Re: on being elitist...

At 07:48 AM 1/17/96 -0600, Ed Carp, KHIJOL SysAdmin wrote:
I would say that an "elitist" is one who believes that the masses (or the great unwashed, depending on your point of view) are somehow "not deserving" of surviving or "not worth it"
The contemporary PC definition of elitist is "One who believes that people are capable of excellence." And an anti-elitist is "One who believes that people are utterly incapable of excellence." Hence Public Education. I'm sure that some on this list think that people will prosper at different rates but I don't think too many expect a great die off of the masses because of their inability to compete. The cypherpunks relevance is that some members of this list want to use cypherpunk tools to protect their differential income from *greedy* governments who want to get their bloody hands on it. DCF "And Hillary said, 'Bill Gates is greedy because he has amassed a fortune of US$15,000,000,000 but the US Government is a helpful Village because it takes US$1,400,000,000,000 from us each year and does good things with it.'"
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Duncan Frissell