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: Tell the EPA to protect clean water from corporate greed: reject proposed weakening in local approval for development that can affect water supply.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Tell your governor, no tax breaks for Big Tech data centers.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
Here's the text of the letter I sent.
I’m writing as your constituent, and as recipient of two awards from the ACM for programs I have shared with the public in freedom, to urge you to reject efforts in our state to provide Big Tech with tax breaks to build data centers. I’m concerned about the harms that data centers can do locally, including siphoning our water, using up our land, creating noise and light pollution, and hiking our electric bills. I’m also concerned that providing tax breaks to giant Big Tech corporations will deprive our schools and local budgets of their already insufficient funds. I'm also concerned that these data centers will mostly operate Pretend Intelligence (PI) -- software that *tries to* imitate what an intelligent entity would say, but without really understanding the words it plays with. The use of these digital dis-services does society harm. We should never allow business to play one state against another by making states compete to offer them the biggest tax break, because that perverse competition harms *all* the states for the benefit of business owners. So please reject efforts to give Big Tech (or *any* business) specific tax breaks to operate in our state. The states should form a union and bargain collectively with these businesses. The states could call their union the United States of America. Wouldn't that be a good thing to have?
US citizens: Call on the media to report loud and clear on the amazingly unusual refusals by grand juries to indict people accused of bogus political "crimes".
US citizens: call on state officials to protect your state from the spread of measles.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
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: Tell the EPA to protect clean water from corporate greed: reject proposed weakening in local approval for development that can affect water supply.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Tell your governor, no tax breaks for Big Tech data centers.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
Here's the text of the letter I sent.
I’m writing as your constituent, and as recipient of two awards from the ACM for programs I have shared with the public in freedom, to urge you to reject efforts in our state to provide Big Tech with tax breaks to build data centers. I’m concerned about the harms that data centers can do locally, including siphoning our water, using up our land, creating noise and light pollution, and hiking our electric bills. I’m also concerned that providing tax breaks to giant Big Tech corporations will deprive our schools and local budgets of their already insufficient funds. I'm also concerned that these data centers will mostly operate Pretend Intelligence (PI) -- software that *tries to* imitate what an intelligent entity would say, but without really understanding the words it plays with. The use of these digital dis-services does society harm. We should never allow business to play one state against another by making states compete to offer them the biggest tax break, because that perverse competition harms *all* the states for the benefit of business owners. So please reject efforts to give Big Tech (or *any* business) specific tax breaks to operate in our state. The states should form a union and bargain collectively with these businesses. The states could call their union the United States of America. Wouldn't that be a good thing to have?
US citizens: Call on the media to report loud and clear on the amazingly unusual refusals by grand juries to indict people accused of bogus political "crimes".
US citizens: call on state officials to protect your state from the spread of measles.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
Japanese fossil fuel companies invest in Australian fossil fuel extractors, and they appear to have lobbied Australia to prolong fossil fuel extraction.
This may be part of why the Australian government has neglected its responsibility to help save civilization from global heating.
Global heating is starting to melt the rapidly heating Arctic permafrost, and this is releasing large quantities of methane at an accelerating rate.
This could lead to a tipping point into much faster heating.
Australian thugs attacked protesters who refused to remain passive in the face of a visit by the President of Israel, who is responsible for tens of millions of Palestinian civilians' killings.
*Britons' right to protest is under threat like never before. If you value it, speak up now.*
The Iranian regime is becoming ever more fanatic, arresting important politicians close to the "reformist" official prime minister.
Gallup polling announces it will cease its 88-year-old practice of tracking the approval ratings of the president.
Some suspect this is because the current president — the bully — is threatening to sue Gallup if it continues to report on how many people detest him.
I would compare this to his sabotaging of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They add up to a practice of trying to deny the public information that makes him look bad.
*As Congress debated the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, civil rights advocates argued that immigration enforcement would be distorted — and weaponized — by its merger with the national security state.*
*In response to such concerns, Congress created an unusually far-reaching internal watchdog office for Homeland Security and its various arms, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.*
The wrecker, cognizant of the danger that that office was meant to prevent, has reduced the office to a skeleton crew.
*House Republicans make rare, albeit symbolic, rebuke of [the bully] over Canada tariffs.*
Congress could cancel those tariffs if it wants to. It could do that by putting a clause limiting tariffs into a bill that the bully would find damaging to veto.
* New evidence shows Gregory Bovino hailed [the deportation thug] who fired at Marimar Martinez five times in her car*. The thugs tried to frame her, too.
Does a statistical survey about death of young children in England demonstrate a problem in their medical treatment?
This result suggests that consanguinity is leading to the birth of children with doubled harmful recessive genes — which is what we expect it to do, more or less. But in order to be sure of this conclusion, we need to know what fraction of children born have consanguineous parents. If that too is 7%, it would imply that those children face no greater danger of early death than other children. If that is less than 7%, it would imply that they do face a greater danger of early death.
If the risk is indeed higher for children of consanguineous parents, the next crucial question is how big a problem this is. What fraction of children of consanguineous couples in England die young? What fraction of children born in England die young? If that is a very small fraction, this problem affects few children.
Another question remains: supposing that this problem is substantial, how big is it compared with the other threats to the health of children in England?
And another one is, supposing that this problem causes a big danger to the children of consanguineous parents in England, is there an effective way to reduce that danger?
The House of Representatives passed a bill to block a substantial fraction of adult US citizens from voting.
Reportedly drug gangs in Mexico have obtained newer and more powerful arms than the Mexican government can get, including drones.
They may be a real threat to Americans, but it is minuscule compared with the threat to Americans from the deportation thugs. Let's not let the secondary threat distract us from the primary threat.
Grand juries almost never deny prosecutors the indictments they ask for. But several grand juries have recently refused to authorize bogus indictments meant for political persecution.
* The American Medical Association (AMA) will partner with the Vaccine Integrity Project to review the evidence on vaccines for influenza, Covid-19 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) for the fall.*
The US government used to do this, but the wrecker put anti-vaxxer RFK Jr in charge of this area.
According to the latest poll, half of all Americans strongly disapprove of the persecutor's repression of immigration.
Over 60%% express disapproval of various specific aspects of it.
The deportation thug agency hires lawyers to pursue deportation cases in a court which is a mockery of a court, before a judge who is a mockery of a judge.
There is no official quota for judges to rule for deportation, but they know they may be fired if they don't do that often enough. When the agency lawyer simply asks the judge to rule for deportation — "to dismiss the case" — giving no specific reasons, the judge often unceremoniously does just that.
In effect, the whole thing is a sham designed to smear a perfume of justice over the stench of arbitrary, dishonest cruelty.
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
