Vocal Minority Quotes

FUCK UNITY! FUCK CONSENSUS! There was no unity or consensus during the American Revolution. We had principled leadership from a small, vocal, minority that refused to compromise on the issue of individual liberty.

However, in a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.

Unfortunately it is often the vocal minority that are heard in times of conflict." Brael Truthseeker Deathsworn Arc 4: Rise of the Archmage - Martyn Stanley

...[One] of the paradoxes of experience is that, in spite of...historical evidence, it is precisely the minority groups that have frequently furnished the most vocal and numerous advocates of fundamental alterations in a capitalist society. They have tended to attribute to capitalism the residual restrictions they experience rather than to recognize that the free market has been the major factor enabling these restrictions to be as small as they are...the purchaser of bread does not know whether it was made from wheat grown by a white man or a [black man], by a Christian or a Jew. In consequence, the producer of wheat is in a position to use resources as effectively as he can, regardless of what the attitudes of the community may be toward his color, the religion, or other characteristics of the people he hires.

Despite being force-fed information today, we cognitively know information is constantly changing and ever expanding. Different authorities have differing interpretations of the same material. The public has a variety of viewpoints on many topics, and understands the special nature of the American spirit where we are free to say, think, and conclude what we wish, free from government or outside censorship (except concerning that which is deemed illegal). The confounding factor is: the majority who understand these things typically believe in following rules and laws, and eschew violence. So, how can they be any match for a vocal, well-funded minority, supported by key media entities, who blatantly circumvent rules and laws, and may successfully impose their ways using violence—often without punishment? Under that scenario, the same side always wins.

All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety—and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx—or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it—and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed. And yet we achieve the process effortlessly. We absorb

Page 259: The bottom line is this. Democracy can be inimical to the interests of market-dominant minorities. There were good reasons why the Indians in Kenya and whites in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and America’s Southern states resisted democratization for generations. Market-dominant minorities do not really want democracy, at least not in the sense of having their fate determined by genuine majority rule. Some readers will surely protest. Many market-dominant minorities—the Chinese in Malaysia, for example, or Jews in Russia, and Americans everywhere—often seem to be among the most vocal advocates of democracy. But “democracy” is a notoriously contested term, meaning different things to different people. When entrepreneurial but politically vulnerable minorities like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, or Jews in Russia call for democracy, they principally have in mind constitutionally guaranteed human rights and property protections for minorities. In other words, in calling for democracy, these “outsider” groups are precisely seeking protection against “tyranny of the majority.

Freed from the limitations of time and space, vocal minorities thus create the false impression that they are speaking for the majority. And this strategy works. Since most of us tend to mistake repetition, confidence, and volume for generally accepted truth, loud minority statements become accepted reflections of reality, regardless of their veracity.

My friend Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, called this idea the theory of “Adjacent Users.” He describes his experience at Instagram, which several years post-launch was growing fast but not at rocketship speed: When I joined Instagram in 2016, the product had over 400 million users, but the growth rate had slowed. We were growing linearly, not exponentially. For many products, that would be viewed as an amazing success, but for a viral social product like Instagram, linear growth doesn’t cut it. Over the next 3 years, the growth team and I discovered why Instagram had slowed, developed a methodology to diagnose our issues, and solved a series of problems that reignited growth and helped us get to over a billion users by the time I left. Our success was anchored on what I now call The Adjacent User Theory. The Adjacent Users are aware of a product and possibly tried using it, but are not able to successfully become an engaged user. This is typically because the current product positioning or experience has too many barriers to adoption for them. While Instagram had product-market fit for 400+ million people, we discovered new groups of billions of users who didn’t quite understand Instagram and how it fit into their lives.67 In my conversations with Bangaly on this topic, he described his approach as a systematic evaluation of the network of networks that constituted Instagram. Rather than focusing on the core network of Power Users—the loud and vocal minority that often drive product decisions—instead the approach was to constantly figure out the adjacent set of users whose experience was subpar. There might be multiple sets of nonfunctional adjacent networks at any given time, and it might require different approaches to fix each one. For some networks, it might be the features of the product, like Instagram not having great support for low-end Android apps. Or it might be because of the quality of their networks—if the right content creators or celebrities hadn’t yet arrived. You fix the experience for these users, then ask yourself again, who are the adjacent users? Then repeat. Bangaly describes this approach: When I started at Instagram, the Adjacent User was women 35–45 years old in the US who had a Facebook account but didn’t see the value of Instagram. By the time I left Instagram, the Adjacent User was women in Jakarta, on an older 3G Android phone with a prepaid mobile plan. There were probably 8 different types of Adjacent Users that we solved for in-between those two points. To solve for the needs of the Adjacent User, the Instagram team had to be nimble, focusing first on pulling the audience of US women from the Facebook network. This required the team to build algorithmic recommendations that utilized Facebook profiles and connections, so that Instagram could surface friends and family on the platform—not just influencers. Later on, targeting users in Jakarta and in other developing countries might involve completely different approaches—refining apps for low-end Android phones with low data connections. As the Adjacent User changes, the strategy has to change as well.

You really need to be careful In taking advice, being influenced, or following and supporting someone on Social Media. Choose to double-check, verify, and apply logic and reasonable thinking in everything. It is because you don’t know the state of mind, intentions, situation, or conditions of the person posting. They might be posting from prison, psychiatric hospital or dark place. They might be bots, egocentric, pessimists, greedy, dishonest, manipulative, narcissistic, vindictive, sarcastic, toxic, selfish, hostile, pedophiles, scammers, murderers, insane, minors, catfish or psychopaths. They might have bipolar disorder. Because they have a large number of followers or they are too vocal it doesn’t mean you should listen and take everything they say.

Hofstadter fretted that in a “populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy,” democracy was open to being co-opted by “the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes,” where “a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.

Slowly, an anti-protest, anti-Black approach to policy took shape in the Nixon White House, with Agnew as its public face. The basic premise of the approach was that America had been for far too long pulled to the left by a too-vocal minority of Americans—Blacks, Latinos, women, students, pacifists, the media, and out-of-touch intellectuals. The Democratic Party’s catering to these groups had resulted in little more than lawlessness, epitomized by the riots. The only way forward for America, the Nixon campaign posited, was leadership that reflected the values of the “silent majority” and a return to “law and order.

The problem is, as Moore pointed out, “That vocal minority will always push around a timid majority. The people who care the most usually get what they want.

In the word vast, the vowel a retains all the virtues of an enlarging vocal agent. Considered vocally, therefore, this word is no longer merely dimensional. Like some soft substance, it receives the balsamic powers of infinite calm. With it, we take infinity into our lungs, and through it, we breathe, cosmically, far from human anguish. Some may find these minor considerations. But no factor, however slight, should be neglected in the estimation of poetic values. And indeed, everything that contributes to giving poetry its decisive psychic action should be included in a philosophy of the dynamic imagination. Sometimes, the most varied, most delicate perceptive values relay one another, in order to dynamize and expand a poem. Long research devoted to Baudelaire's correspondences should elucidate the correspondence of each sense with the spoken word.

There has always been a vocal minority that claims Christians should not feel stressed. In the old days to acknowledge that you felt anxious, depressed or stressed-out indicated spiritual backsliding, failure in your devotional life or your Christian service. As a result, many people kept quiet about it and just tried to cope. There is little evidence in Scripture for this belief. Both Jesus and Paul were careful to make stress positive as well as negative. Jesus warned us that ‘in this world you will have trouble’, also translated as ‘tribulation’ or ‘pressure’ (John 16:33), but went on to say that we should take heart because he had overcome this on our behalf. In other words, we shall experience pressure but it will not destroy us, he will bring us through. Paul indicates that coping with stress is a recurrent problem for Christians when he says that despite his own period of discouragement and despair, God ‘has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers’ (2 Corinthians 1:10–11).

Do you have something to say?" I prompted. "Or do you just enjoy propping up the wall?" Colin considered me for a moment longer. Aunt Arabella likes you." He sounded unflatteringly perplexed. "There is a small but vocal minority of people who do." Colin had the good grace to look abashed. "Look, I didn’t mean to—" "Treat me like I have a loathsome social disease?" His lips quirked with something that might have been amusement. "Do you?" "None that I’d admit to in mixed company." After all, an unhealthy obsession with Cadbury Fruit & Nut bars isn’t the sort of weakness a girl confides in just anybody.

How do you do this every day?” he asked, hating the sound of his own voice. It felt like he’d spent the night gargling glass. They said he had minor trauma to his throat and vocal cords. Whether it was the screaming or the forced oral sex, Bowie didn’t know.

Even with all of this plot to be dispensed, the songs do rise organically out of the script. Doris’s first entrance, in head-to-toe buckskin, finds her astride a stagecoach, belting out the very catchy Sammy Fain/Paul Francis Webster song “The Deadwood Stage (Whip Crack Away).” The rollicking tune and exuberant Day vocal match the physical staging of the song, and character is revealed. Similarly, later in the film there is a lovely quiet moment when Calamity, Bill, the lieutenant, and Katie all ride together in a wagon (with Calamity driving, naturally) to the regiment dance, softly singing the lilting “Black Hills of Dakota.” These are such first-rate musical moments that one is bound to ask, “So what’s the problem?” The answer lies in Day’s performance itself. Although Calamity Jane represents one of Day’s most fondly remembered performances, it is all too much by half. Using a low, gravelly voice and overly exuberant gestures, Day, her body perpetually bent forward, gives a performance like Ethel Merman on film: She is performing to the nonexistent second balcony. This is very strange, because Day is a singer par excellence who understood from her very first film, at least in terms of ballads, that less is more on film. Her understated gestures and keen reading of lyrics made every ballad resonate with audiences, beginning with “It’s Magic” in Romance on the High Seas. Yet here she is, fourteen films later, eyes endlessly whirling, gesturing wildly, and spending most of her time yelling both at Wild Bill Hickok and at the citizens of Deadwood City. As The New York Times review of the film held, in what was admittedly a minority opinion, “As for Miss Day’s performance, it is tempestuous to the point of becoming just a bit frightening—a bit terrifying—at times…. David Butler, who directed, has wound her up tight and let her go. She does everything but hit the ceiling in lashing all over the screen.” She is butch in a very cartoonlike manner, although as always, the tomboyish Day never loses her essential femininity (the fact that her manicured nails are always evident helps…). Her clothing and speech mannerisms may be masculine, but Day herself never is; it is one of the key reasons why audiences embraced her straightforward assertive personality. In the words of John Updike, “There’s a kind of crisp androgynous something that is nice—she has backbone and spunk that I think give her a kind of stiffness in the mind.

TaskRabbit has 25,000 contractors, about 10 percent of whom rely on it for full-time income. Founded five years ago, the company has almost $38 million in venture backing. Arun Sundararajan, an NYU business professor who studies emerging digital economies, said it's not possible to determine whether the complaints are from a vocal minority or represent widespread dissatisfaction. "It seemed like (the new model) was a necessary shift for TaskRabbit to grow, but they may have underestimated the extent to which providers and clients felt a sense of ownership over doing things the old way," he said. "In any marketplace, the people who are trading start to feel engaged with the process they have learned.

we have a very strange relationship with success in this country. Everyone wants it, but a vocal minority insists on denigrating those who have achieved it.

So, 2017 might not have been the year of the woman the way we expected, but the Trump White House did give women, especially minority women, the motivation to become more vocal about the challenges we face. It also reminded us that while we can be aggressive and persistent when necessary, we also need to be aware of its toll on our health.