>The concept he critiqued was that of "original accumulation". Under that
>term a rag bag of ideas were put together to explain (or more properly to
>explain away) the existence of the original fund of capital, from which
>all subsequent accumulation starts. Marx says it is capitalism's dirty
>secret that the original accumulation fund is not got by 'abstinence' but
>by theft, enslavement and plunder. (Following the hints put forward by
>Rousseau, who said that property begins when one man puts a fence around
>some land and others recognise it [badly remembered], or from Prudhon who
>says 'all property is theft').
I'm unclear what you're saying here Jim. Which examples of primitive accumulation from Goldner did you object to? I didn't get the sense that he was talking about extraordinary theft and con tricks, but ordinary ones. Note, of course, that since I may simply be under the influence of all those who've gotten it wrong. If so, then perhaps it would help if I understood was correct forms of primitive accumulation are, as opposed to those Goldner listed.
If I ever get the blog database operational again, I'll post this and your reply if you don't mind since we had been in midst of discussing goldner's post when the host pulled the plug on our web site. We were starting to get up a good war over lenin!
On that note, OT, but yes, we were experiencing DOS attacks: an IP address a massive number of requests to access the blog. This caused a huge stress on the server, burning up our CPU time. This is sort of like what happens when three buses drop into a McDonalds at 3 pm, causing a huge stress on labor that is prepared only to handle the typical afternoon lull.
We aren't sure why the blog is under attack, but it has coincided with an incident in the Blogosphere where a prominent law professor decided that I was a rightwing provacateur or simply a faculty member posing as someone who isn't a faculty member.
She trolled around my blog, collecting all kinds of data, compiling it and taking screenshots, then accused me of lying about who I really am. She seemed to think I was a faculty member pretending not to be an academic. Apparently, this is the tack to take to lure massive numbers of women to socialist feminism these days. I was unaware! Meanwhile, she threatened to out me offlist by letting me know she knew my real name: maiden, married, single. She'd done her homework! :)
She then asked me to quit my job as said feminist academic and stop destroying feminism and feminists. (Her quotes are now promotional quotes on my sidebar! I stole from doug!)
The incident that sparked the latest blow up was when she did something similar to a prominent feminist blogger and then sent a third party email indicating that she was considering suing said blog for saying bad things about her. heh. I do not make this up.
Around that time, some joker showed up to say that of course I was an imposter. No one could know web design, information security, political theory, catering, etc. and be a real person. (I told him that's because I was really 17 people! Duh!)
Similarly, another prominent blogger -- two actually -- have accused me of being a p uppet master to women and men of color. See, I pull their strings and make them run off to white liberal and progressive blogs to bitch about racism. No, seriously. I don't make this stuff up. Serious people, a serious writer, have said this. I'm not working for the rightwing, getting paid, he said. I'm just a freelancer provocateur.
Again, I have no idea if the two events are connected, but it does seem odd. I try to keep the tinfoil hat on (or is it off), but....
I wasn't so sure when Dwayne Monroe said it was because I'd stirred up the normaloperations of progressive thought out there -- shoving people out of the well-trod grooves -- but it is clearly a political objection since all the people who've made these accusations are influenced by radical feminist thought and/or are progressive threatened by socialist thought.
So, I am unsure of the blog's future since our current host, while somewhat more helpful, will continue the same policy as the former. That's because an attack on us will mean fewer resources for others sharing the same server space. To protect customers who aren't under attack, they pull the plug on the blog and will cut off service all together.
The only solution is, possibly, virtual private hosting or dedicated hosting. I know the former would work, but I'm not sure about the latter.
IOW, the solutions offered -- going to other similarly affordable hosts -- aren't solutions at this time.
And no, getting the police involved is impossible. you have to show major monetary damages first to get any federal help. I think the min. is $5k. And it's really hard to track. The IP packets are coming from China, but virtually all denial of service attacks use IP spoofing to hide the true origin of the attack. Many of them also simply used compromised 'zombie' computers -- like an ordinary computer users who doesn't run a secure machine. Once they've hacked into the zombie, they can us it to launch the attack and use IP spoofing to add still more layers of difficulty tracing the origin.
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