Treefinder Revokes Software License For Users In Immigrant-Friendly Nations

dotancohen writes: The author of bioinformatics software Treefinder is revoking the license to his software for researchers working in eight European countries because he says those countries allow too many immigrants to cross their borders, effective 1 October. The author states, "Immigration to my country harms me, it harms my family, it harms my people. Whoever invites or welcomes immigrants to Europe and Germany is my enemy."

Comments

Hmmm ...

[gstoddart]

So basically he's a batshit crazy idiot who is ranting publicly and acting like a whiny bitch?

Congratulations, Gangolf Judd ... you're an idiot, and a moron.

Although the change in the license may be a nuisance for some researchers, the program is far from irreplaceable, several scientists tell ScienceInsider. Treefinder had not been updated for several years and it was mostly used by researchers who had grown used to it, they say.

And largely irrelevant, from reading this.

Strimmer says. It is not clear whether Jobb still has a job. (His website says that he âoecannot work as a scientist, because my traditional views and values conflict with that eliteâ(TM)s doctrine.â)

Everything about this article suggests some raving idiot sitting in the dark lamenting how the world won't adhere to his bullshit beliefs.

Whatever, and nothing of value was lost.

Re:Hmmm ...

[TheSunborn]

Nope. To quote from his statement:

"Immigration unnecessarily defers the collapse of capitalism, its final crisis,"

So he sounds more like a communist or anarchist.

Re:Who cares

[orzetto]

I worked for a few years at a Max Planck Institute (not the same one as Jobb), and I remember he sent occasionally racist rants to all email recipients in all institutes, in which he lamented that the foreigners were taking his job. The rants were so logically inconsistent they looked like a crossing of Time Cube and the Unabomber Manifesto.

More than racist, which he is, the guy is psychologically unstable; the archetypal mad scientist.

Re:Oh, that's ironic

[afidel]

No, only 21.8% of the refuges are fighting age men. Try again you racist troll.

Re:How racism?

[thoromyr]

And, interestingly enough, nationalism is a recent invention. We are taught that there are distinct countries and the implication is that this has always been the case. If nothing else, people are either told or simply assume that before nations there were tribes and that tribalism preceded nationalism. But it isn't true.

There is a related problem, that of language. We like to pretend that languages are distinct and have clear boundaries. Someone speaks English, or German or Spanish or... But this notion of language is fairly modern and isn't even true. This is tacitly acknowledged by adding labels to indicate region, recognizing that American English is not the same as British English. Nor is the English spoken in India the same as either of those. Egyptian Arabic is a mix of Arabic and British English with some older Egyptian vocabulary thrown in.

Being a dead language, Latin was fairly defined as a language circa 800 AD, but the people inhabiting what we now call France did not refer to themselves as French, German or in fact any national or tribal identity. The term "the Franks" is more modern than anything else. Historically membership in a tribe was a hand wavy group identification, not about ethnicity or heredity. If you asked a Frank about his identity as a Frank you would have confused him. If you asked him what language he spoke it would similarly have confused him.

Linguists have labels for dead "languages" but the truth is there is no hard definition for what such a language was or who spoke it. If you started on the west coast and traveled east the spoken language would shift from place to place with generally increasing differences. The closest you get is a sort of civic identity where someone felt attachment to the city of his birth, but it is reading too much into it to regard it as a precursor to nationalism.

When King Harald set out to unite Norway there was no strict geographical boundary. People who lived in what we now call Norway didn't identify themselves as "Norwegians". They lived in familial groups, households, and identified with their relatives though certainly not in a tribal sense. Individuals who didn't like King Harald's requirement for land ownership left, mostly for Iceland, where family continued to be the most significant group identity and there was certainly no national identity.

No, nationalism was consciously invented as a tool to rally the mass of people behind a political figure or organization. Nationalism, and its sister patriotism, are tools to control a population. It is nationalism that encourages xenophobia. Despite a popular modern conception that primitive peoples were distrustful of outsiders, by and large what we have observed is the opposite. At least, those groups that survived with a primitive lifestyle to more modern times have failed to be adequately suspicious of foreign intruders.

It is modern nationalism, not primitive tribalism, that leads to xenophobia.