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
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 | How I Do My Computing | 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.
I expect to have a trip to Europe in May - June. The start and end dates remain to be decided.
If you would like to invite me to speak during that trip, please write to me now so we can start discussing it. Write to `-invitation' following my three-letter username.
My talks consist of an hour of presentation and an hour of Q&A. The overall focus is software and freedom, but generally the talk includes various subtopics; we can discuss which subtopics together.
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
Richard Stallman will give a talk titled "Free/Libre Software and Freedom in the Digital Society" at 4pm on April 15 at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas.
US citizens: call on Congress to restore the gerrymandering limitations that the Supreme Court just abolished.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
One question is, how can this be done? Passing the same law that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional would not work.
Perhaps it would work to require states to use the algorithm that finds the fairest possible set of districts.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to ban gambling on war and on government policies.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to block privatization of the US Postal Service.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on the EPA to stop trying to weaken coal ash protections.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to block war with Cuba, and end the humanitarian crisis there.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to pass a Farm Bill that helps families put food on the table.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your senators to vote for S. J. Res. 99, which would protect authorized foreign workers who have filed for renewal of that authorization from being expelled because government agencies were late in responding.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to block the corrupter's UAE bailout.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your representative and senators to support Rashida Tlaib's Lebanon War Powers Resolution.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Congress to impeach FBI director Patel.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on Instead of Capping Social Security Benefits, Tax the Rich and EXPAND Social Security.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on your state Attorney General to shut down the corrupter's prescription drug scam.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on Congress to block Paramount from consolidating the main US news media.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
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.
Scientists forecast that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is quite likely to collapse.
*A collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50-100cm to already rising sea levels around the Atlantic.*
The world's two largest airlines (United and American) propose to merge.
The idea is absurd in principle, since it would undermine competition. Under a government that believed in preserving competition, they would never have proposed this. But the wrecker encourages the businesses that support him to merge and become a monster — as long as they use their power in devious ways to punish his designated enemies.
*US tech firms successfully lobbied EU to keep datacenter emissions secret.*
This shows that EU governments felt desperate for money ("investments") from those companies — so desperate that they betrayed their countries for those companies' favor.
Protester Renea Gamble, who was arrested for wearing a penis costume, was found not guilty, and will sue the city for arresting her on absurd grounds. Perhaps also for knocking her down so that she hit her head on the ground.
The thugs said that at one point she had named herself as "Aunt Tifa", and prosecuted her for that too. I love her sense of humor.
A reporter investigated FBI head Patel's command for FBI personnel to act as security for his girlfriend. In response, the FBI began investigating the reporter.
For magats, whatever magat officials do for the benefit of magats, even if corrupt or illegal, is legitimate. For journalists to investigate such actions is "stalking".
Patel has also sued The Atlantic for investing his official life.
A project has tried to estimate the cost to black Americans in Fulton County, Georgia, of various racist laws and government practices, including slavery and Jim Crow, and sometimes having the KKK drive blacks off their land to take it away from them.
It also includes the wages they would normally have been paid for work that they were forced to do. It amounts to a a large sum in today's money, though the article does not estimate an overall total.
The project aims ultimately to determine a just quantity of reparations to give to descendants of those who were robbed and cheated. I am interested in seeing the results. How to give a disprivileged group's members effective aid to surmount the inherited effects of being disprivileged is not obvious.
The article linked to above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles, such as this one, because they are important. I want to help the article educate people about racism. At the same time I want to rebuke its bigotry — so I present this comment about it.
*[Justice Department] inspector general to audit department's compliance with Epstein Files Transparency Act.*
The question this raises is whether this will be an honest audit (Did the department follow the law?) or a maga-audit (Did the department do what the corruptor wanted?).
The restructuring of the US Forest Service may be intended partly to hamper research to understand global heating effects.
The new head of the Forest Service used to work for a logging company, and in his thoughts he still does.
The corrupter is pushing Bosnia to make a corrupt deal to have a pipeline built by a company run by loyal henchmen with no pipeline experience.
Aside from the diversion of funds to reward people for committing crimes for the corrupter, the social cost of this would be a bigger risk of pollution and increase of the general level of corruption. The EU is right to try to stop it.
Polanski, the leader of the English Green Party, is Jewish and upholds Palestinians' rights — and rejects the attempt to tar that as "antisemitic". He rebuked Starmer's criticisms, saying, "We've got into a bizarre situation in this country where a non-Jewish prime minister is attacking the one Jewish leader on a case of antisemitism."
Mayor Mamdani vetoed a bill to ban protests near schools. He was not able to veto a similar ban on protests near religious establishments, but it deserved to be vetoed.
The corrupter/persecutor embodies the worst of us. *Name the ugliest human quality, and [he] will demonstrate it and glory in it.*
I criticize one point in the article: don't hint at criticism of "dodging the draft" during the Vietnam War.
The Southern Poverty Law Center pays people to inform on the private plans and views of hate groups. Magats in the "Justice" department are prosecuting the SPLC for supposedly "defrauding" their donors. However, Donors say this is no fraud — the SPLC is exactly what they want it to do.
The confusion here is an instance of judging actions by their form while disregarding the substance of the ethical issue. I wonder whether a computer program came up with this idea.
Republicans in Congress seek to protect fossil fuel companies from all legal responsibility for the damage of growing climate disaster.
If they do cause full-blown climate disaster, they will not have enough trillions to pay for all the damages. But the liability might help us at an earlier time — help us make them stop causing the disaster.
*[The bully]'s pardons are harming violent crime survivors*, by eliminating fines that the pardoned criminals would have paid into the fund to compensate them.
The UK's rules about political campaign donations spread a suspicion of corruption, which is confirmed every time a party changes rules and laws to favor the interests of rich people who donated to it.
The same is true in the US, even though the precise rules are different.
The article advocates public funding of political campaigns. I support that.
The bully insists on personally making all decisions about negotiations with Iran. The trouble is, he is incapable of deciding anything.
Iran properly doesn't trust anything the bully says about war or peace.
The ingrate is planning to send a thousand Afghan refugees (who helped the US army in Afghanistan) to the Congo instead of allowing them into the US.
The Congo has had a civil war for decades. What a lousy reward that is for their help.
The UK will ban everyone who is now under 16 years of age from ever buying tobacco.
I am against the use of tobacco, because tobacco is deadly. But I think it is wrong to prohibit drugs, even if they are dangerous. Regulating and discouraging drugs of abuse makes sense, but prohibiting them outright goes too far.
China has imprisoned a Chinese who who engaged in a pro-democracy protest while studying in Australia.
Never forget that China seeks to spread repression over the whole world.
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.
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
