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.
Our next rally for Julian Assange is Saturday, March 4 at 11:30 to
12:30pm. We will gather at Park St. Station on the Boston Common to speak
out for Assange and gather signatures on our petition to our senators.
(See how the media failed Julian Assange at Harper's Magazine.)
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.
That 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.
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 Biden to appoint Kyrsten Sinema ambassador to
Italy.
The proposal is ironic but I think it is seriously proposed.
-
US citizens: call on Attorney General Garland to automate marijuana
pardon applications.
-
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the Republican plan to replace
income tax with a big sales tax.
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 Biden to
declare a climate emergency now.
This would give him powers he could use effectively without Congress.
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 Bayer to stop manufacturing neonicotinoids.
-
US citizens: call on the Biden administration to
hold Silicon Valley
Bank executives accountable
— to claw back some of their profits from its failure.
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 Biden Administration to
investigate racial
inequity
at Maximus, a federal call center contractor.
The White House comments lines are
+1-202-456-1111
and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
-
In Connecticut: support the campaign to
legalize leaving a child alone
even for minutes in public places such as the public library.
-
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and ask per to sign on
to Rashida Tlaib's letter to Merrick Garland calling for
dropping charges against Julian Assange.
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 Florida legislature to reject the bill to
censor bloggers.
-
US citizens: call on Biden to ban government contracts for pharmacies
that refuse to carry Mifepristone.
-
US citizens: call on Congress to admit Washington DC as a state.
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 House Ethics Committee to investigate Speaker
McCarthy for giving Tucker Carlson the complete security video of the Jan 6
attack.
-
US citizens: call on state legislatures to continue participation in
ERIC, an organization of states which help each other reconcile their
voter lists.
-
Everyone:
call on Amazon to start negotiating
with the Amazon Labor Union.
-
US citizens: Support the
Insulin for All Act.
The name of that proposed law is badly formulated, since we don't want
everyone to take insulin! Most people don't need to.
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 Congress to
repeal the 1991 and 2002
authorizations
for the US to send forces to fight in Iraq.
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!
-
Everyone:
call on Big Tech
to implement end-to-end encrypted messaging now.
Messaging applications that involve through nonfree client software
are unjust, and endanger your privacy, regardless of whether
they do end-to-end encryption, because the encryption could be
ineffective or snoop on users.
-
US citizens:
call on Biden to protect communities
from the effects of railroad companies' greed.
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: phone your congresscritter and your senators
reject right-wing budget cuts and pass Biden's budget.
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)
-
US citizens: call on Biden to appoint Kyrsten Sinema ambassador to
Italy.
The proposal is ironic but I think it is seriously proposed.
-
US citizens: call on Attorney General Garland to automate marijuana
pardon applications.
-
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the Republican plan to replace
income tax with a big sales tax.
The result of that change would be to tax wealthy people much less and
tax poor people a lot more. This is what sales taxes always do; we
should get rid of them.
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!
-
*Angry Fox News chief said [in 2020 that] fact-checks of Trump’s
election lies "bad for business."*
-
Rep. Gaetz hired a convicted murderer as an aide. But not just
any murder — that one murdered a prisoner of war in Afghanistan.
I expect that this was no coincidence — that Gaetz did this to demonstrate
his support for political murder.
-
The Tories' planned law to punish refugees will especially punish
those who have been enslaved and trafficked.
-
The bullshitter has been indicted for secret payments to Stormy Daniels.
I think that paying her, as such, was not a crime. I think the crime
was using campaign funds for this personal purpose, but I wish that
were made clear.
Robert Reich rebuts the ways the wrecker will claim that it was unfair
to indict him.
Comparing the US and other democracies in regard to how they treat
criminal accusations against former presidents.
-
*Trump appointees interfered to weaken EPA assessment of [a type of PFAS].*
Biden reversed the damage they had done, but they remain in positions
of authority in the EPA.
-
Calling for radical replacement of the London thug department.
-
US citizens: call on Biden to
declare a climate emergency now.
This would give him powers he could use effectively without Congress.
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 Bayer to stop manufacturing neonicotinoids.
-
US citizens: call on the Biden administration to
hold Silicon Valley
Bank executives accountable
— to claw back some of their profits from its failure.
The White House comments lines are
+1-202-456-1111
and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
-
Finland's schools
systematically teach how to identify misinformation
and ungrounded accusations of conspiracy.
I think this would be wise to adopt everywhere.
-
TikTok's
intense collection of data about each user
is a threat to Americans and to US national security.
As EPIC points out, TikTok is far from the only such.
The same is true for many other "social media" platforms, and school
education programs, and other proprietary programs. If you can't
modify the program to send whatever made-up data you want to send,
instead of true facts about you, it is not safe to use.
The ADPPA bill that EPIC recommends would reduce the existing massive
internet surveillance, but it starts with the usual mistake: systems
can collect data that is "reasonably necessary and proportionate to
provide or maintain a product or service". That is
too lax and will fail
to protect privacy.
My article, linked above, provides a key test. Does the rule prohibit
systems that charge for parking which make every driver enter per
car's license plate number? That practice is dangerous surveillance;
any law that fails to prohibit it is too weak.
The ADPPA's stricter rule for children and teenagers should apply to
everyone, but even that could be interpreted in a way that is too weak.
We can be sure companies will press for the weak interpretation.
This requirement must be bulletproof.
-
Will we open our eyes to the past and its implications, or drown them out
by shouting?
*The campaign to "protect our [British] history," in other words, is about
protecting the past from historians — and protecting the present from
dangerous new ideas about how we got here. Because when an organisation
like the Guardian researches its own historical links to transatlantic
slavery — and then apologises and embarks on a substantial project of
restorative justice
— the newspaper is not primarily presenting a
different past, but its ambition for a different present.*
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by
capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry,
capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and
normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make
exceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important,
such as the one linked to above.
-
Right-wing fanatics in Wisconsin ordered a first-grade class not to
sing the
song Rainbow land.
The song's words advocate tolerance instead of hate in a very general way,
but the word "rainbow" was more than the censors could stand for.
-
The Pentagon should include, in its planning for where to put military bases,
the predictable extra cost of putting the base in a
state which prohibits
abortion.
I'd go further. I'd suggest a policy of actively restationing units
and activities from abortion-restricting states to abortion-tolerant
states, with a goal of moving moving nearly all to the latter
in 10 years.
-
The CHIPS act is intended to discourage US semiconductor companies
from outsourcing of chip manufacturing to hostile countries such as
China. A look at the details of how it is supposed to achieve this
shows the weakness and timidity of the US government in
dealing with
any sort of big business.
The US government hasn't got the gumption to prohibit US companies
from doing things that put the nation in danger, or even to penalize
them to discourage doing so. The best it can manage is to offer
subsidies if they avoid those actions.
For this reason and many others, making America great again starts
with slapping down the businesses that think they own it.
Here's the
White House statement lauding the law.
-
Exxon scientists in the 1970s and 1980s presented executives with a
fairly accurate projection of what global heating caused by fossil
fuels might do to the world in a few decades.
But they presented it
as a possibility;
with all the gaps in the scientific knowledge of that time, they could
not determine whether those things would really happen.
By around 2000, the science had resolved the uncertainty and
fossil-fuel executives could not honestly deny the damage they were
going to cause.
-
(satire) *Prisoner Given 10 Extra Years For Good Behavior To
Serve As
Role Model For Fellow Inmates.*
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, 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
