Richard Stallman's Personal Site
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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.
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.
The next rally for Julian Assange will be at the Park Street Station
on Feb 11th from 11:30 to 12:30.
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.
Is your bank pressuring you to use biometric ID?
If so, please write to rms at gnu dot org.
It could be useful if you document what is happening.
Link Policy
The largest part of the site is the
political notes, and they
are typically updated every day.
- send me examples of how proprietary programs have been
designed to be addictive.
- I'm looking for people to check a few sites for me regularly
and show me any new articles that I would like to see or link to.
If you would like to help me
in this way, please write to rms at gnu dot o r g.
- send me examples of how proprietary programs have been
designed to cause programmed obsolescence of products.
- write
site-specific Firefox extensions
or local scripts to operate specific web sites.
- help
maintain and operate savannah.gnu.org.
- experiment to find good ways to attach
fruits to a Grav-mass tree.
- help web sites put free licenses
on their Javascript code.
Civil Liberties Minute:
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
graphic by Susan Henson
Americans, you may wish to copy this icon to your own page, as a
way of showing what patriotism means to you.
Recording of Guantanamero
Listen to the
recording
of
Guantanamero,
a protest song written in Spanish. The recording is in
Ogg Vorbis format. To install an Ogg Vorbis player,
see
the FSF's Ogg Players page.
-
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 pandemic has taken surveillance of workers to the next level.*
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.
-
A hundred years ago, having your face photo circulated as a suspect
could direct persecution at you — for instance, making it impossible to get a job.
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.
More items where there
ought to be a law.
Quotes
Here are some
quotations that I particularly like.
(
RSS Feed)
-
Suspects in the murder of Jovenel Moïse, the imposed president of Haiti,
were sent to the US for trial.
Can anyone explain to me how it is that the US has jurisdiction
over a murder in Haiti?
-
Despite the UK's new requirement for foreign entities that own UK
property to state who the real owners are, loopholes allow some of
those owners to continue to hide their identity.
-
The German government, including the Green Party, chose the side of
building a new coal mine. It needed thousands of uniformed thugs
to defeat the 35,000 protesters who tried to block the conversion
of a village into a coal mine.
Destroying a town for public purposes is sometimes legitimate. (All
the inhabitants of that town were compensated and given time to move.)
Four towns were inundated to make the Quabbin reservoir which brings
rain water to the Boston metro area. But building additional fossil
fuel facilities steers our future towards climate breakdown.
-
Parents in a small town in Connecticut let their children, ages 7 and
9, walk a mile to a store. Someone freaked out and called the thug
department. The parents now face criminal charges.
-
Memphis published the names of the black thugs that helped to kill
Tyre Nichols, but concealed until this week the name of the white thug
who was involved, and what role he played.
This could represent bigotry.
The report seem also seems to try to cover up some aspects of the
thugs' violence.
Speaking of bigotry, the article displays symbolic bigotry by
capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry,
capitalize both words or neither one.) Normally I do not link to
articles that do this, but I make exceptions for some articles that I
consider particularly important, such as the first one.
It should not be surprising that blacks can absorb from white society
the widespread ideas of bigotry against blacks.
Ideas for what could make for a real change in the violence of thugs
against blacks.
-
Supposedly UK voters can cope with the new voter-ID law by applying
for special government identification, but only .5% of the people who
would need one in order to vote have applied.
-
Thugs in Huntington Park, California, ran towards Anthony Lowe with
guns drawn. He dropped off his wheelchair and tried to pull his body
away from them, but he could not move very fast that way; then they
shot him dead.
It appears they did not run their body cameras. That in itself
is suspect. I've proposed automatic systems that will activate
body cameras at the sound of a shot (or a taser) and will save
the previous five minutes of video as well as subsequent video.
-
*"Suspicious death" of Rwandan journalist prompts calls for investigation.*
-
US citizens: call on Congress to stop corporate profiteering off of
COVID vaccines, by guaranteeing free access to all Americans.
-
The Burmese military rulers repeatedly bomb villages of civilians.
*[Burma] junta hit by western sanctions as "silent strikes" mark coup
anniversary.*
-
*US dairy policies drive small farms to 'get big or get out' as
monopolies get rich.*
Industrial concentration is the cause of a range of injustices and suffering.
We need policies to break up those monopolies; any policy which does the opposite simply must be changed.
-
A twisty maze of regulations and restrictions -- in the US, in Mexico,
and in other countries -- make it very difficult for anyone to
exercise the right to request asylum in the US, even to follow the
long and slow procedure the US imposes for doing so.
The "Title 42" system of making asylum-requester stay in Mexico runs
into a problem since Mexico won't let them stay there.
An additional aspect of oppression in this system is the US requirement
to use a snoop-phone app, "CBP One". Those programs are nonfree and
typically malware.
So are the operating systems of the snoop-phones themselves.
For governments to make them the only way to communicate with a
government agency for some purpose is in itself unjust. So, for the
same reason, are "web apps" that send substantial Javascript programs
that users have to run in their own computers. Knowing the US
government, I expect it abuses that power grossly when it gets the
chance.
I'm sure most of the people compelled to run "CBP One" hardly care
about that injustice, given the painfulness of their situations in
general. But unlike those. this one tends to spread to non-refugees
-- to everyone.
-
Olympic games tend to spread permanent increases in surveillance and
repression wherever they go. The next victim will be Paris.
I've urged the citizens of cities in more-or-less-free countries to
defeat those cities' Olympic bids. In addition to repression
and surveillance,
they tend to crush poor people
and especially homeless people,
and transfer a lot of public money to big companies.
-
Robert Reich: the growing national debt is mainly due letting the rich
pay too little tax.
-
British libel law still lends itself to use by rich people to suppress
truthful journalism. The fact that Russian oligarchs who are personally
under UK sanctions are doing so is especially embarrassing, but it is just as bad when British plutocrats do it.
The Tories are planning to make this even worse. They are working to
change thousands of laws all at once -- laws imposed by the EU to
protect human rights and regulations to protect people's health.
This includes changes that would make libel suits an even easier
way for rich people to bury the truth.
-
The EPA rejected the Pebble Mine and thus protected Bristol Bay, Alaska.
-
A former member of the US military-industrial complex
calls for help in breaking it up.
-
*Iranian couple filmed dancing in Tehran are jailed for 10 years.*
-
The term "gender-affirming surgery" has a serious flaw as a way of
defining a category of surgical operations: it is subjective, not
objective. Specifically, it is stated in terms of what someone
(presumably the patient) thinks about the operation, not in terms of
what the operation concretely does.
One patient might say, "I see this operation as affirming my gender,
so I want to have it." Another patient might say, of the same
operation, "This would go against gender, so I don't want it."
We need an objective way to define and refer to this class of
operations, one independent of whether a given patient wants such an
operation or not.
-
Drones were used to attack some sort of building or base in Iran.
US officials said that Israel carried out the attack.
We don't know what that target is, or what it does, or what purpose it
serves. However, this is likely to provoke war with Iran.
The four factors of the apocalypse:
global heating, global hating,
global eating, global mating.
[More Cartoons]
Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth)
to express your rejection of Facebook.
E-books
Non-oppressive Commercial
E-books
Don't use Facebook
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.
No national identity cards
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.
Borders
Stay away from certain countries because of their
bad
immigration policies.
Flight connections
Avoid flight connections in these airports because
of their
treatment of passengers.
The Lifelong Activist
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.
Bob Chassell
Writing (mostly science fiction) by my
friend Bob Chassell who recently died.
Solidarity Economy and Free Software
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance
on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
Falkvinge articles
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."
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.
Media/Press/Bios
Richard Stallman's bio and publicity photos, and other things
of interest to the press, have been moved to a
separate page.
The berry torture.
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.
Futon Physics
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española. 
The
Night before M-x-mas
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 Cartoons
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 Portuguese
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.
Pre-Zen Studies.
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.
Un malentendido gracioso.
ESR's favorite programming language:
Objectivist C.
American
Extremists
My Small Mouth
The huns and the writs.
No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)
Hammer into Anvil
Made for You (December 2012)
(local
copy) Esperanto
translation
A science fiction story: Jinnetic
Engineering (
in
Portuguese,
Farsi,
Spanish,
Armenian,
Russian,
French, and
Italian).
The Right to
Read
My book of essays about the philosophy of Software Freedom,
is available from the
GNU Press.
Love and Dance
My Childhood Sweetheart
Made for You
My Former Personal Ad
Am I Doctor Stallman?
Avec des
chapeaux French song parody.
My radio program of Music from
Georgia, originally broadcast on WUOG in Athens, Georgia on
Oct 13, 2014.
Resolving the trolley
problem
Quantum Theory and
Abortion Rights
A
proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both
speech and writing.
Origin of the POSIX name.
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".
My Childhood Sweetheart
Love and Dance
Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor
Certificate of confusion
I would like to thank:
- Positive Internet for hosting this web site.
- Graziano Sorbaioli for improving the layout of the main
page.
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
