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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
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.
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.
I urge you to vote in Democratic primaries for the progressive candidate, if there is one. And in the final election I urge you to vote for Democrats, unless a liberal independent had a good chance of winning.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people to![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Debt Ceiling Reform Act, which would deny Republican extremists the power to hold most federal spending hostage to demand passage of harmful laws.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the ETHICS act so that they can't profit by buying and selling stocks that their votes will affect
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the Senate to keep MAGA bigotry out of the National Defense Authorization Act.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on T-Mobile, GM, CVS, and Elevance to stop funding Republican harassment using fake criminal accusations to attack voting rights.
US citizens: Show your support to Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter for fighting and blocking monopolies.
Imagine if we had a president and congress that supported all of FDR's New Deal, not just a few parts.
US citizens: call on University administrators and boards to end repressive tactics against protests in support of Palestinians' rights.
I agree with the recommendation that we should not label ourselves or others as "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine". We should campaign for peace between those two nations and the safety of all.
Many US billionaires are donating millions to elect the insurrectionist because he has promised to help them take even more of America's wealth from the rest of us.
If you know of an institution (or part of one) named after any of the billionaires mentioned in the video, for instance Steve Schwarzman, how about holding protests against his association with a convicted corrupt official that tried to steal a US election and openly threatens to try again.
Simply pasting "Trump" or "Trumptool" over the name of his billionaire supporter might be a good start — but do expect to have to put that sign up again frequently.
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.
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.
It is exciting that SB 976 turns towards restricting recommendation algorithms. But these options should not be limited to minors — every user should have this choice. (Please do not refer to teenagers as "children"; that feeds the US tendency to treat them like children and retard their development.)
However, I suggest taking a step beyond just choosing to use or not use the platform's addiction system. Recommendation algorithms should be completely separated from platforms!
If you want to use a nontrivial recommendation algorithm, you should be able to choose it yourself and use it anonymously. You could send it the URLs you want it to base its choices on. These might be some of the pages you had visited, and perhaps pages you had not visited.
Then it should send you its recommendations. You could pass all, or just some, or none of those recommendations to the platform to look at them.
AB 1949 is admirable because it gives a small boost to privacy for users of all ages, not only for children. It isn't enough, though — users should also be guaranteed the right and possibility to access through the Tor network and to use aliases. And collection of a user's data by the state should require a warrant against the user.
The door plug that blew out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 airplane was missing four bolts meant to hold it in place. They were missing because Boeing maintenance removed them and did not put them back in again.
Some workers actually made the mistake, but they were working as part of a work system that Boeing management was responsible for setting up and running. That's where the real fault is.
I suggest passing a law to require aircraft manufacturing and repair companies to have a certain fraction of licensed commercial pilots on their boards. Perhaps 66%.
Private equity is gobbling up large parts of the US nursing home business. This puts patients in danger since private equity can amass lots of money, create an oligopoly, and get away with abuses.
The study suggests that "regulation may be needed." I will take a stronger stand and call for firm limits — perhaps even prohibiting private equity combinations from owning home nursing businesses.
I'v also proposed prohibiting private equity from buying up lots of rental housing.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
A fanatical Christian group is recruiting poll workers ready to try to rig the election for Jesus.
If the wrecker doesn't actually win, they will dogmatically declare that "fraud" and try to declare him the winner despite the votes.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Debt Ceiling Reform Act, which would deny Republican extremists the power to hold most federal spending hostage to demand passage of harmful laws.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Greg Palast: Texas Republicans are threatening to jail Houston's election officials for facilitating voter registration.
They fear that the Democrats will win Texas if disprivileged groups find it easy to vote.
Israeli soldiers blocked a vaccination aid convoy in Gaza for 8 hours and questioned some of the people working in it. The convoy was unable to carry out its aid mission. Fortunately, nobody in it was killed or wounded.
Australia is considering requiring social media platforms to check the age of each user. This article describes the mechanisms that might be used. It seems that each one will either require you to identify yourself to some other service that could keep track of everything, or require some sort of unalterable unique number from your computer. I expect they will demand something that users can't alter, which implies rejection of free operating systems (on a free operating systems, you could always set it to whatever value you like).
So I think this represents a plan to require that users either identify themselves, or run nonfree software (which will probably snoop on them), or both.
But I can't be completely sure of that — I have to make guesses about what some of these things mean.
There is a system that can verify your age to a web site while refusing to identify you to that web site: GNU Taler can be adapted to let you get tokens that you can use to prove you are over N years old, but that would not enable the site to identify you, and that won't allow the Taler site to know which sites you gave them to.
But that is not in the list of what Australia is considering.
A discarded bag of Cheetos messed up the ecosystem in Carlsbad Caverns. The balance in a cave is so sensitive that a small amount of food that does not belong there is enough to endanger it.
*Conservatives think giving children [gratis] lunch at school is socialism, but vast, powerful private monopolies are freedom.*
The more power a person has, the more society needs to regulate the use of that power to protect everyone else in it. Most of you, like me, don't have much power — though we may be able to influence others by convincing them — so we should have a lot of freedom, outside of actions that directly endanger others.
By contrast, a billionaire's power is very dangerous, so dangerous that we should regulate many things they could do. Even better, we should tax high income and high wealth enough that nobody can become or remain a billionaire.
There are other interesting points in the article.
*Reducing night light exposure may be a simple way to cut [type 2] diabetes risk.*
I wish the article gave some idea of how much light it takes to have a big effect.
*Pride or shame? British history is too complex to be seen in such glib terms.*
American history is likewise too complex to deserve, as a whole, any one feeling. Rather than argue over a choice of one single feeling overall, we can do better by identifying the parts of history that deserve pride, condemnation, or whatever else.
I would recommend condemnation, rather than personal shame, for the actions that we think were wrong.
Hindu-nationalist ideology in India, in the 1930s, drew lessons from its contemporary, Nazism. Comparing the two can help us identify the fascist essence that they have in common.
This suggests the lesson that the specific choice of majority trait which serves as an excuse to marginalize and dehumanize others is just a detail. Any trait can be used for this, if its members can get their hands on power to oppress the rest.
The trait need not even be borne by a majority, except in a somewhat democratic state which impedes any minority from getting the power to oppress others.
*Vaping damages young people’s lungs as much as smoking, study suggests.*
*DeSantis' election police questioned people who signed abortion petitions.*
This seems to be an attempt at intimidation.
MIT canceled its contract for reading Elsevier journals several years ago and has suffered no great inconvenience as a result. This is great news, because it suggests that more universities can cancel their contracts too.
MIT saved a substantial amount of money by doing this, but that is a secondary issue. What's important is that if more universities cancel these contracts, the result could be to wipe out the journal publishers or make them desperate enough to agree to be bought out for an affordable sum. After buying them out, the new copyright holder could make all the online copies libre.
Please join me in shunning the term "open access" and using the term "free scientific publishing" instead. The article linked just above explains why that term is better.
Analyzing this situation as an instance of a "collective action problem."
I think that one of government's missions is to fix these problems for the people. To do that, we need to elect representatives and officials who won't hesitate to say that some profitable business is a parasite and advocate laws to nullify its business model.
Digital game publishers are trying to twist copyright law to construe ad-blocking as copyright infringement. That would magically make them illegal without consulting the people's thoughts on the matter.
The article linked to above makes the deep mistake of using the term "IP" to refer both to copyright and to other disparate laws. That usage might leads you to suppose you could generalize about those laws and reach one single conclusion that would apply to all of them.
That is a path to confusion, because these laws are dissimilar in almost every point. If you want to think clearly, treat copyright as one issue, patents as another unrelated issue, trade secrets as another issue unrelated to those, trademarks as yet another issue unrelated to the other three, and likewise for plant variety monopolies, IC mask monopolies, design patents and publicity rights.
If you assume that any one of them is similar to any other, you're headed for error. Instead, do as I do: I think about just one law, I call it by its distinguishing name, and I never imagine that what I learn or conclude about it applies to any other law.
The planet roasters of the North Sea have warned that the proposed increase in the windfall profits tax levied on them would result in decreased amounts of drilling, and decreased extraction rate, over the coming decade.
The author of that article seems not to understand that that is part of the overall goal, which is to move from civilization-endangering fossil fuels to renewable generation.
All the arguments that planet roasters make for letting them extract more and more are based on burying this point. One of the things that disappoints me about The Guardian is that it continues to publish articles with this slant.
The French president, Macron, who is on the plutocratist right-wing, appointed a plutocratist right-wing prime minister, Bernier. There have been massive protests.
Bernier and Starmer seem to get along very well.
Arwa Mahdawi argues that it is now demonstrated that no amount or gravity of Israeli atrocities against Palestinians will make Biden act to restrain those atrocities. Sad to say, it looks like that is true.
However, I can't understand the fuss about Israeli soldiers who put on the underwear of Gazan women. They meant that as mockery, which is not nice, but mockery is as nothing compared to the atrocities committed against those same women (and almost all of Gaza). Those women (and their families) have been driven from their homes. Some have been killed, and more are being killed. Those soldiers have probably participated in the real atrocities.
A person who would get more outraged about making fun of women's underwear than about these violent atrocities would seem to lack a sense of proportion.
South Australia is considering a bill to require social media platforms to check the ages of users, which would have the effect of requiring them to demand that each user identify perself.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the ETHICS act so that they can't profit by buying and selling stocks that their votes will affect
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
The charges against Pavel Durov are about chat groups, not encrypted conversations. It is a relief that this is not an effort to ban end-to-end encryption. However, I am somewhat concerned about the announced changes. Those who will be affected by them will include political dissidents as well as criminals. The phrase "upload media" is very vague, but if it means "upload videos", I fear that blocking this will do more to hamper the fight against crime (and particularly crime by agents of the state) than to hamper crime.
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".
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
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.
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.
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