To be pedantically clear, the first sentence here is not passive! Both clauses there have an explicit subject (‘this’ and ‘we’ respectively) and neither verb (‘means’ and ‘need’) is passivised. I like Geoffrey K. Pullum’s article on what is and isn’t passive: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html
(Not that this means the announcement isn’t problematic, mind you. It still feels like it’s trying to avoid focussing on something. And yes, the second sentence does this by means of the passive voice. I just get annoyed when people misidentify it, as they seem to do regularly.)
It's a tricky judgment call and not everybody will receive it the same. But I like learning little tidbits! Crucially, I don't think poster did a "pedantic correction" for the sake of unfairly dismissing the point ; they did it to educate and that always gets credit in my book :)
To be pedantically clear, the first sentence here is not passive! Both clauses there have an explicit subject (‘this’ and ‘we’ respectively) and neither verb (‘means’ and ‘need’) is passivised. I like Geoffrey K. Pullum’s article on what is and isn’t passive: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html
(Not that this means the announcement isn’t problematic, mind you. It still feels like it’s trying to avoid focussing on something. And yes, the second sentence does this by means of the passive voice. I just get annoyed when people misidentify it, as they seem to do regularly.)