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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
In Rapperswil, Switzerland, Richard Stallman will give a talk. The title of the talk will be Free Software and Your Freedom.
In Geneva, Switzerland, Richard Stallman will give a talk. The title of the talk will be Free Software and Freedom in Computing.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
We may have already won this one, but it is not certain yet. Signing this is still important.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
When a few powerful entities — such as, major oil companies — reshape the system that most people live in so that only by making difficult efforts can they avoid putting the world in grave danger, those entities become responsible for the harm they have led and pressured people to do.
If you take any advice from a "crisis pregnancy centers", you're likely to find yourself having a cry, sis ;-{.
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.
Various companies and even unknown individuals publish mushroom identification books, or offer online dis-services that purport to identify them, falsely claiming these are based on "artificial intelligence".
In fact, they are based on bullshit generators, and taking their advice can leave you sick or even dead. But people call these "artificial intelligence", which suggests that the output they generate is based on knowledge or understanding of the subject matter.
I urge people to criticize writers and companies that stretch the term "intelligence" to cover the capacity to fabricate plausible-sounding bullshit.
Starbucks has decided to negotiate with the employees' union.
Russia and China vetoed the US security council resolution on Gaza complaining that it did hold back from actually ordering a ceasefire.
I agree that this is a shortcoming. Biden is playing the asymptotic approach again. Russia and China complained about this, validly. (Quite possibly they were also trying to deny the US any credit.)
Nonetheless, I would have approved it because it is a step forward, even though not quite as much as to end the asymptotic approach.
Republicans openly demand impunity for official thugs; they demand prosecutors resign for prosecuting thugs.
If we don't want thugs to maim, kill and imprison with impunity, we must stand firm against it now.
In the 1970s, Britain had policies that rendered owning houses and renting them out unprofitable; private landlords sold their rental houses to cities for use as public housing. Then in the 80s the Tories specifically set out to promote private landlords again and to eliminate public housing.
It is clear how the private landlords made rental housing far more expensive. What I to not see is how this created a scarcity of housing available for rental. However, the practice of building mansions which rich people will buy only as investments has certainly taken much housing space off the rental market.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to break up UnitedHealth's medical treatment almost-monopoly.
Xi thought he could crush the spirit of Hong King and still benefit from it economically. He crushed its spirit, indeed, and ended up with a wreck of a once-great city.
The Republican governor of Wyoming vetoed a bill passed by the Republican-dominated legislature that would have permitted carrying concealed guns in public schools in public meetings.
It's good that at least some Republicans are not total extremists.
Food delivery companies can only be profitable if they exploit their workers by underpaying them.
This is in addition to the ways they exploit restaurants and their customers.
Banks have a clever (but unsupported) theory to claim that their sneaky extra profits can't be reduced. It asserts that these extra profits are irresistible, and any laws again one scheme will lead banks to replace it with another.
The article presents boast theoretical arguments and empirical facts to reject that theory. What is really happening is that banks are trying to intimidate the public by saying, "You can't beat us, so give up."
But we can beat any sort of gouging if we elect politicians who really work for us and really want to beat them.
Political violence comes mainly from right-wing extremists, whipped up by right-wing extremist leaders. But many falsely blame the left.
Oil-company executives and their loyal servants held a meeting at which they declared that reducing fossil fuel use was a "fantasy", and that we should give up on it.
Their statements appear to claim that the task is intrinsically hard, but in fact the difficulty is created by them. The part they don't say is that the main obstacle to achieving that goal is all the money they spend opposing it. They spend it on misleading the public and they spend it on the support of politicians.
If the public is "unwilling to pay for a world with less carbon pollution," it is because they don't grasp the scope of the disaster the current path is leading to, from fires, floods, medical problems and failures of agriculture. By denying this, the planet roasters lead the public to suppose that they have a painless option.
*The Dutch airline KLM has misled customers with vague environmental claims and painted “an overly rosy picture” of its sustainable aviation fuel, a court has found.*
I saw a partly similar instance of subtle greenwashing recently: an airline company ad on a wall in Boston asserted that the gas generated by a collection of trash could power one flight per day. (Presuming, I suppose, that some planes' engines are converted to operate on methane.) It might be true -- I can't insist that it is false -- but it would make hardly any difference to the harm global heating is doing.
*‘Man-made famine’ charge against Israel is backed by mounting body of evidence.* A UN court may consider charges.
The Texas law that authorizes the state to arrest and prosecute people given a mere suspicion that they are unauthorized immigrants has been blocked by a federal appeals court.
We depend on the Supreme Court to block state laws that tie federal law in knots, but right-wing judges can't be trusted with that responsibility.
Biden has announces stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks.
The progress has been slowed down in response to planet roasters' lobbying.
The US now advocates a UN Security Council resolution to call for an "immediate ceasefire in Gaza" and release by HAMAS of its remaining hostages.
It was clear that Biden was moving in this direction for several months with small steps. I am sure he had pressing political reasons to do it that way. Nevertheless, given the thousands of civilians being killed, the US had an obligation to reach this point much sooner.
Both of those ought to happen, but suppose HAMAS refuses to release the remaining hostages -- what then? Israel has an obligation to protect the civilian population, hostages or no hostages; the resolution needs to reinforce that obligation too, or it could fail entirely.
Bats are important parts of ecosystems; some farms are setting up bat houses so as to get the benefit of their presence.
Several white Mississippi thugs have been convicted of torturing two blacks, apparently out of sheer hatred and are receiving long prison sentences. One has been sentenced to 40 years in prison.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.)
I join in disgust for the thugs who committed this crime, the whites referred to as "white" in that article. But the article does not suggest reserving that lower-case form for torturers and other violent bigots. On the contrary, it practices simple race-based bigotry, similar in its root to the bigotry that underlay the thugs' crime of torture.
I do not make a false equivalence here. Symbolic verbal bigotry is far less as an evil than physical torture. Torture is correctly punished as a crime, while verbal bigotry, in itself, is punished only by our expressions of disapproval. But said verbal bigotry and that particular act of torture are both instances of bigotry, and bigotry is always wrong. We should reproach minor symbolic bigotry as well as extreme violent bigotry.
Normally I will not link to articles that practice this symbolic bigotry, but I make exceptions for some articles because I consider them important -- and I label them like this.
A student in an English boarding school describes the persistent cruelty that crushed the humanity out of the students.
Students at such schools included elite children, and many became political or business leaders, and the cruelty they are taught manifested itself in many government policies.
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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