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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
The photo comes from
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"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
the Free Software Foundation or
the GNU Project.
For the sake of separation, this site has always been
hosted elsewhere and managed separately.
It is more likely I can actually go if you have funds to cover the additional cost, and a speaker's fee would be nice.
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
I will have a trip to Europe in the second week of October and I am looking for invitations for additional talks in the same trip. If you would like to invite me to speak in that trip, please write to me at rms-invitation@gnu.org with "october" as the subject.
It is more likely I can actually go if you have funds to cover the additional cost, and a speaker's fee would be nice.
US citizens: call on all Democratic candidates to pledge not to accept oligarch money.
US citizens: call on state legislators to reject any calls for an Article V convention.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on California Attorney General Rob Bonta to protect journalists covering the LA protests.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the Big Bad Bill, which Congress just passed. Here's an AFL-CIO list of how it harms low-income Americans:
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the CDC to restore funding for vaccine development.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html for why that issue matters.)
First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScript in your browser or are using the LibreJS plug-in.
I have done the next step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without javascript!"
They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for many of them, including this one.
To start, fill in the personal information answers in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.
Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript by visiting that page.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.
This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort for the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
US citizens: call on the USPS board of governors to retract its nomination of a Fedex board member as head of the USPS.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html for why that issue matters.)
First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScript in your browser or are using the LibreJS plug-in.
I have done the next step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without javascript!"
They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for many of them, including this one.
To start, fill in the personal information answers in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.
Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript by visiting that page.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.
This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort for the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
US citizens: Tell the Senate to remove the million-dollar deposit requirement for asking for an injunction.
US citizens: Tell the US attorney for NJ to stop prosecuting Rep. McIver.
US citizens: call on the Senate to censure Senator Mike Lee for his contempt towards the assassinated Democrats in Minnesota.
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 put sanctions on Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories. The report inculpates Alphabet/Google, Facebook/Meta, and Microsoft, plus others in various countries.
US citizens: call on all Democratic candidates to pledge not to accept oligarch money.
*UN Gaza investigator Francesca Albanese says US sanctions against her a sign of "guilt".*
I don't think what the persecutor feels is guilt, as such. He seems to be impervious to the moral self-criticism that is essential for avoiding wrongdoing. I think he realizes that the condemnation will carry weight with the public, and lead some to despise him, so he seeks to silence or discredit those critics.
A billionaire who switched from supporting the Tories to supporting Labour evidently thought he was joining Tory Lite. Now he is worried that Starmer might get the idea he is head of the Labour party.
George Monbiot: Attacking the poor creates a power base for right-wing fanatics when "centrist" plutocratists are in power, they do this; when the fanatics get into power, they can continue doing it.
In Europe, as in the US, governments have encouraged and fed the corporate takeover of housing. This is the root cause of unlivable prices.
Europe spent the "peace dividend" from the end of the Cold War mostly on tax cuts and mostly for the rich. It can rearm and protect the non-rich now by returning tax levels to previous levels.
I suggest putting a withholding tax on business's payments to stockholders and creditors, which for EU taxpayers would count as withholding towards their personal tax payments. Non-EU taxpayers would not be able to get it back.
*Tesla asks NHTSA to hide its response to Robotaxi questions.*
Businesses employ people but they are not people. They are not entitled to keep secrets from the public in matters that rightly concern the public's well being.
*UK bosses to be banned from using NDAs to cover up misconduct at work.*
This is a step forward, but it should go further. Businesses should not be allowed to compel employees to cover up harm to the public either.
The UK is considering abolishing jury trial for some subset of criminal charges.
If the system is "collapsing" it is probably traceable one way or another to budget cuts, made "necessary" by tax cuts for the rich.
Economic forecasting predicts that the changes that the Labour Left forced on Starmer will convert a predicted increase in poverty into an predicted decrease.
That's good, but will it last? Some other change that hurts the non-rich could convert the positive forecast into negative again.
The US suspended weapons shipments to Ukraine, claiming that its stockpiles of weapons were running low. However, there is no evidence that such a thing is happening — that justification seems to be just bullshit.
A Canadian woman has been living in the US since childhood, with her husband and their children, without official authorization. Her husband voted for the persecutor, and now that his wife has been targeted for persecution, he says he regrets his vote.
*The UN is our best defense against a third world war. As [the wrecker] wields the axe, who will fight to save it?*
Adapting to dangerously hotter summers can fit in with reducing greenhouse emissions, funded by taxes.
The author speaks of taxing the worst polluters, but drivers in aggregate are among the worst and the less wealthy of them can't afford to pay more tax. However, subsidizing fossil fuel for them undermines decarbonization. A solution which avoids undermining it is to give poor people a payment they can use as they wish. They can all use it, and it preserve for each of the incentive to switch away from fossil fuels.
Why are the British so concerned about fly-tipping? Does an upside-down fly have difficulty getting back on its feet? Are flies now delivering food to diners' tables?
20 years ago, the economic powers started working together to "make poverty history" around the world.
Since then, governments have abandoned that goal. Now they are adopting policies to increase poverty in their own countries.
Rebecca Solnit: *Did National Weather Service cuts lead to the Texas flood disaster? We don’t know.*
It is clear that the wrecker's cuts to science, and in particular NOAA including the NWS, will do harm again and again. But we can't take it as certain that they was responsible for how bad the damage was this time.
On the other hand, we know that the planet roasters' resistance to decarbonization caused this flood to be worse.
We also know that their current resistance will lead to more and worse floods, as well as to more and worse fires, and to inundation of many coastal cities, large and small, around the world.
Israel's Orwellian language for many aspects of the bombardment and siege of Gaza.
Israel has openly announced a plan to force all Palestinians out of Gaza, confirming the intention that many have suspected.
The first step in the plan is to concentrate the population of Gaza in one camp on the ruins of the border city of Rafah. Even worse, it is explicit that this is part of a plan whose goal is to expel them.
If the world does not quash this plan, it will be rip up the restraints that still partly discourage crimes against humanity around the world. Other states are likely to follow this example, expelling populations much bigger than Gaza's, perhaps into deserts where they will die. In the probable age of hunger, a few decades from now, tens or hundreds of millions may be eliminated in bulk by a single command.
Israel labels each act or tool of cruelty with the word "humanitarian". This appears to be a campaign to inure people to hypocrisy, aiming to poison that word and make it hard to describe actual humanitarian actions.
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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