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 | 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.
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, so he will probably live many more years nonetheless. But he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.
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.The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people to![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
[ No upcoming talks. ]
US citizens: call on your senators to support the Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act, which would prohibit release of plastic "nurdles" into US waterways.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the Senate to refer Leonard Leo to the Justice Department for contempt of Congress.
US citizens: state that politicians shouldn't make our medical decisions.
Everyone: Tell the Adobe CEO to stop selling generated images of war.
It seems to be that ownership of too many such houses by any owner, whether human or corporate, should also be prohibited.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Please phone the White House to support the goal of a full cease-fire.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
*UK mental health charities handed sensitive data to Facebook [with a tracking pixel].*
Let's start the attack on massive surveillance by making it illegal for a server to include a tracking pixel.
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.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
The ACLU is defending the NRA against government campaigns to extralegally intimidate banks into refusing it as a customer. The same case will defend many other sorts of organizations from harassment based on political views.
(satire) *Toyota Reveals That Any Babies Conceived In Backseats Of Their Cars Belong To Them Now.*
China is putting former Hong Kong newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai on trial for supporting democracy (they describe it in different terms). After he is convicted, he will probably spend the rest of his life in prison.
China would probably claim those statements are false -- that it is "Hong Kong's" courts, not China's, that the charges are undermining order and national security, Those are typical lies of repressive tyrannies such as China.
Calling on Biden to push Netanyahu out of power in Israel so that Israel can accept reasonable terms for peace in Gaza.
*[At least 40%] of the air-to-ground munitions that Israel has used in Gaza since October 7 have been unguided, otherwise known as "dumb bombs."*
When bombing in Gaza, to hit some Palestinian civilians does not require great precision.
*AI doomsday warnings a distraction from the danger it already poses,* such as the recommendation engines of antisocial media platforms that encourage the spread of disinformation and hatred.
*You can't fight the Republican party's "big lie" [that the wrecker really won the 2020 election] with facts alone.*
The new records set by global heating (and its consequences) this year are frightening.
Various US states have found legal pretexts to persecute 61 women for giving themselves abortions or helping with them. Many have suffered lasting harm as a result.
Yanis Varoufakis claims that capitalism has given way to a form of platform feudalism, where the dominant powers are the companies that charge rent for transactions passing through digital platforms that most people consider impossible to avoid.
It is not in fact impossible -- I almost never touch any of them -- but avoiding them does require an effort. I am able to stand firm in this effort because I hate the wrongs they impose on individuals (nonfree software and tracking each person) even more than their wealth and power.
Most people don't appreciate the injustice of that nonfree software or the tracking of everyone so they can't draw strength and resilience from that source.
If you want to discuss Varoufakis's interesting political theory, I suggest not adopting the term "cloud" that he so often uses. That is a marketing term designed to distract the mind from the one-user-at-a-time wrong that these companies' sites do to each user.
Pity the poor fools who think that what Europe needs is "its own Apple or Google". One of each of those is too many. And pity even more the Europeans, if that quest for home-grown European feudal lords is a success.
Hot weather has made a normally harmless Pasteurella species start killing elephants in Africa, and antelopes in central Asia.It was never observed to cause disease before.
It could happen to other species of mammals, including perhaps our own.
High levels of particulate air pollution significantly increases the danger of getting type 2 diabetes. The pollution of Delhi may more than double that probability.
In the decade after 2010, many countries experienced leaderless horizontal protests,- some of them very large. But hardly any gained anything for democracy or justice, or whatever causes had motivated the protests.
Some were co-opted by right-wing forces that were organized. Others suffered from having no leaders that could negotiate to accept concessions from the state.
President Rousseff of Brazil, a leftist who had been tortured by the same military thugs that were bashing mass protesters in Sao Paulo, watched the protests on TV trying to figure out what the protesters wanted -- so she could do that for them. But there was no answer to be had, because they were not organized enough to have agreed on anything specific. She could only guess.
The article explains how organized right-wing extremists put the blame on her, and that eventually led to making Bolsonaro president.
*[Former EPA employee] Karen McCormack says regulators at [that] environmental agency are discouraged from speaking up about dangerous chemicals.*
She said *that she believed the EPA was not fulfilling its mission to protect the public from harmful chemicals.* One example is the weedkiller, paraquat.
* Senator [Sanders] introduces resolution to investigate "humanitarian cataclysm … being done with American bombs and money".*
Everyone: call on clothing manufacturers to phase out fossil fuels.
US citizens: call on your senators to support the Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act, which would prohibit release of plastic "nurdles" into US waterways.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the Senate to refer Leonard Leo to the Justice Department for contempt of Congress.
US citizens: state that politicians shouldn't make our medical decisions.
Everyone: Tell the Adobe CEO to stop selling generated images of war.
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:
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
