Richard Stallman's Political Notes' Journal
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Thursday, August 10th, 2023
| Time |
Event |
| 3:17a |
Trials for uniformed thugs
When uniformed thugs are tried for crimes, they ask to be tried by a
judge with no jury, because they know judges are likely to find them
not guilty.
People who work in the criminal justice system often need the
cooperation of thugs. For this reason, some prosecutors go to extreme
lengths to protect uniformed thugs from prosecution.
Nowadays some prosecutors do prosecute thugs, but I expect that many
of them still try to protect thugs.
I expect that judges also want the cooperation of the thug department
and therefore are under pressure not to put thugs in prison, even
when they deserve it. | | 3:17a |
Only 10 vaquita porpoises left
Only 10 of the vaquita porpoises are left. They are being driven
to extinction by gillnet fishing.
I am surprised that people did not years ago capture some vaquitas to
establish a protected population. That is the usual way of saving a
species when its population drops so low. | | 3:17a |
Eritrea's oppression deserves protest
Eritrea's oppression of its populace deserves a protest, and so do
"festivals" it runs to raise money in other countries.
But these protests should not include violence.
Info about Eritrea's oppression. | | 3:17a |
Crowded living conditions of poor people
The crowded living conditions of poor people causes them to have worse
sleep.
Poor sleep in turn leads to various medical problems and a shorter
life span.
Poor sleep can be caused by other things. People with enough money
are not immune. Nonetheless, they are less likely to have that
problem. | | 3:17a |
Gender stereotypes lead to punishing women
Gender stereotypes lead to punishing women employees if they
speak assertively
in ways that are treated as acceptable for men.
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 denounce bigotry, and
normally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I make
exceptions for some articles that I consider important and that I
don't know another reference for. That article is one of the
exceptions. | | 3:17a |
Surveillance from cars from China
UK ministers warn that cars from China may carry out massive surveillance
for China.
That is a real danger, but the same danger applies no matter where the
cars come from. Their failure to consider this for Tesla cars,
which are known to surveil their users with extreme thoroughness,
is a bizarre mental lapse.
Real respect for your privacy means not collecting personal data about you.
Some surveillance systems are imposed by legal requirements;
others to serve attempts at driving without a human driver,
which means those cars are not "autonomous".
Why is it impossible to find what surveillance is done, or get rid of
it when found? Because the car software is nonfree! A nonfree
program, one that you can't study or change, never deserves your
trust.
Since you can fix the car's brakes yourself (though it will have
to pass inspection), there is no reason the car's software should
be treated likewise.
What about car hardware that can do surveillance? Laws should require
that any cameras that can see outside the car, or passengers, be
designed to blur out their faces, bodies and clothing, sufficiently
that the car's computers learn only that _there is something there_
and its rough dimensions (accurate no more than to the nearest foot).
Cameras that look at the camera should also blur enough that they cannot
identify the driver.
Laws should also require that the user can easily deactivate and
reactivate each or all kinds of radio transmission and internet
connectivity, except for radio-based anti-theft systems such as
Lowjack. provided they are installed or activated only at the user's
initiative and never by default.
Likewise the user should be able to the user can easily deactivate and
reactivate each or all kinds of GPS receivers from keeping a log of
locations and reporting them later. A GPL navigating device should be
forbidden to make the location records over any interface that can be
accessed by other systems in the car, or by maintenance diagnostic
systems.
The UK should also cease tracking the movements of all cars
via license plate cameras on the roads. | | 5:17a |
Failing marketized model of higher education
* Institutions, academics and students are being ill-served by a failing
marketized model of higher education.*
The US methods of doing this are different in detail but they have had
similar consequences.
To treat education as a business for which people should pay based
on the profit they hope to get from it is effectively to deny
the value of an educated populace — which means to deny the value
of democracy. | | 5:17a |
The bully threatened the wrong people
The judge in the insurrectionist's trial, for trying to use fraud and
force to overturn the 2020 election, gave him release conditions which
included not threatening witnesses. Since then, he has
threatened
witnesses several times.
Robert Reich says, and I agree, that he should be jailed now for this.
I must take issue with one of his points that may mislead readers.
If indeed 400,000 defendants in the US are in jail pending trial
because they "didn't meet a condition of their release" — and I take
Reich's word for that, it doesn't imply what it sounds like.
For many of them, this had nothing to do with their doing anything
wrong — they simply did not have money to make bail.
There is a movement now
to put an end to keeping defendants in jail simply because they are poor. | | 5:17a |
Umar Khalid in Modi's anti-Muslim India
Modi's repressive thugs used his repressive laws to accuse
nonviolent protest leader Umar Khalid
of "terrorism".
The "evidence" for this accusation, as described in the article,
was a rhetorical question whose answer was "no", which
they mis-cited as an affirmative statement.
| | 5:17a |
ECOWAS v. Niger coup generals
Niger
*Niger: thousands gather for
rally to cheer generals
who led coup.*
Some carried Russian flags as well as Niger flags. That confirms
that this rally was not a grass-roots expression of public opinion.
It confirms that the generals are allied with Wagner, which also
supports coup-installed governments in neighboring Mail and Burkina
Faso.
Wagner may have suggested the coup in Niger and encouraged the generals
to organize it.
Wagner is a conventional military force and Ukraine has shown it be
defeated by conventional military force. It was sent to serve Putin's
wish to get more global power by military means, but it is officially
a private mercenary company, not the Russian army. There is no reason
not to send a Western force to operate ground-attack aircraft and
heavy weapons to help defeat it. But given the
hostility in the
region toward France,
the former colonial power which is accused of continuing neocolonial
exploitation there, it would be wise not to include French troops.
(That article includes lots of other pertinent information.)
To prevent atrocities, it would be important for the force to have
people from Niger as advisors, and consult them
about each proposed attack to make sure the target
is not a wedding or a family.
American soldiers, even with strict orders and good will, can't always
distinguish correctly. I expect that no one else can do better.
The governments sending that force must firmly resist the temptation
to convert it into a counterinsurgency battle afterward against the
predatory Islamist gangs that threaten all the countries in that
region. They are a very different problem, and much harder, and
Western countries tend to do it very badly.
| | 5:17a |
| | 5:17a |
States react murderously to fentanyl
Many
US states are reviving the harsh penalties
of the War on Drugs, and worse, in an effort to reduce the underground use of fentanyl.
Relatives of people who died emotionally tend to direct their
grief into revenge against targets of opportunity, and I think
this is an example of that tendency.
These laws are unlikely to reduce use of fentanyl, but will cause a lot
of avoidable secondary suffering.
The way to reduce the use
of fentanyl and other addictive drugs is with harm-reduction policies.
| | 8:33a |
Blasphemous burnings v. Freedom of speech
Muslims in Sweden think that there must be "boundaries" to freedom of
expression, and these must include
criminalizing burning a Qur'an.
Burning a symbol of something you condemn is a form of protest that
everyone is entitled to. That's why the US Supreme Court invalidated
the law that used to criminalize burning the US flag. Burning it is a
symbolic act of denunciation of the US, not material damage to the
United States. Likewise for burning any religion's holy book, or
Mao's little red book, a copy of the Bill of Rights, a copy of a
Microsoft software license, a copy of the GNU GPL, or any text that
represents something you oppose.
Where Muslims are in charge, they usually protect their feelings by
censoring any criticism of their religion. They label criticism of
Islam as "blasphemy" and punish it very severely —
in some countries
with death.
This violates the human rights of people with certain views.
Where Muslims are in charge, they don't respect religious freedom either.
Many countries which make Islam the established religion punish any Muslim
who tries to stop being a Muslim. In Malaysia, the law simply says
that people of Malay race are Muslims whether they like it or not.
This too violates the human rights of people with certain views.
We need more respect for human rights, not less. Sweden must not use
"hate crime" as an excuse to repress condemnation of Islam.
Nor is it legitimate to claim that an act of symbolic condemnation
"endangers national security". How could that ever happen? If
Muslims (or any other group) threaten to attack the nation in revenge
for a symbolic act of condemnation, they are the ones threatening
national security, not the people they demand to repress.
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