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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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For the sake of separation, this site has always been
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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
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
I have not announced it because the event is fully subscribed. I regret that others cannot get in.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Social Security Expansion Act.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: tell the saboteur in chief that you condemn the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop fake abortion clinics' deceptive and predatory practices.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on The FDA not to end routine food safety inspections — change would lead to sickness and death.
US citizens: call on Congress not to attack Section 230 — that is dangerous for people's freedom of speech.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
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.
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.
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.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
*{The corrupter's] white-collar criminal pardons cost public $1bn, says ex-DoJ official.*
Assuming he profited from this in some way, it amounts to a transfer from America's account to his account.
While some groups of deportation thugs told mothers being deported that they had to take their US-citizen children with them, another group told another mother that she could not do so.
I conjecture that they have been given vague and confusing instructions, written in a hurry by inexperienced people, so in similar situations various officials draw different conclusions. That tends to happen when those who write the instructions don't think carefully about them.
(satire) *RFK Jr. Encourages Americans To Do Their Own Research About Dragons.*
* The saboteur in chief has ordered the closure of 25 scientific centers that monitor US waters for flooding and drought, and manage supply levels to ensure communities around the country don't run out of water.*
From now on, if your region has floods or water shortages, the saboteur will be partly to blame.
British human rights defenders have defeated in court one increase in repression of protests. The increase was serious but the Tories treated it as minor.
I wonder whether this will free any of the UK's political prisoners who were convicted of protesting.
There is once again a fleet of unarmed ships carrying aid to Gaza. Someone used drones to attack one of the ships, half the Mediterranean sea away. Attackers suspect the attack was done by Israel.
I agree it was probably the Israeli army , because Israel had means, motive and opportunity. Some other countries had the means, and perhaps an opportunity, but No other country had a motive.
Israel used to seize aid boats and arrest the people on them. The change to attack the boats and maybe kill the people on them reflects how Israel has changed since then.
Was that attack terrorism? I think it was. Terrorism means making war on noncombatants, and those unarmed aid workers are clearly not combatants.
*Labour's planning bill threatens protected habitats [in Britain], says environment watchdog.*
Some Buddhists are making a big fuss about the auction of ancient gems that belonged to a man who found them and excavated them. They claim that the gems were mixed with a kind of relic — some of the dust remaining from Buddha's cremation — and this makes them sacred so they can't be auctioned.
I can imagine what the Buddha would say about this obsession:
I invite all of you to learn to be less attached
to physical things, including gems and
derivatives of parts of my former body.
Attachment generates suffering, and that
includes attachment to those things. If my
former body has any importance, it is only in
the advice that it once spoke to you, which I
now repeat.Please join me in focusing on things that
really matter and you will become more enlightened.
A Zionist lobby group is pushing for California to impose state censorship of the ethnic studies classes that are mandatory in high school there.
I think these classes should teach Uri Avnery's Truth Against Truth and follow that with the work of today's bridge-builders, such as Mohsen Mahdawi and his Israeli colleague Mikey Baratz
But that should not be enforced by government censorship.
*Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick laid out a disturbing plan to bring back serfdom.*
*RFK jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory.*
He also endorses the implausible theory that "chemtrails" are made intentionally and by DARPA.
It is dangerous to let an ignoramus mess with America's medical system. He will order the use of useless "treatments" for imaginary problems while rejecting the real treatments for real medical problems based on imaginary reasons.
On NYU's repressive punishment of nonviolent student protests, which it improvises from week to week and enforces in a biased and haphazard way.
Mohsen Mahdawi was released on bail and defended democracy for all Americans.
*Once the repression of dissent, in the name of security, becomes a key objective of a government, authoritarian rule and even martial law are not far off. When they look at my case, all Americans should ask themselves: what is left of our democracy, and who will be targeted next?*
The US needs more citizens like him.
Many countries have passed laws that label journalists that criticize the state as "foreign agents". This enables arbitrary restrictions on the press.
The challenge is how to distinguish foreign-organized influence campaigns from campaigns for journalistic freedom.
Rebecca Solnit talks about protests that have had important political effects, even if the target doesn't explicitly agree to any demands.
One example, was the protests in Seattle in 1999, which blocked a global "free trade" initiative.
"Free trade" tends to mean that companies can get away with whatever they wish and rich people can hide all their wealth from taxation, so it is very harmful. I have a feeling that some super-rich people and companies are using the example of the wrecker's reckless and sudden tariff increases to teach the public that "tariffs are bad, we must eliminate them", but that idea would be as harmful now as it was in the 1990s.
The U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories calls for more European leaders to be charged with complicity in war crimes for supporting Israel's bombardment of Gaza.
A former Labour shadow minister, now in Parliament as an independent, calls on Labour to listen to the revulsion of many Labour voters against Starmer's right-wing policies.
The population of flying insects in Britain fell by half from 2021 to 2023. In 2024 it did not bounce back. The cause is not known, but it can cause disaster for many kinds of plants, as well as birds, frogs, and other things that eat insects.
Just as the world came to have a chance to eliminate HIV through medicines that prevent its spread, the wrecker showed up and cancelled US plans to pay for doing that.
If civilization falls due to global heating, we are likely to lose the technology to make medicine to treat and prevent HIV. What a shame to prevent us from getting rid of it first.
Eliminating patents on medicines is very important. The three fields where patents are most harmful are agriculture, medicine and software.
El Salvador's CECOT prison is more cruel than Guantanamo. The prisoners are kept incommunicado and have no legal rights. Anyone there can be sent to that prison on the "president"s whim. Other, older prisons there are (reportedly) even more cruel.
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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