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.
Boston Area Assange Defense will gather together as press-freedom and human-rights defenders continue to protest the US-unconstitutional prosecutorial pursuit of journalist Julian Assange. Assange is imprisoned in a London supermax prison, awaiting extradition to the US for publishing the truth about US war crimes. Our fight continues with these recent events:
The trial date for Assange’s last UK court hearing is due any day now – we hope that Assange’s defense will be able to fight this extradition through the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), but this case is unprecedented and we cannot depend on justice being served. It’s up to all of us, not just journalists, to continue fighting against this pursuit of a journalist!
Please join us at Porter Sq, Monday, Sept 25th, 4-5:30 pm!
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.
I'm looking for people to![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
Livestream: https://live.gnu.org/gnu40.webm
General inquiries: gnu40@gnu.org
The event is organized by The Faculty of Educational Studies (Pedagogická fakulta), Free Digital Society members. It ends at 16:30.
For inquiries, mario.havel@paralelnipolis.cz.
I am not forgetting about the injustice of the occupation of Palestine, but the fight to prevent Israel from being taken by fascism is in a crucial stage now.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121
If you phone, please spread the word!
My name is NAME, I am your constituent. Please reject any budget that slashes Medicaid, and publicly oppose any plan to create a closed-door commission to cut Social Security and Medicare.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Rich people do not have a "right" to keep all the money they alter our laws to direct to them!
If you are invited to phone your representative, that is an effective thing to do. But you don't need to do this by texting from a snoop-phone. You can simply phone 202-224-3121.
If you phone, please spread the word!
*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.
US citizens: call on the EPA to adopt a stronger limit for pollution from trucks.
Richard Stallman will give a talk on September 30th in Prague, Czech Republic, at Charles University (Univerzita Karlova) at 14:00h.
The event is organized by The Faculty of Educational Studies (Pedagogická fakulta), Free Digital Society members. It ends at 16:30.
The Armenian inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh are fleeing after Azerbaijan's conquest.
Striking auto workers now see that Biden supports them and the fascist despises them.
US citizens: call on the EPA to adopt a stronger limit for pollution from trucks.
The Tory minister in charge of the hostile environment in Britain calls for rejecting the European convention on human rights.
Julian Assange's perfunctory final hearing is expected very soon. Extraditing him raises issues of violating the European convention on human rights. Will the UK follow its obligations under the treaty, or use the occasion, Putin-like, to display contempt for it?
The corrupter has been found guilty of fraud for tremendously exaggerating the value of his businesses in order to get deals.
The judge canceled his business certificates in New York State. Large fines follow.
*Trump is a real estate "genius" only in a "fantasy world".*
*[The] Conman […] tells GOP to shut down the government to stop his criminal trials (which it won't).*
US citizens: call on ABC, CBS, PBS, NBC, CNN, and affiliates: Stop platforming the fascist leader.
*It’s a lie promoted by the right [wing] that state help saps people of their drive.*
Plutocrats want working-class people to have to try desperately to find a job, so that they will take a subservient attitude towards their so-called "betters".
US citizens: call on members of Congress to co-sponsor the Israeli Democracy Resolution.
I am not forgetting about the injustice of the occupation of Palestine, but the fight to prevent Israel from being taken by fascism is in a crucial stage now.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and convey this message.
My name is NAME, I am your constituent. Please reject any budget that slashes Medicaid, and publicly oppose any plan to create a closed-door commission to cut Social Security and Medicare.
The Capitol Switchboard number is +1-202-224-3121.
If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Citibank and BofA to stop funding JBS Foods, because of its deforestation.
US citizens: call on the Bureau of Land Management to protect the Western Arctic from oil drilling.
* Reality TV show contestants are more like unpaid interns than Hollywood stars.*
Exploitation of interns occurs in many fields of business.
When there is competitive pressure on people starting out on careers, they are compelled to accept whatever form of hazing might get them started. A need for an unpaid internship can really cut down the candidate pool. Meanwhile, the candidate or per parents needs to have money in order to support the internship. It becomes one of the things that keeps the children of poor families out of good jobs.But let's not forget that enabling the most capable young people get the best jobs is only part of what is needed for a good society. We need to enable everyone to have a decent life — which means, the less capable don't get so much less than the more skilled.
Likewise, social mobility is not as important as giving everyone a decent life. Social mobility is one of the ways the wealthy try to convince most of society to settle for a chance of getting rich rather than demanding a decent life.
Family life in Scandinavia, with the help of government-funded child care, encourages couples to share housework and to reserve mealtimes for togetherness.
The FDA warned pharma companies to stop lying about which drugs are covered by their patents.
The patent system is basically a scheme to give big companies power over markets. In the area of medicine, they enable pharma companies to make medicines so expensive that most people who need them, even in a "rich" country (one with a comparatively large fraction of rich people), cannot afford them.
The companies argue for this power based on the expense of developing and then testing the drugs. Indeed, those are expensive, and we can't just wish those expenses away. But the development expenses are often paid for by the government (as they should be) and yet the government allows the company to seize the profit for itself. As for the testing, giving pharma companies control over testing of medicines enables them to corrupt it.
We should most definitely remove testing of the effects of medicines from their hands.
Disney has yielded to right-wing culture wars and plans to be s silent about issues such as gay rights and racial equality.
Since the right-wing extremists will surely continue fighting to impose their views on everyone, this is a setback for society.
Please keep in mind that Disney's commercial activities are fully based on injustice: DRM, identifying all customers, and antisocializing contracts which demand users commit not to share copies,
Sharing is good and should be lawful. Thus, the only modern copy of a Disney movie or TV program that does not do you injustice is an unauthorized copy.
Michigan has raised the minimum age for marriage to 18, protested by Republicans.
This change may be for the better. Marriage is a difficult responsibility, nowadays more than ever.
However, referring to teenagers under 18 as "children" is propaganda for treating them as helpless and "protecting" them from any agency, even in activities and relationships far less difficult than marriage.
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
