The photo comes from wikimedia.org
"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
The photo comes from
wikimedia.org
"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.
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.
I urge you to vote in Democratic primaries for the progressive candidate, if there is one. And in the final election I urge you to vote for Democrats, unless a liberal independent had a good chance of winning.
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)
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to prosecute Big Oil.
US citizens: call on CNN to ask candidates how they would reduce nuclear tensions. -->
Everyone: Call on Canada to enforce its environmental laws against logging to export wood chips for burning.
US citizens: call on Biden to fund the transition to renewables and stop funding fossil fuels.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
US citizens: call on Democratic leaders to rescind their support for Netanyahu's speech to Congress, and all Democrats to boycott the speech.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger.
It is exciting that SB 976 turns towards restricting recommendation algorithms. But these options should not be limited to minors — every user should have this choice. (Please do not refer to teenagers as "children"; that feeds the US tendency to treat them like children and retard their development.)
However, I suggest taking a step beyond just choosing to use or not use the platform's addiction system. Recommendation algorithms should be completely separated from platforms!
If you want to use a nontrivial recommendation algorithm, you should be able to choose it yourself and use it anonymously. You could send it the URLs you want it to base its choices on. These might be some of the pages you had visited, and perhaps pages you had not visited.
Then it should send you its recommendations. You could pass all, or just some, or none of those recommendations to the platform to look at them.
AB 1949 is admirable because it gives a small boost to privacy for users of all ages, not only for children. It isn't enough, though — users should also be guaranteed the right and possibility to access through the Tor network and to use aliases. And collection of a user's data by the state should require a warrant against the user.
The door plug that blew out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 airplane was missing four bolts meant to hold it in place. They were missing because Boeing maintenance removed them and did not put them back in again.
Some workers actually made the mistake, but they were working as part of a work system that Boeing management was responsible for setting up and running. That's where the real fault is.
I suggest passing a law to require aircraft manufacturing and repair companies to have a certain fraction of licensed commercial pilots on their boards. Perhaps 66%.
Private equity is gobbling up large parts of the US nursing home business. This puts patients in danger since private equity can amass lots of money, create an oligopoly, and get away with abuses.
The study suggests that "regulation may be needed." I will take a stronger stand and call for firm limits — perhaps even prohibiting private equity combinations from owning home nursing businesses.
I'v also proposed prohibiting private equity from buying up lots of rental housing.
It should be illegal for a store to charge different prices to customers depending on whether they identify themselves and/or hand over demanded personal data.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
*Biden pardons thousands of US veterans convicted under law banning gay sex.*
This should have been done years ago, but better late than never.
Julian Assange has accepted a plea bargain according to which he will be sentenced to the time he has already spent in Belmarch prison. (One charge has been filed already by the US for him to plead guilty to.) He is now supposed to go to the Mariana Islands (near Guam) to plead guilty and be sentenced to "time served", and then leave for Australia.
Reportedly Australia's support for Assange played a major part in convincing the US to agree to this deal.
I am very glad for Assange for being out of prison, but I am alarmed that the danger of being treated similarly will face other journalists and publishers in the future. If the US had prosecuted the perpetrators of the actions in the "collateral murder" video, none of this would have been necessary.
The plea deal requires approval from the judge. I wonder what will happen to Assange if the judge declines to accept the deal. Could he be sent to a US prison to await trial?
*One in five households in Gaza go whole days without food, draft UN report says.*
Documents show Israeli-influence funds target US college campuses and push to redefine antisemitism in US law.
The redefinition they push for is to adopt the distorted IHRA criterion for judging antisemitism.
I think it would be justified for Biden to take an action to block or punish this influence attempt — something sharp enough that Netanyahu will conclude he is going too far and must stop.
*Southern China hit by floods as north suffers from drought.*
Last I heard, China was rapidly increasing its burning of coal, so its own actions are partly responsible for these twin disasters.
Netanyahu rejected the idea of a lasting cease fire in Gaza. He spoke of "pauses" but it is not clear that those would allow in enough aid to save Palestinians from dying from shortages.
I think that whatever Netanyahu says about what he will or might do in the future is bullshit, just as if it came from the wrecker. Furthermore, since Netanyahu wants the wrecker to win the election, he will say whatever will cause trouble for Biden now. As long as Biden doesn't dare to do defy Netanyahu in something with consequences, Netanyahu will drag Biden around on a chain and he may indeed lose.
Let's not lose sight of where we want to end up.
A young right-wing American, a supporter of the wrecker, told Robert Reich, "Think of Putin, Xi, Kim, Ali Khamenei, Netanyahu — they’re all odious thugs," he said. "We need our own odious thug to stand up to them."
That thinking has a blatant flaw. The other "odious thugs" (his words) he listed, aside from Netanyahu, made their own peoples the first and principal target of their oppression, though they hurt some minorities worse. I think the wrecker would be similar. An American would need to be very lucky to benefit from being under the wrecker's heel.
Sweden's foolish campaign to push everyone into using tracked digital payments instead of anonymous cash is unjust to everyone who uses the digital system. Ironically, it has also boosted fraud.
A digital payment systems fraud can steal far more money than a small store would ever have on hand as cash. Thus, leaving cash has magnified the danger from crime.
If they were using GNU Taler for digital payments, instead of BankID, that would fix both problems. A Taler payment never reveals the payer's identity, and does not enable fraud against merchants.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to prosecute Big Oil.
Apple's narrow and restricted provisions for alternate app stores have been found to violate the EU's Digital Markets Act.
If the EU stands by this, it may eventually compel Apple to allow something comparable to F-droid.
Posting a religious text in a public school classroom isn't harmless, let alone neutral.
It would be difficult to write it in English and be neutral between monotheism and polytheism, and including atheism in the range of views respected would be even harder.
*Over half of US women on probation or parole need permission to travel for abortion.*
*Toys, spices, sewing machines [and many other things]: the items Israel banned from entering Gaza.*
*The climate crisis is driving an exponential rise in the most extreme wildfires in key regions around the world.*
Extreme fires are a small fraction of total wildfires, but they release more greenhouse gases because they burn whole trees. The gases accelerate global heating.
Whether the effect of this feedback loop is truly exponential remains to be observed, but if it is, reducing greenhouse emissions may become impossible. We should not wait for those observations before we act vigorously to reduce greenhouse emissions while we still can do so.
Photojournalist Linda Tirado was covering a protest about the murder of George Floyd when a uniformed thug shot her in the eye, perhaps with a tear gas canister. She is now dying from the damage that did to her brain.
Thugs know from their training that firing a gas canister at someone's face is likely to kill. That one should be charged with murder.
Colorado's new law will regulate sale of products that contain PFAS.
US citizens: call on CNN to ask candidates how they would reduce nuclear tensions.
*Elected officials in sweltering US states prioritizing fossil fuel cash over people.*
This includes the Republican governors of Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Nevada.
One right-wing billionaire has given $75 million to the wrecker's campaign and $25 to the confuser's campaign (RFK Jr).
Labour is considering plans for a wealth tax in the UK. At last it is looking for a way to make a substantial improvement in all the problems caused by Tory spending cuts.
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".
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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