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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: phone your senators and urge each one to protect the funding for public media.
Here's a suggested script that I am passing along with changes. Of course, you can say what you wish to say.
Hello! My name is [First Name]. I'm a constituent and am calling to
ask Sen. [Name] to oppose any action that cuts funding
to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Public media are among our nation’s most important media, with
overwhelming support among people from all 50 states and all political
leanings.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Everyone: write to Palantir's board of directors and call on them to explain what they are doing with personal data from the US government.
In my letter I called on Palentir never to process that data together with any personal data obtained in any other way. That would include, for example, location data.
I used the following Subject field:
You must tell us what Palantir is doing with personal data from the US
government and NEVER process it together with any other data you have.
I used the following message body:
Others are demanding that Palantir be transparent about what it does
with personal data from the US government. I join in that demand, but
that does not go far enough.
Palantir must never combine, or process together, any of that
government data with any other data it has or obtains about people.
To do so would establish a China-like system of total repression.
I want to be able to continue to love my country. I want it to remain
"the land of the free and the home of the brave." I hope you don't
want Palantir to be responsible for converting the US into a place
that people must flee for their freedom's sake.
Sincerely,
It is most effective if you write your message in your own words. If you are in a demographic that tends to support the bully, it is good to mention that.
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 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.
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.
Wildflowers growing on contaminated soil can absorb arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead from it, and pass them on to bees. It damages he bees' memory, which can wipe out the hive.
US citizens: phone your senators and urge each one to protect the funding for public media.
Here's a suggested script that I am passing along with changes. Of course, you can say what you wish to say.
Hello! My name is [First Name]. I'm a constituent and am calling to
ask Sen. [Name] to oppose any action that cuts funding
to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Public media are among our nation’s most important media, with
overwhelming support among people from all 50 states and all political
leanings.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Everyone: write to Palantir's board of directors and call on them to explain what they are doing with personal data from the US government.
In my letter I called on Palentir never to process that data together with any personal data obtained in any other way. That would include, for example, location data.
I used the following Subject field:
You must tell us what Palantir is doing with personal data from the US
government and NEVER process it together with any other data you have.
I used the following message body:
Others are demanding that Palantir be transparent about what it does
with personal data from the US government. I join in that demand, but
that does not go far enough.
Palantir must never combine, or process together, any of that
government data with any other data it has or obtains about people.
To do so would establish a China-like system of total repression.
I want to be able to continue to love my country. I want it to remain
"the land of the free and the home of the brave." I hope you don't
want Palantir to be responsible for converting the US into a place
that people must flee for their freedom's sake.
Sincerely,
It is most effective if you write your message in your own words. If you are in a demographic that tends to support the bully, it is good to mention that.
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.
Iran is deporting 4 million Afghan refugees in a hurry. Many are single women, who under Afghanistan's repressive laws can't even leave the border post.
With their prospects, death is an escape. Why, I wonder, do they obligingly walk to the border post, when they could instead drop on the ground and say, defiantly, "You can carry me or you can kill me"?
There may be other opportunities to fight their guards, for those who would rather die fast than be driven to death or slavery.
Australia wants some of its oldest rock art to be listed as a World Heritage site.
Advisors say Australia should first end industrial development and damaging air pollution, and then it could be listed. I agree Australia should end those, but I wonder if the committee could issue conditional approval.
Charges against Mario Guevara have been dropped. When brought to court, they proved to be garbage.
*Bangladesh's ousted leader Sheikh Hasina has been formally charged [in Bangladesh] with crimes against humanity after being accused of ordering a deadly crackdown against anti-government protests last year that left more than 1,400 people dead.*
Greg Palast: Tesla stays afloat as a seller of greenhouse gas offsets.
*So, my dear green friends, when you buy a Tesla, you're not reducing your carbon footprint by a quarter inch, because Musk is selling your good intentions to General Motors so they can pollute more.*
*The corrupter's inaugural fund got $19m from fossil fuel industry, analysis shows.*
The corrupter used the electoral fund as an opportunity to pressure the rich for bribes.
If we ever win back democracy, we should make it illegal for any elected or appointed official to raise funds for anything similar in spirit to an inaugural fund. If its purpose is per glorification, perse must have no direct relationship with its operations, with its fund-raising, or its money.
The US saboteur in chief deleted the web site that published national climate assessments, including the most recent one which is from 2023. A copy of that is available here.
Much worse, he has shut down the preparation of the next edition, due in 2027. This will surely please his sponsors, the fossil fuel companies.
Scotland is in drought, due to global heating, and the government has asked people to limit water usage.
That is the right first step, but to avoid making things worse they must use less fossil fuel.
People in part of Texas have suffered a disaster that they partly brought on themselves. That includes the flood itself — many years of voting for climate denialists have permitted more global heating and that enabled the flood. And it includes the wrecker's efforts to weaken and abolish FEMA.
How should we express our disgust for those political policies in relation to the resulting non-natural disasters?
A doctor in Texas wished for Republican voters in the flood region to suffer the bad consequences of their votes. That is not the right ethical position.
Many Kerr County voters are getting the consequences most of them voted for — but we should be sad for that, not wish for that. Their votes were foolish because of their bad consequences; we should regret both those foolish votes and their bad consequences.
People get the government their behavior deserves, but people always deserve good government.
We can say that people brought disaster themselves without wishing for disaster to harm them. We can wish that they learn to make wise decisions without wishing for a disaster so "to teach them" that lesson.
Moreover, disasters don't always get people to be compassionate towards each other.
Meanwhile, while she was being fired for wishing that right-wingers suffer the harm they have caused, a group of right-wing fanatics seek to impose that harm on non-right-wing Texans.
*The Private Prison Industry Looks Forward to Soaring Profits Thanks to [the persecutor]'s Budget.
Senator Whitehouse accused *Democrats and climate groups [of being] "too polite" in fight against "malevolent" fossil fuel giants.*
I agree. The planet-roasters have grounds to know that they are risking destroying civilization and most living humans for their own profit. We don't owe them the benefit of the doubt.
Asian friends of the US are aiming to increase their trade with China as a replacement for the US.
This is a natural consequence of the bully's tariff threats.
Cory Doctorow: Instead of retaliating towards US tariffs with its own Tariffs, it should retaliate by repealing the Canadian equivalent of the DMCA. And it should follow up by publishing jailbreaks for various US companies that are jails.
Doctorow argues that that would do far more harm to oppressive US companies that sell people jails, including Apple, Google, John Deere and car companies, and would avoid raising prices for Canadians.
I criticize the article's choice of terminology. When talking about copyright laws such as the DMCA, it refers to them by the over-general and vague term "IP". That term is always an overgeneralization and we should never use it.
It also refers to digital handcuffs as "digital locks". The most important thing about DRM and other digital handcuffs is that they are fundamentally unlike locks.
Locks, in general, are not nasty or unjust in that way. The lock on your door doesn't oppress you — because you have the key. Your password is a lock on your computer that does not oppress you because you choose and you have the key (password) to open it.
Protecting your control over your home or your computer is not an injustice.
The systems that companies use to restrict what you can do with your computer are handcuffs, not locks. The handcuffs are unjust towards you because the companies put them on you.
Digital handcuffs are an injustice because they give a company control. If we call them "locks", that tends to legitimize them — so let's not!
Some of America's best academic researchers are being chosen for the chance to move to a French university.
300 researchers have applied, but there are only 38 finalists. I don't know how many will actually be chosen, but I would estimate not more than 10. What will the others do?
140 EPA employees who signed an open letter criticizing the management *dismantling the EPA office of research and development, canceling environmental justice programs and grants, making employees fearful, undermining the trust of the public, and "ignoring scientific consensus to protect polluters."*
In other words, of acting against its official mission.
Those administrators suspended those employees and said, "The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the administration's agenda…"
And when the "administration's agenda" is to make the EPA fail totally, who then ought to be suspended?
Journalist Mario Guevara was arrested covering a protest, and handed to the deportation thugs. A judge ruled to release him on bail, but the thugs are playing silly games to keep him in jail.
Project 2025 seems to have planned a general campaign to probe the law at every possible weakpoint, seeking ways to negate people's legal rights. Among those, the authority of judges to order officials to correct their abuses.
Amazingly, US immigration persecutors were able to see the case for mercy for Mandonna Kashanian, an Iranian student who was stranded in the US when the Islamic revolution took power. Her family mobilized people in her community to convince their congresscritter, who had influence with the deportation thugs.
Her name leads me to speculate that she may be of Armenian ethnicity and not Muslim. That would be a reason why returning to Iran would have implied oppression.
The fact that it is possible gives reason to hope they might feel the stirrings of human decency more often.
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.
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