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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.
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.
Canadians: I suggest you seek election advice at a local chapter of a group that pushes to curb global heating and has the courage to say, "Canada should stop exporting fossil fuel." It will at least use the right goals to suggest who to vote for in your area.
Join a Friday climate strike.That page is made by scraping Fridays for Future so you can get the information without running any Javascript code. I would be very glad if they made the information on their own site accessible from the Free World; then we could simply refer people to their site and do without the scraping etc.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
This would make it harder for private equity combinations to destroy otherwise successful businesses and reduce competition.
If you phone, please spread the word!
There should be a law requiring online services, if they close a user's account, to permit the user to continue to download whatever information perse had left in the account.
To be sure, it is foolish to rely on an online service to hold any data for you; you should store it locally, and use online services only as backups (encrypted). Preferably more than one online service in parallel, for redundancy. But we should not allow online services to cite this as an excuse for arbitrarily causing people great avoidable harm.
It should be a crime to knowingly approach a person while maskless inside a building or vehicle.
The extreme of this is represented by the Amazon warehouse, where a worker's every move is controlled by the computer system. This is one of many reasons to refuse to buy from Amazon.
Unfortunately, surveillance of workers is not limited to Amazon. I think states should pass laws to limit surveillance of workers. It should cover independent contractors as well as employees.
The law should completely forbid demanding that workers run any specific software on their own computers (keep in mind that portable phones are computers); the employer who wants that must furnish the computer at no charge.
Now it can cause you to be arrested randomly for walking down the street.
If stores use face recognition inside the store, they should not be allowed to use photos for matching against people in the store except for photos they have taken in that store, and photos of people convicted of theft and fraud.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
The US immigration thug agency uses sites such as YouTube as well as Facebook and Twitter to find all users who seem to be interested in matters concerning immigration.
It is clear that some of these subpoenas investigate people who are not by any stretch of the imagination engaged in planning crimes. These are nothing like the Proud Boys.
The only way to deal with this problem is not to let those sites collect personal data on people for watching anything, unless there is a subpoena to collect data on those who visit a particular channel or page.
The myth of Capitalism is that investors take risks with their money, so they deserve a big profit when the risk succeeds. I can go along with this to a point: we can't let the investors keep most of the wealth that a business produces — most has to go to workers and to the state.
Nowadays, private equity fund managers and similar "investors" have obtained plutocratist laws which assure them of profits even from failure.
This problem stems from another foolish general practice: the US has more or less given up on penalizing companies that do harm. Instead, the proposal is always to subsidize businesses that say they won't do the harm.
And governments don't even bother to insist that the business do what it was subsidized for.
Thugs around the US violently attacked protesters and journalists at the rallies for George Floyd in 2020. Some of those shot with "nonlethal" weapons and left with irreparable injuries.
Have the thugs that refused to give Evans any help getting to the hospital been punished for that?
Have the thugs that encircled and besieged protesters
been punished for that?
Americans, what DeMentis is doing to Florida shows what he would do to the whole US if he becomes president.
He has pioneered new sorts of bullying that go beyond the corrupter.
DeMentis aims do more than defeat opposition; he seeks to punish those that dared to oppose him.
I do not judge laws and government policies mainly based on whether they induce big companies such as Disney to move work to my state or my country. But I see, in DeMentis's efforts to punish Disney, a plan for the sort of fascism that makes opposition too dangerous.
(satire) *Target Removes All Towels From Stores After Soaking-Wet Lunatic Objects To Dryness.*
*Mississippi family demands officer be charged for shooting 11-year-old.*
*Supporters of jailed Iranian journalists call for trials to be held in public.*
Secret trials are an indication of tyranny. China's political trials are all secret.
Australia sometimes does it too.
Cutting down old-growth forests has wiped out spotted owls in Canada. Only one owl is remains in the wild in Canada.
What do Republicans want most? To make sure rich people have a low tax rate.
Australia is now paying welfare benefits through a bank card that will track all spending of them.
A large fraction of those affected by this new system of surveillance are indigenous, and they are campaigning to put an end of this.
US citizens: if your congresscritter is a Republican, phone per at 1-833-964-2935 to call for raising taxes on the rich rather than cutting the benefits that non-rich Americans (even those with jobs) depend on. You could add, "Don't threaten to make the US default."
US citizens: call on Congress to expand the Supreme Court.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Biden to use federal spending rules to direct more pay to workers and less to CEOs.
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
South Australia has passed repressive laws against protests that might inconvenience others, and one of the politicians who voted for it says, "be grateful we won't cut your head off."
The protests that the state wanted to prevent were going to be against planet roaster companies that already kill people by the hundreds of thousands, and are working on raising that to hundreds of millions.
*It's a horribly effective [Tory] ploy: under invest in the health service, then encourage patients to blame staff for any failures.*
Buttigieg is going all-out to push for oil drilling in the Uinta basin of the Colorado Plateau, and to transport the oil long distances by train alongside the Colorado River.
He is also planning to approve tax breaks for building the line for these trains, so the owners can get a subsidy to prepare to poison the water of a large region of the US.
There is no room in the carbon budget for developing any new oil fields, no matter where the oil might be sent or how.
Starmer has proposed a real, significant change: to build millions of housing units under government direction, to avoid a massive give-away to the rich.
*You Should Not Trust Russia’s New "Trusted Root [certification authority for https]".*
*Elections in UK and US at risk from [neural-network-generated] disinformation, say experts.*
To refer to these systems as "artificial intelligence" spreads confusion, so I don't call them that. Please join me in that refusal.
Florida officials systematically entrap convicts into registering to vote and then voting. Then they get prosecuted for "voter fraud".
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 order copies of my book, Free Software, Free Society, 3rd edition', signed or not signed.
"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".
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
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.
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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