My objection to this class of stylistic advices is that they use tricky arguments to prove their point. Usually the authors choose an extraordinarily ugly piece of text (or even make it up, as is probably the case with the description of bicycles in your link) that abounds in the word or grammatical category they despise and want to argue against, then reformulate it in normal language, taking care to avoid the undesired thing, then pretend having proven a general rule that the despised part of language never should be used, save of course few exceptions which they rarely bother explicitly describing. The readers see two pieces of text, one ugly and one readable, and usually accept that the ugliness is caused by the expression they are advised to purge from their writing (which is even not always the case) and that the less they use it, the better (which doesn't follow).

Good writing is not achieved by avoiding everyday expressions and regularly used grammatical features. There are things to be avoided in writing or speech, for sure. But if you are going to ban the most frequent verb which also plays the role of copula and is part of passive and progressive constructions, you are constraining the expressive power of the language, limiting the effectivity of communication, and even making your writing harder to read. It has as much sense as saying you should never use the prepositions "in" and "on"; certainly you can rewrite any text so that the rule is satisfied - and since you are forced to search for alternatives interesting and novel expressions may appear as a by-product - but ultimately, because of artificial limits you have put on yourself, you are not free to say exactly what you want to say.

"Dull to read" is a subjective evaluation I don't share. Moreover, it is exactly the sort of justification which is given (1) to arbitrary norms. When people are told (2) that they shouldn't do X, they easily convince themselves that X feels dull, even if there wouldn't be such a feeling without the (arbitrary) social norm. I don't know for certain whether this is the case of the passive voice, but I am generally skeptical about subjective justifications of existing norms.

As for obscuring reality and the Orwell's essay, see Vladimir_M's comment and the links included therein. One of the more interesting points is that the critics of passive voice generally don't use passive voice less often than the rest of the writers. Maybe I have been careful in this comment and thus am not entirely fair, but I have used passive constructions twice (numbered above) in positions where the active alternative would be much longer, while in the parent comment you have put three instances of passive voice ("justifications are attached", "link is explained", "mention is thrown"; two of them only to spare a short personal pronoun "I").

"Metaphysics of metaethics" is indeed confusing for me, but I usually don't understand anything containing the word "metaphysics", so I am not sure whether the alternative is any better. I agree with your objection to "shocking" and, to a lesser extent, "dissent". No problem with "needless to say".

That answer isn't feasible-- it's based on behaviors after the breakup, so they can't be the cause of the breakup, even if they were present (perhaps in less extreme form) before the breakup.

Also, it's at least possible that the man would have tolerated the same difficult behavior from a woman with larger breasts-- he may have been accurate about his preferences.

What about being accurate about difficult behaviors which are at least theoretically easier to change than basic body features?

I know a woman whose husband had been taking her office supplies, leaving her to think that her memory was seriously erratic. When she found her office supplies in her desk and confronted him about it, he told her off for violating his privacy.

I don't know whether she mentioned this during the breakup, but would it have been a good idea to do so?

Hypertrophy Specific Training lists research that supports their training regimens.

People generally respect doctors. Medical intervention can lend legitimacy to a condition.

A cognitive agent with intentions sounds like it's at least in the same conceptual neighborhood as free will. Perhaps free will has roughly the same role in their models of moral action as intentions do in your model.

If a tornado kills someone we don't say that it acted immorally but if a man does we do (typically). What's the difference between the man and the tornado? While the tornado was just a force of nature, it seems like there's some sense in which the man was an active agent, some way in which the man (unlike the tornado) had control of his actions, chose to kill, or willed the consequences of his actions.

One approach, which many philosophers have taken, is to give the label "free will" to that meaning of agency/control/choice/will/whatever which allows the man to have moral responsibility while the tornado does not, and then work to define what exactly it consists of. That might not be the best move to make, given the many existing definitions and connotations of the term "free will" and all of the attachments and confusions they create, but it's not an inexplicable one.

People still argue those things nowadays though. Any remotely salacious criminal story has hacks crawling out of the woodwork to gloat about how the perpetrators will be raped, and the current Attorney General has deliberately delayed introduction of mechanisms to clamp down on the practice. For a long time one of the most popular proposal out of Britain's "let the public suggest policies" initiative was to send paedophiles to Iraq as human mine detectors.

And you're missing the major reason for the increase in variety of criminal punishments, which is that the increase in the number of non violent crimes. I don't think I'll run too much risk of embarrassing myself if I suggest that mephedrone clinics weren't considered an alternative to jail time 100 years ago.

As to gender, I was under the impression that radically post- and anti- gender views like those expressed by Julie Bindel and Donna Harroway were novel, if there are 19th century author's with similar viewpoints I'd be happy to hear them. Again this is an issue where I don't see any dead viewpoints, so even small increases in radical-ness increase the general width of ideas held.

It strikes me though from the prison issue that our differences are mostly over what qualifies a belief as respectable. There are many beliefs that are no longer taken seriously by liberal academics, if that's what you mean by mainstream then I agree the 19th century showed a much broader range of opinion then ours.

Getting back to my original point, just about everything in the OP is within the range of orthodoxy of public opinion, and everything except "obama is a muslim" within the academic one, and yet they can be modeled as contrary to one another.

I think sensitivity to faint sounds and the ability to sort signal from background noise are separate abilities.

Stars don't die on purpose though, it's not as impressive.