flag officer misconduct.
It is legitimate to monitor the conduct of police officers in ways that would not be morally legitimate for workers in general, because police officers have special authority and face the temptation to become thugs. However, giving their personal data to Palantir is not excusable.
Sad to say, use of "bossware" for monitoring of workers with no special authority has become widespread.
The CIA and MI6 saw that Putin was moving to invade Ukraine, months before he did so, but they could not convince either European allies or Ukraine that it would happen. Until it did.
When the UK's privatized water companies were effectively blocked from polluting the seas, they switched to polluting the rivers — massively.
Starmer Labour's ministers say Britain needs "investment stability", but that is a bad outcome when it comes to investment that is a kind of exploitation. That ought to be criminal, not protected.
The UK, like most countries, is unstable against being consumed from the inside out by business. The way to put an end to this instability is to make the owners of water company stock forfeit the entire value of their "investments".
Students in Iran have resumed large protests, condemning the state for killing many thousands of students in January.
No one in the US today has experience in treating severe cases of polio. There haven't been such cases in so long that the doctors who had that experience have got old and died.
As a result, when American children start developing polio thanks to the lunacy of RFK Jr (and his boss, the wrecker), they won't even get the treatment that sick children in the 1950s used to get.
Iran's universities face armed repression and the exclusion of students from campus.
Epstein and his friends were a nexus of sexist influence in academia.
Putin hates Telegram, and is trying to arrange Russian criminal charges against its developer, Pavel Durov.
This leads me to suspect that he is planning a military-style attack against Durov or the people who operate the servers behind Telegram. against Durov or the people who operate the servers behind Telegram.
About the war situation in Ukraine.
Some big US banks have "invested" in planet roasting, and some have not. That means large organizations have a significant choice to make.
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:
Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org.
Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003,
2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013,
2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are
permitted provided this notice is preserved.
Verbatim copying and redistribution of any of the photos in the
photos subdirectory is permitted under the
Creative
Commons Noderivs license version 3.0 or later. You can copy and
redistribute the photo of me playing music to
the butterfly under the
Creative Commons Noderivs
Nocommercial license version 3.0 or later. Any other photos of
me in this (the toplevel) directory may be copied and redistributed under
the
Creative Commons Noderivs license version 3.0
