Don’t you have to be a little detached, considering the casual way in which Russia treats human life? I hear their soldiers survive the front lines for 30 minutes on average. I don’t have all the information to pass moral judgement on the 3am events of that night. Even if I had all the information available, I still don’t know how I would pass judgement on his life (so far). He seems to spend his time consumed by a thankless, endless task. Is it penance now? Was it some kind of penance before? Can people even/ever be redeemed?
How do we keep dreaming about a future worth fighting for when so much bad stuff has happened, stuff that must be the foundation on which we build?
In 2019 he was working on core-js full time without pay, living in Russia because it was cheaper. By his own account, three weeks after a big release he was driving home at 3 a.m. when two young women on a dark road ended up under his car, and one of them died. The families asked for about $80,000, and the prosecutor asked for seven years.
He added a message that appeared in the terminal every time anyone installed core-js, asking for help or a job. Millions of developers saw it, and many of them complained about the message. He went to prison in January 2020 and was released early, about ten months later.
I am bad at passive and active. Would you explain in-context please?
How do two people end up under a car that’s being driven, unless he ran them over? If someone died because of the consequences of his actions, how could it be construed that he didn’t kill them?
Active and passive is just that - passive voice absolves responsibility by detaching what happened from who did it.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Active vs passive is just two bits of grammar in English and other languages. One thing you can do with the passive voice is to not say who did something, yes, but the sentences above are simply communicating different things. One is not the passive version of the other.
There are many ways to obscure blame without using the passive voice. “ended up under” and “died” are both active, not passive.
Saying Hailey’s version in the passive would look like
Two young women were ran over [by him], and one was killed [by him].
It would be hard to add the detail about this being related to him driving home without the blame being very obvious, so the passive voice doesn’t work for obscuring blame in this case. So the author chose the active voice with a different choice of framing and different verb choices to obscure the blame instead.
It’s bad! I recoiled when reading it. It’s just that it’s bad for reasons unrelated to the passive voice.
I’ve heard of this as the exonerative voice before: tends to get used a lot when talking about police action, in that someone “ends up injured after being in an area where police were also present” while not mentioning that police caused the injury.
You’re correct that it’s not strictly the passive voice, it’s further down the road than passive.
Using passive voice to describe a prison sentence for killing a woman really took me out of it for some reason.
score 1 · canonical
Don’t you have to be a little detached, considering the casual way in which Russia treats human life? I hear their soldiers survive the front lines for 30 minutes on average. I don’t have all the information to pass moral judgement on the 3am events of that night. Even if I had all the information available, I still don’t know how I would pass judgement on his life (so far). He seems to spend his time consumed by a thankless, endless task. Is it penance now? Was it some kind of penance before? Can people even/ever be redeemed?
How do we keep dreaming about a future worth fighting for when so much bad stuff has happened, stuff that must be the foundation on which we build?
score 1 · canonical
I am bad at passive and active. Would you explain in-context please?
score 1 · canonical
Passive voice:
Active voice:
score 1 · canonical
That’s not even passive vs active, that’s saying two completely different things.
score 1 · canonical
How do two people end up under a car that’s being driven, unless he ran them over? If someone died because of the consequences of his actions, how could it be construed that he didn’t kill them?
Active and passive is just that - passive voice absolves responsibility by detaching what happened from who did it.
score 1 · canonical
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Active vs passive is just two bits of grammar in English and other languages. One thing you can do with the passive voice is to not say who did something, yes, but the sentences above are simply communicating different things. One is not the passive version of the other.
There are many ways to obscure blame without using the passive voice. “ended up under” and “died” are both active, not passive.
Saying Hailey’s version in the passive would look like
It would be hard to add the detail about this being related to him driving home without the blame being very obvious, so the passive voice doesn’t work for obscuring blame in this case. So the author chose the active voice with a different choice of framing and different verb choices to obscure the blame instead.
It’s bad! I recoiled when reading it. It’s just that it’s bad for reasons unrelated to the passive voice.
score 1 · canonical
I’ve heard of this as the exonerative voice before: tends to get used a lot when talking about police action, in that someone “ends up injured after being in an area where police were also present” while not mentioning that police caused the injury.
You’re correct that it’s not strictly the passive voice, it’s further down the road than passive.
score 1 · canonical