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
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This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
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For the sake of separation, this site has always been
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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: Call on Interior Secretary Burgum not to let Big Oil destroy Chaco Canyon.
US citizens: call on Big Tech to cancel contracts with Israel's government.
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.
Iran is hunting down the Starlink connections that are still running, trying to eliminate all external communication.
People think that Iran is planning to sever its domestic internet entirely from the rest of the world.
Robert Reich: *If agents of the federal government can murder a 37-year-old woman in broad daylight who, as videotapes show, was merely trying to get out of their way, they can murder you.
Even if Trump and his vice president and his secretary of homeland security all claim, contrary to the videotapes, that Renee Macklin Good was trying to kill an agent who acted in self-defense, they could make up the same about you.
Even if Trump describes her as a “professional agitator” and his goons call her a “domestic terrorist,” they could say the same about you regardless of your political views or activism. If you have left-wing political views and are an activist, you’re in greater danger.
How can we believe what the FBI turns up in its investigation, when the FBI is working for Trump and is headed by one of his goons, and is investigating possible connections between Renee Good and groups that have been protesting Trump’s immigration enforcement?*
When a corrupt and dishonest president packs government agencies with his corrupt and dishonest henchmen, everything they say and everything they do becomes suspect.
As Reich put it,
We must commit to peacefully fighting this regime, to ending Republican control of Congress in 2026, and to sending this dangerous gang packing in 2028 — assuming we’re still free and alive by then.
*Subject: Trump Bullies Flip-Flopping Senators Into Defeating Vote to Block Venezuela War.*
That was just barely enough to defeat the resolution.
*[the bully] is making China – not America – great again, global survey suggests.*
US citizens: Call on Interior Secretary Burgum not to let Big Oil destroy Chaco Canyon.
US citizens: call on Big Tech to cancel contracts with Israel's government.
An experiment demonstrates that horses respond to odor of human sweat differently depending on whether the human was feeling fear at the time of collection.
Deportation thugs on streets around Minneapolis have been observed on various occasions making slightly veiled threats to shoot protesters.
They have become a murderous criminal gang that shelters under a distortion of legal authority.
Journalist Laura Jedeed applied for a job with the deportation thugs, expecting to write a story later about the process and how they rejected her for what their background investigation would reveal about her politics. But they did not bother to investigate — they accepted her even though she had not actually even filled out the forms.
She is concerned that they may be accepting all sorts of violent criminals without bothering to check.
Denmark has ordered its soldiers to fight any armed attack on Danish territory, including in Greenland.
Denmark's army cannot militarily stop the US army from seizing Greenland. The point of this order seems to be to prevent the imperialist from sending his troops to seize Greenland and then pretending that the attack didn't start a war.
The EPA been ordered to give weight to the cost of pollution control but not to the cost of the human damage done by pollution, as a basis for relaxing the limits on soot pollution.
The economic cost of a person's death is a callous way to judge the importance of saving a person's life. But ignoring it, as an excuse for allowing more toxic pollution, is even worse.
How can Europe defend Greenland (and the rest of Europe) from the bully?
A special company in New South Wales, Australia, is authorized to fell trees in areas that are a habitat for endangered native species (plants and animals). It is supposed to take care not to harm those species, but it seems to take insufficient care.
It is so prone to mistakes that I wonder who profits from them.
The wrecker has halted immigration visa consideration for 75 countries, ostensibly because too large a fraction of immigrants from those countries end up needing some sort of public support.
This is not a rational response to the problem. I was treated a couple of times by doctors that had immigrated from Albania — I am sure their income was adequate not to need welfare. By lumping everyone from each country together, the US shoots itself in the foot.
*1.5°C target likely to be passed by 2030.*
After the imperious bully told Iran he would launch an attack if Iran executes protesters, the Iranian regime reacted just as I expected: by saying executions would start soon.
The bully is cruel and unpredictable. The mullahs are cruel and rigid.
The Adelaide festival canceled a speaking invitation to a non-terrorist Palestinian, saying that presenting her would be "culturally insensitive" after a shocking terrorist gun attack on Jews in Sydney.
She rebuked the idea that the mere presence of a Palestinian with political views is somehow offensive in a way that one can at most hint at.
*Both Human Rights Watch and the cross-party law reform organization Justice say recent legislative changes have created a chilling effect on lawful protest and should be repealed. Their reports, simultaneously published on Thursday, also say that proposals for more curbs should be halted.*
What the bully wants to impose is not a "new world order" but a return to the same old imperialist international chaos.
One point in the article is a conceptual confusion:
Yet this is not an administration that wants to colonize; instead it demands compliance. The new bosses in Venezuela are the same old bosses, the same henchmen and yes-men, only now with the No 2 running the show. This isn’t “imperialism”, not a new US protectorate nor some southern principality for son-in-law Jared, but something much cheaper and less onerous to the Oval Office: rule by remote control.
That statement adopts too narrow a definition of "imperialism". US imperialism in the 20th century often operated by working with local strongmen who were, in all but name, vassal rulers. It was different from the kind of imperialism practiced by European countries before 1950, but they often switched over to this new kind with the colonies that they had given independence to.
Robert Reich: we must eliminate laws that attribute personhood to things which are not people, and also the laws that treat some people as less than persons.
We can protect things like species, rivers and forests without falling into those practices.
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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