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: call on the Democratic National Committee to release their investigation into the causes of their defeat in the 2024 election.
US citizens: call on US media to take seriously the threates by the saboteur in chief and his henchmen to sabotage the 2026 congressional election.
Everyone: call on news organizations to cover the SAVE Act clearly and directly as a voter suppression measure — examining who would be blocked from voting, how implementation would work, and why these requirements are being advanced now.
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.
*Democrats urge windfall tax as big oil set to make billions from Iran war.*
President Bukele's repression forced the news site El Faro and its journalists to flee El Salvador.
*Most of the 4.9 million children who died in 2024 could have been saved, according to a new UN report.
The corrupter is following the usual fascist playbook for clamping down on the free press and converting it into a propaganda engine.
The wrecker said he will refuse to sign any bills until Congress passes a bill to disenfranchise millions of American citizens. This seems to imply that he will veto every bill — but it does not in fact imply that.
The president can allow a law to pass by waiting ten days (not counting Sundays) without either signing or vetoing the bill. He hasn't said whether he will do that. He might go for the greatest possible sabotage by vetoing every bill passed — but he also might not.
Of course, he is not at all honest and doesn't hesitate to contradict whatever he said he would do, so maybe it makes no difference what he said.
Political prediction betting has led to threats against a journalist demanding he retract an article, supposedly coming from a bettor who stood to lose millions of dollars because of that article.
Israel attacked an Iranian fossil gas extraction complex, and Iran is now threatening to retaliate against other countries' fossil gas extraction complexes.
Israel's attack was unjust and dangerous, because there was no military basis for it. Iran's threatened response would likewise be unjust and dangerous, for the same reason. However, Iran has not done it yet; if other powers deter Israel from continuing this, Iran may not start.
The US/Israeli attempt to make Iran's government collapse by killing high officials appears to have failed — it is organized to survive assassinations.
Iran's regime has committed enormous violence against the opposed public, violence at a level that magats might dream of but have not yet fallen to.
Optimizing systems for efficiency when running at maximum capacity means aiming for minimum slack. It is a mistake for an individual, but an even more devastating mistake when a country does it.
Almost half of the Britons age 16 to 24 who are neither working nor studying say the reason is due to a medical problem.
I think it is alarming that life-hampering diseases are increasing in frequency.
Some countries' successful interventions to reduce childhood obesity.
Some of them cost money. Governments must bite the bullet and take a bite out of the billionaires' assets.
Deportation thugs arrested authorized permanent resident Juanita Avila without looking at her green card, but her daughter recorded the arrest and that shamed them into releasing Avila with merely some gratuitous physical injury.
Then Avila and others sued, and a federal court in Oregon ruled that deportation thugs cannot arrest anyone without a specific warrant unless they present a written justification that satisfies strict legal standards for arrest without a warrant.
*CBS News heavily edits 60 Minutes interview [with the corrupter], cutting boast network "paid me a lotta money".*
A year ago, he sued CBS for editing an interview with candidate Kamala Harris in a way he did not like. It paid him millions to settle that lawsuit, and he explicitly presented that as a success in humiliating CBS. And suggested that CBS not broadcast that remark, and other humiliations, but he knew they would be reported.
Was it wrong for CBS to edit out the bully's boast about having made CBS bend the knee to him? Is it better for freedom and democracy to make a company look bad for having let us all down, or would that be likely to help him bully other companies into subservience? I don't know, but I would not trust news from companies that have given fealty to a would-be king.
*The appointment of a controversial slate of [antivax] vaccine advisers by Robert F Kennedy Jr likely violated federal law, and all votes taken by the committee over the past year have been stayed, a federal judge ruled on Monday.*
In particular, their vote to remove many vaccines from the US childhood schedule has been rendered inactive — for now. But if a higher court reverses this court decision, that will reactivate the vote.
*These "advisers" "missed 99% of data" on Covid vaccines before making recommendation, memos reveal.*
Interviews with civilians in Tehran who aren't sure which side of the war they need to fear more.
Masood Masjoody, an Iranian dissident in exile in Canada, disappeared and it looks like the regime had him murdered.
Calling for investigation of bets about the attack on Iran, because of suspicions the bettors had inside information, and the implications if they did.
Iran has plenty of supporters for its new supreme leader, just as it has plenty of protesters who hate him.
He is reported to hate the protesters and plans to ramp up the repression in Iran.
The wrecker threatens to go on strike by refusing to sign any bills that Congress might pass, unless/until it passes the voter-suppressing Subjugate America Act.
If he does go on strike, that would protect American from many bad bills that Republicans want to pass, bills which would attack our freedoms, crush the poor, or subject us to diseases.
Alas, we can't expect him to keep his word. He might at any moment break his own strike by signing some particularly vicious bill.
A famous and celebrated Australian defender of human rights has condemned the government's endorsement of the US and Israeli attack on Iran.
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
