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.
I expect to have a trip to Europe in May - June. The start and end dates remain to be decided.
If you would like to invite me to speak during that trip, please write to me now so we can start discussing it. Write to `-invitation' following my three-letter username.
My talks consist of an hour of presentation and an hour of Q&A. The overall focus is software and freedom, but generally the talk includes various subtopics; we can discuss which subtopics together.
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
Richard Stallman will speak in Erlangen, Germany on June 16 at 16:00, at the School of Engineering of FAU.
The talk is on the moral issues of free vs nonfree software.
We suggest you bring cash.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to oppose the Earned Wage Access Consumer Protection Act. It is a roundabout way of exempting payday loans from existing regulations that protect the public.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to Oppose H.R. 4801 and Protect Against datamining and manipulative fintech.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
I urge you to edit the letter's subject and text to remove the term "AI" and replace it with "snooping and manipulative fintech" or something else that rejects the marketing hype. For good measure, you could critique the term "AI" -- I did that too.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: Support H.R. 1137, the "No Kill Switches in Cars Act."
I think that if someone is convicted of driving under the influence, or something close to that, it is legitimate to attach a sensor-driven kill switch to stop per from driving while inebriated.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to put an end to the FISA law's permission for warrantless spying on Americans.
The FISA court was supposed to prevent abuse of this power, but it has announced that the constraints on its operation made that impossible in practice.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Take Action: Shut down the hidden sweatshops of data workers.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
I ask you follow me in expunging the acronym "AI" from your letter.
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.
The US history of prosecuting reporters and their sources (whistleblowers) runs through Nixon and Obama, and merges into the persecutor's current efforts to totally subjugate the news media.
Two thugs from police departments miles away visited several Cincinnati schools and tried to conduct "wellness checks" of a list of students, with no warrants to justify this and having no jurisdiction there anyway. It turns out they were working on behalf of the deportation thugs, perhaps seeking to make a few unlucky children's life drastically worse. This follows the usual gross basic emotional dishonesty of the deportation thugs.
"AI" "scribes" used by some doctors to generate medical records make significant errors in their output, fairly often.
Kash Patel faces a new criticism — for snorkeling in the vicinity of the USS Arizona National Monument.
Patel has done a series of cavalier, unjust, and repressive actions, for which he ought to be impeached and removed, and in some cases perhaps jailed. But snorkeling near a sunken battleship is not one of them. It is of no real significance — only a symbolic meaning which anyone might attribute or not.
I observe a tendency to reproach, excessively, alleged failures to "show respect" is a distraction from the real injustice that really matter. It plays into the hands of right-wing extremists, who just love "showing respect" for dead heroes as an excuse for persecuting or murdering the living heroes who campaign for freedom today.
US deportation thugs may retain enough of an idea of common humanity and an idea of right and wrong to feel a moral conflict between that idea and the cruelty of their job. Various organizations are offering them paths to repentance and rehabilitation.
European countries are seeking excuses to deny asylum to true refugees that have reason to fear being tortured, or wish to live where their close relatives live.
The persecutor seems to be threatening to kidnap Raúl Castro, the aged former president of Cuba.
In Cuba there are right-wing dissidents, that want to allow some people to get rich subjugating the rest, and there are left-wing dissidents, such as the late Oswaldo Payá, who want to preserve the educational and medical achievements of the Cuban revolution while establishing freedom of speech. The persecutor would surely despise Payá just as he despises the Americans funds for good education and medical treatment he is eliminating.
Among various kinds of dangerous pollution produced by burning wood in fireplaces, one shocking kind is lead.
What the incredibly expensive failed effort to save one stranded humpback whale says about people's irrational priorities.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to oppose the Earned Wage Access Consumer Protection Act. It is a roundabout way of exempting payday loans from existing regulations that protect the public.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to Oppose H.R. 4801 and Protect Against datamining and manipulative fintech.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
I urge you to edit the letter's subject and text to remove the term "AI" and replace it with "snooping and manipulative fintech" or something else that rejects the marketing hype. For good measure, you could critique the term "AI" -- I did that too.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: Support H.R. 1137, the "No Kill Switches in Cars Act."
I think that if someone is convicted of driving under the influence, or something close to that, it is legitimate to attach a sensor-driven kill switch to stop per from driving while inebriated.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to put an end to the FISA law's permission for warrantless spying on Americans.
The FISA court was supposed to prevent abuse of this power, but it has announced that the constraints on its operation made that impossible in practice.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
*The [English/Welsh] Greens need to learn the right lessons from the destruction of Corbynism.*
*New Report Reveals Coordinated Corporate Campaign Against Life-Saving Federal Heat Standard for Workers.*
California's rule requiring businesses to protect their workers, with rest breaks and access to water and shade, is a big help, and extending it nationwide could avoid thousands of illnesses (some of them fatal) per year.
*Three-quarters of UK millionaires would be happy to pay more tax, research finds.*
Israel is about to start building an Israelis-only road through the West Bank, designed as an excuse to exclude Palestinians from all the other roads in a central region of the West Bank — and force them all out.
Woodrow Wilson warned in his campaign in 1912 about the domination of the US government by a few rich people, and called for stripping them of their power.
At the same time, he pressured actively for racial segregation.
It is impossible to simplify Wilson to pure good or pure evil: we need to recognize both at once, in different areas of life, and judge each of them as it deserves.
The boss of JP Morgan, a giant US bank, praises UK officials as "smart" when they reduce taxes for big foreign banks like his, and tries to threaten them with "investing less" if they might increase taxes for big foreign banks.
He is one of the arrogant rich men that Woodrow Wilson warned about. He is an enemy of Britain, and Britain should treat him as an enemy.
He is an enemy of America, too, for the same reason.
Republicans in Utah and Oklahoma want to shield fossil fuel companies from liability due to damage done by global heating.
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
