I saw that yesterday and it just makes me sputter with rage at these assholes. Just who in the hell do they think they are? What the fuck is wrong with them?
Republicans.
They are Republicans.
In Florida.
In the tweet it says:
Police are refrained from doing anything.
“Refrained”?? Should that be restrained? Or should it be “police are refraining from doing anything”?
And what police? City? County? State? What governmental has the authority to order the police to arrest these people or at least disperse them? Where does the buck stop?
The evil passive voice succeeds again in obscuring information.
It’s just an incomplete sentence. Should be something like “Police are ordered/encouraged/urged to refrain from doing anything”
Nothing fundamentally wrong with passive. More the fact that copy editing is a lost skill, especially on Twitter
Yes there is – it doesn’t say who restrained (or encouraged them to refrain) from doing anything. And that’s essential information.
That’s not a problem of active/passive. That’s again a copy editing problem. A poorly written sentence is poorly written whether it’s written in active or passive voice.
E.g. “the police were ordered by the mayor to refrain from doing anything” vs “the mayor ordered the police to refrain from doing anything”
Or “Police are refrained from doing anything.”
With the “are” being a typo.
Maybe was originally, “Police are not doing anything”, and in the re-write, didn’t take out the original “are”.
Passive voice is not liked by Akaj because sentences which were written in that voice are the cause of boredom in readers.
Oh. 
You’re probably right. Very good. 
I don’t like passive voice because it obscures the ACTOR, the DOER, the ONE RESPONSIBLE, to wit: “Mistakes were made” is an expression that is commonly used as a rhetorical device, whereby a speaker acknowledges that a situation was handled poorly or inappropriately but seeks to evade any direct admission or accusation of responsibility by not specifying the person who made the mistakes, nor any specific act that was a mistake.
In your examples, the second sentence is a much better sentence than the first one. The subject of the first sentence is “the police.” But they are not actors. They don’t DO anything in that sentence. They were acted upon by the mayor.
Now if your sentence said, “The police did not interfere with the demonstrators because they were following the mayor’s orders…” or “The police permitted the demonstrators to continue to harass drivers because the mayor ordered them to stand down…” then you have the police behaving like subjects of sentences. Like assholes, but definitely the subjects of the sentence.
My usual response to that is, “And the passive voice is spoken.”
How can it be defamation without malice? Does this outlaw satire?
I swear that’s the second time I’ve heard “per capita” used like that in the last week or so.
This is from October, but this is the first time I saw it. And it’s from Breitbart, so don’t click if you don’t want to give them views. According to them, the left tricked the right into not taking vaccinations intentionally to kill them.
Margarine Failure Groane says that 75% of the world’s population has illegally immigrated into the US in the last two years.
(She deleted and re-posted the original tweet, but screenshots are forever.)
It’s more of an abandoned one.
I thought the right was convinced (a) COVID is a hoax, and (b) the vaccines are dangerous.
They sure do here in MAGA country.
I’ve taken up Tai-chi and the classes are indoors for now. Tai-chi involves a lot of stretching and reaching motions, so you need a lot of room to be able to get a good workout. I’ve let it be known that not only have I had 5 COVID jabs, I’ve also had got my flu shot AND shingles shots last year.
As a result, there are only two other people who are willing to work out in my side of the room, the other 10-12 are all crowded together in the other side of the room to avoid any possible vaccine shed or whatever is going on in their little pea-sized brains.
I’m just fine with that and I hope their behavior keeps up when we are able to move outside.
To think what they’d do if you coughed (with covered mouth, turned away) within, say, 20 feet of them.