330 DEAR HACKER

330 DEAR HACKER

comment on some of the positions you have advocated over the past months.

I first became really bothered at what appeared to be your defense of the WTO rioters and demonstrators in Seattle. I have followed some of the figures involved in organizing these demonstrations for a while and find them to be nothing more than professional anarchists and modern-day Bolsheviks. Apart from advocating socialist revolution, they are in it only to cause violence and disruption and have nothing constructive to offer politically. I would wager that most of the mob accompanying them are entirely ignorant of the actual political mo- tives of their “leaders,” and are just looking to fulfill an adrenaline rush. Fortunately, what views this lot does manage to articulate are so radical and fringe, it is unlikely they ever will gain a wide following.

I also want to address some of your comments in response to letters in the 18:3 issue. Your attacks on gun ownership utilize some of the same distorted, one-sided statistics used by gun control advocates for years. The 75 percent reduction in gun-related deaths in Canada compared to the United States includes police shootings and instances of self defense in this country. Citizens in the United States use firearms in self-defense against crime more that 6,000 times per day, and less than five percent of those instances require the pulling of a trigger.

The way we do things here in the United States is not now, has never been, and never will be perfect. Yet many voices such as yours advocate tearing it all down because of that lack of perfection. As long as human nature remains as it is, your utopian pursuits will remain a fairy tale quest. The fact is that, like it or not, we live in the best system in the world. It should continue to be criticized and improved, and we all need to be alert to those who try to twist the rules for their own benefit and the detriment of others. That is something often done well by 2600 by pointing out the danger and folly inherent in things like the DMCA or MPAA. You have it partially right in your belief that less government is better, but you also need to realize that corporations are not all evil. Naturally they are very self-interested and often they do stupid things, but by trying to punish a couple of dozen people in

a board room, you also end up seriously harming hundreds, if not

OUR BIGGEST FANS

thousands, of employees who are just trying to make a living and take care of their families.

So, as you get busy painting me as a Nazi kook or some such thing, I will take my leave of you secure in the knowledge that, like the WTO demonstrators in Seattle, your views will no doubt be regarded as so radically fringe that you won’t gain much of a following either.

G. Conterio Calling us names and then virtually daring us to call you names in return says more

about you than any name ever could. That said, let’s quickly dismantle your logic so we can move on with more technical matters. The WTO protesters, particularly in Seattle, enveloped a wide range of political beliefs, left, right, and center. Even the mass media occasionally got this right. The revisionism that has turned these peaceful protests into riots is very self serving to those who want to demonize the entire anti-globalization movement. But the firsthand accounts and unedited footage tell a very different story. Listen to our own coverage from November and December of 1999 on our website in the “Off The Hook” section where we tracked down dozens of these firsthand accounts. This is not to say there weren’t a few idiots who tried to cause problems by destroying property. But these people hardly defined the mood of the rest and even their actions paled in comparison to the actual violence perpetrated by the police, which to this day remains completely unpunished. Talk to people who were actually there and come up with some unedited footage that backs up your conclusions before you condemn an entire group of people. And if you can find any way that what we’re saying here differs from the things we’ve been saying since our first issue, please let us know.

It’s wonderful to know that citizens in the U.S. are constantly using guns to prevent crime (although it’s a bit puzzling to figure out where such statistics are kept). But in other parts of the world, they somehow manage to prevent a whole lot more crime without using guns at all! And of course, there’s the matter of all the gun-related crimes that we fail to prevent, which was sort of the whole point. The simple fact is that we have a major problem and getting more guns is certainly not the answer. And our statistics come from such biased organizations as hospitals, police depart- ments, the Centers for Disease Control, and the United Nations. And they all seem to correlate quite nicely.