Richard Stallman's Personal Site
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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.
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.
Supporters of Julian Assange will gather again at the entrance to Park
Street Station on the Boston Common on *Monday, November 14, 2022,
from 11 to 12:30*
In the Boston area: Vote to re-elect Ayanna Pressley for Congress.
Canadians: I suggest you seek election advice at a local chapter of a
group that pushes to curb global heating and has the courage to say,
"Canada should stop exporting fossil fuel." It will at least use the
right goals to suggest who to vote for in your area.
Join a Friday climate strike.
This page is made by scraping Fridays for Future so you can get the
information without running any Javascript code. I would be very glad
if they made the information on their own site accessible
from the Free World; then we could simply refer people to their site
and do without the scraping etc.
I am limiting the number of new political notes per day so as not
to overload the volunteers who install new notes.
If you'd like to help, please write to rms at gnu period org.
Is your bank pressuring you to use biometric ID?
If so, please write to rms at gnu dot org.
It could be useful if you document what is happening.
Link Policy
The largest part of the site is the
political notes, and they
are typically updated every day.
- send me examples of how proprietary programs have been
designed to be addictive.
- I'm looking for people to check a few sites for me regularly
and show me any new articles that I would like to see or link to.
If you would like to help me
in this way, please write to rms at gnu dot o r g.
- send me examples of how proprietary programs have been
designed to cause programmed obsolescence of products.
- write
site-specific Firefox extensions
or local scripts to operate specific web sites.
- help
maintain and operate savannah.gnu.org.
- experiment to find good ways to attach
fruits to a Grav-mass tree.
- help web sites put free licenses
on their Javascript code.
Civil Liberties Minute:
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
graphic by Susan Henson
Americans, you may wish to copy this icon to your own page, as a
way of showing what patriotism means to you.
-
US citizens: call on drug stores to require people to wear masks.
-
US citizens: phone President Biden and urge him to issue an executive
order requiring federal contractors to disclose all of their political
spending.
The White House comments lines are
+1-202-456-1111
and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
-
US citizens: call on your state legislature to implement fair
districting.
-
US citizens: call on Congress to ban assault weapons and
high-capacity magazines.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you call, please spread the word!
-
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, don't starve critical
investments in healthcare, children and transit. Pass government
funding before the end of the year.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
-
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice not to let the wrecker
use his new presidential campaign to get off the hook for criminal
charges.
-
US citizens: call on Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to remove all
medical debt from credit reports.
-
US citizens: call on state officials to disqualify the wrecker from
running for president or other offices, as the Constitution calls for.
-
US citizens: call on Biden to advocate repeal of the ‘02 AUMF.
The White House comments lines are
+1-202-456-1111
and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
-
US citizens: call on the FTC to require platforms to make their direct messages
end-to-end encrypted.
This is a half-measure. Truly secure encrytion has to be done by a
free client program that the user installs independently of the
platform. Therefore it can't be implemented by a communication
platform.
If the encryption is done by the platform -- either in its server, or
in its nonfree client program, or in code sent to the user's browser
(for instance, in Javascript) -- then the platform has control over
the encryption, and can backdoor it at will.
-
US citizens: call on Congress to raise the debt ceiling now
so Republicans can't use it as a lever for sabotage later.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
-
US citizens: phone your representative and senators
and call on them not to pass any tax cuts for business.
Handouts should be directed to non-rich Americans!
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
+1-202-224-3121,
+1-888-818-6641 and
+1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
-
Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger.
Recording of Guantanamero
Listen to the
recording
of
Guantanamero,
a protest song written in Spanish. The recording is in
Ogg Vorbis format. To install an Ogg Vorbis player,
see
the FSF's Ogg Players page.
-
There should be a law requiring online services, if they close a
user's account, to permit the user to continue to download whatever
information perse had left in the account.
To be sure, it is foolish to rely on an online service to hold any
data for you; you should store it locally, and use online services
only as backups (encrypted). Preferably more than one online service
in parallel, for redundancy. But we should not allow online services
to cite this as an excuse for arbitrarily causing people great
avoidable harm.
-
It should be a crime to knowingly approach a person while maskless inside
a building or vehicle.
-
*The pandemic has taken surveillance of workers to the next level.*
The extreme of this is represented by the Amazon warehouse,
where a worker's every move is controlled by the computer system.
This is one of many reasons to refuse to buy from Amazon.
Unfortunately, surveillance of workers is not limited to Amazon. I
think states should pass laws to limit surveillance of workers. It
should cover independent contractors as well as employees.
The law should completely forbid demanding that workers run any
specific software on their own computers (keep in mind that portable
phones are computers); the employer who wants that must furnish
the computer at no charge.
-
A hundred years ago, having your face photo circulated as a suspect
could direct persecution at you — for instance, making it impossible to get a job.
Now it can cause you to be arrested randomly for walking down the street.
If stores use face recognition inside the store, they should not be
allowed to use photos for matching against people in the store
except for photos they have taken in that store, and photos
of people convicted of theft and fraud.
More items where there
ought to be a law.
Quotes
Here are some
quotations that I particularly like.
(
RSS Feed)
-
Frontier Airlines has eliminated telephone customer support. The only
way to communicate with the airline is through its web site.
I once flew on a Frontier flight, and noted that the staff seemed to
have a right ear and a left ear, but no front ear. That cast its name
in question. Now it should be called "No-ear Airlines."
I tried looking around that web site. For the most part, the
information seemed to be present and navigation worked. But I think
that most inquiries and actions depend on nonfree Javascript code,
which excludes me from doing them.
They invite people to use a chat system to get in contact with an
agent. That might be an acceptable solution, except that that chat
system is part of the web site and it seems to depend on Javascript
too.
One thing I noticed on the site is that the company is pressuring
people to use its cr…app rather than its web site.
Surveillance by the web site is limited; surveillance by a
cr…app is much more complete.
-
Google promised not to save location data about "sensitive" places
such as abortion clinics, which some states threaten to sue or
prosecute people for going near. It did not make enough change to
eliminate the danger.
I am not surprised, because surveillance-based companies will always tend
to collect too much data and hold on to too much data.
However, data tends to get duplicated and get stored in various
places. The root of the search problem is (1) collecting location
data, (2) collecting personal identifying data, and (3) identifying
return visitors (with cookies).
An acceptable web service must not find out any of those facts about
you unless you request to send them. And it must do its job even if
you choose _not_ to send them.
See surveillance verses democracy.
-
US citizens: call on drug stores to require people to wear masks.
-
41 Republicans plus Manchin used a filibuster to kill the proposed
railroad workers' contract that gave them sick leave.
Then the Senate
approved the contract lacking sick leave, the version that Biden had
asked for.
-
*Three UK Universities Ban Fossil Fuel Industry Recruiters From
Campus.*
-
The UK's immigation department sent 20 asylum seekers letters inviting
them to come to meetings to discuss their cases. When they arrived,
which in some cases was a big expense for them, they were told that
the staff did no plans for meetings with them that day.
Either these letters were a prank, or the UK government has become so
incompetent and confused that it can't carry out the simplest plan.
After seeing how incompetent Tories are,
I think the latter is more plausible.
-
Senator Merkely has proposed a bill to put a heavy tax on single
family homes when they are owned by big companies that own hundreds of
them.
-
The history, since 1940, of the series of US tax cuts for the rich
that impoverished the country.
Want to really make America great again? Tax the rich!
-
*The [corrupter's] supporters can no longer avoid testifying before
grand juries in Washington DC and Georgia.*
-
*Big polluters given almost €100bn[-worth] in carbon [emissions]
permits [gratis] by EU.*
That was over a period of 9 years.
-
The FBI and DHS focus disproportionately on foreign terrorists as
possible threats, and insufficienly on (right-wing) domestic terrorists
such as white supreacists and Nazis.
-
The Tyre Extinguishers have deflated the tires of 900 SUVs around the world
as a protest against these dangerous gas guzzlers.
-
A Just Stop Oil protester was sentenced to 6 months in prison for
blocking a highway for a while.
The court called this "causing a public nuisance," and I'm sure it
did. As these protesters say, it's nothing compared to the unending
public nuisance conditions that increased use of fossil fuels will
cause.
-
*Ukraine needs tanks, and the west should supply them. They could
finish off Putin and Russia.*
The proposal includes modern aircraft and longer-range missiles.
Careful strategic thought is required about whether to donate the latter.
-
Herschel Walker, MAGA maggot candidate for the Senate in Georgia,
filed for a tax break on a "primary residence" in Texas where he
really lives. This may have been illegal.
-
Pheromone-assisted INSECT traps CAN photograph and identify pests
via image recognition.
This technique can potentially save greatly on the use of pesticides.
Unfortunately, under today's general practices, it will also be a trap
for farmers. It will be run by nonfree software, so it will snoop
on the farm and put the farm at a disadvantage. And the farmers won't
be able to repair it.
-
The US system of producing medicines suffers from too much commercial
centralization (few producers) without much central planning.
Also a tendency to optimize for efficiency rather than reliability.
The result is susceptibility to shortages.
-
Anti-vax fanatics in New Zealand would rather let their baby die
than let it get a transfusion of "vaccinated blood" for surgery.
They and others have convinced each other that there is some danger in
this.
-
George Monbiot: Farming and its subsidies are an increasing danger
to nature and the climate.
There is no mystery to why governments subsidizes farming. It is not just
that rich people want to profit from them; everyone wants the results.
But we need to cut down this unsustainable practice.
Fewer babies will certainly help!
-
A fracking company accepted criminal liability for poisoning the water
of Dimock, Pennsylvania and will pay to replace the wells with new
water systems and to deliver clean water for the next 75 years.
Here is a timeline of how the company caused the damage, of
enforcement efforts, and how the company resisted them.
This is justice in a narrow sense, but it won't clean up the water of
that region. It won't undo the lasting diminiution of water supplies
in Pennsylvania. There may not be any feasible way to do that.
There must be many other regions of the US which have already suffered
similar damage.
We must not allow it to happen in any more places.
The four factors of the apocalypse:
global heating, global hating,
global eating, global mating.
[More Cartoons]
Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth)
to express your rejection of Facebook.
E-books
Non-oppressive Commercial
E-books
Don't use Facebook
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.
No national identity cards
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.
Borders
Stay away from certain countries because of their
bad
immigration policies.
Flight connections
Avoid flight connections in these airports because
of their
treatment of passengers.
The Lifelong Activist
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.
Bob Chassell
Writing (mostly science fiction) by my
friend Bob Chassell who recently died.
Solidarity Economy and Free Software
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance
on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
Falkvinge articles
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 order copies of my
book, Free
Software, Free Society, 3rd edition', signed or not signed.
"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."
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.
Media/Press/Bios
Richard Stallman's bio and publicity photos, and other things
of interest to the press, have been moved to a
separate page.
The berry torture.
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".
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
Earth
under attack from planet Koch.
On doxing, and how to spell it.
Futon Physics
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española. 
The
Night before M-x-mas
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.
My Cartoons
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 Portuguese
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.
Pre-Zen Studies.
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.
Un malentendido gracioso.
ESR's favorite programming language:
Objectivist C.
American
Extremists
My Small Mouth
The huns and the writs.
No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)
Hammer into Anvil
Made for You (December 2012)
(local
copy) Esperanto
translation
A science fiction story: Jinnetic
Engineering (
in
Portuguese,
Farsi,
Spanish,
Armenian,
Russian,
French, and
Italian).
The Right to
Read
My book of essays about the philosophy of Software Freedom,
is available from the
GNU Press.
Love and Dance
My Childhood Sweetheart
Made for You
My Former Personal Ad
Am I Doctor Stallman?
Avec des
chapeaux French song parody.
My radio program of Music from
Georgia, originally broadcast on WUOG in Athens, Georgia on
Oct 13, 2014.
Resolving the trolley
problem
Quantum Theory and
Abortion Rights
A
proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both
speech and writing.
Origin of the POSIX name.
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".
My Childhood Sweetheart
Love and Dance
Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor
Certificate of confusion
I would like to thank:
- Positive Internet for hosting this web site.
- Graziano Sorbaioli for improving the layout of the main
page.
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
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
