Sure, feel free to speculate. But have you ever been to San Francisco? It's commonplace here. Most of the Chinese-operated massage parlors are semi-tolerated brothels. Law enforcement has ongoing concerns about human trafficking, but it's hard to prove when the proprietors and the sex workers all deny it. (And why wouldn't they?)
Of course nobody is going to post an ad on Craigslist that says, "Truckload of Chinese virgins! Bulk pricing! Serious buyers only!"
The fact that so many "enlightened, sex-positive people" are so willing to wish this kind of stuff into the cornfield is precisely what makes the sex trade so insidious. But if you come to my city -- or any city -- walk its streets and really get to know it, you'll understand that the realities of prostitution for most of the participants are not nearly as pretty as the "independent sex worker entrepreneur" crowd will tell you.
I'm willing to bet that the ability to post ads on Craigslist really does cut down on some of the danger and crime associated with prostitution for some women. That still doesn't make me comfortable with it.
Sorry, but those things have existed forever, and will regardless of any laws or lack thereof. You are always going to have trafficking, weirdos, drug abusers, etc. Your entire argument is bullshit.
So because they exist, we should have ads for Chinese brothels in glossy magazines? On TV?
Legalize (safely) prostitution as is already being done in NV across the country and watch the impact.
I specifically said I was willing to make the assumption that legalized prostitution was the answer. (I don't really believe in anything so simplistic, but I'm willing to accept it for the sake of argument.) So, having missed my point completely, what's yours?
Yeah, but you missed my point. Prostitution isn't legal and you can't get coke at a pharmacy. So let's lobby for the right things here. Lobby for legalized prostitution, lobby for free cocaine for everybody for all I care -- but don't lobby for Craigslist to be allowed to support the existing black markets for coke and women. Whether you consider vice crimes to be victimless crimes or not, right now there are a lot of really rotten people who profit from those markets, and some of the profits go towards other things that you might like a lot less than you like hookers n' blow.
It's not like legalizing this would lead to the collapse of society... even the Church at one point allowed it.
If by "this" you mean prostitution, rather than the posting of ads, then I venture that the collapse of society isn't the whole issue here.
Does society collapse when a hooker gets beaten up by a weirdo? Does society collapse when a bunch of Chinese girls get brought over in a shipping crate to work in a brothel? Does society collapse when a college girl's boyfriend tells her that if she wants to keep the coke coming she needs to turn a few tricks, and it will only be just once or twice? Or, when these things happen, does society just keep on humming the way it always has and nobody needs to give a damn, yet alone raise a finger?
The problem I have is not with prostitution per se, but with half-assed attempts to decriminalize prostitution that contribute to making the situation worse. There's a lot of human misery involved in the sex trade right now. Maybe legalizing prostitution will do away with all of it -- for the sake of argument, let's assume that it will. But until prostitution is really and honestly legalized, for Craigslist to allow posting of prostitution ads now is to support the sex trade as it exists right now, and I can't say I'm really for that.
I never understood what was the point of putting these things in places where turnover is a few minutes.
Think Wi-Fi in McDonald's is weird? Just the other day I saw a big sign advertising "Free Wi-Fi!!!"... on the door of my local Safeway. Now who on Earth goes to the supermarket to surf the Web? And why is it in Safeway's interests to encourage that?
I once heard that the reason McDonald's used to outfit its restaurants with hard plastic bench seats colored garish orange and yellow was for that reason -- so you wouldn't want to stick around too long. Has it changed its mind recently?
Maybe MS Office really IS the best office system in the world - but it should stand on it's own merits, and not rely on all the rest of the MS monopoly.
I don't completely understand this comment. I have used OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, Lotus Symphony, and Google Docs, and not one of them has persuaded me to quit using Microsoft Office. You're welcome to read/write my.doc files using any of the above if you prefer, but I am going to continue to allow myself to be bludgeoned by an unfair monopoly, as you put it -- as do a whole lot of other people. How is that not "standing on its own merits"?
Drifting completely off-topic now, I re-read The Great Gatsby just this year and I thought it was a very good book indeed. I didn't totally hate that one when I read in school, either, though. I've also read Moby-Dick, and while I enjoyed that, too, I thought it was a little overrated. It reads pretty much like one of Melville's longer short works with a primitive treatise on whaling interspersed between the chapters that actually drive the plot forward, and the characters aren't much to speak of, either. I remember that the chapter all about how great it is to eat clam chowder made me hungry, though!;-)
I hear lots and lots of anecdotal stories about people using their work PCs to surf porn. I know somebody who lost his job because of it. Then you hear of cases where an employee -- and I mean big-level management, now, not just some schmuck -- turns a laptop in to IT because "it has viruses" and the IT staffers find that the hard drive is completely full of porn. Of course the exec protests: it must have been his kids getting into his computer. But sure enough, firewall logs show that it was probably all him, from the office. Whether this is because people are unwilling to pay for broadband at home, they just lack common sense, or there really is such a thing as "porn addiction," I'd venture is open to speculation.
Or for that matter, go to Customize, pull up "Commands Not in the Ribbon," and assign "ToggleFull" to the F11 key (the same key that is used in Firefox). Voila! No wasted screen real estate.
BTW -- the obvious counter-argument here is that none of the people I mentioned were really doing what they did explicitly to offend. They all had some higher purpose in mind. But that's what you say. What if someone else -- someone in a position of power -- claims that they don't have any higher purpose? Who gets to decide? The usual argument in favor of "the right to offend" is that no one voice, whether democratically appointed or not, can truly speak for everybody.
You didn't respond to what I said. If someone's goal is to offend, they're a troll.
That's not true. Sometimes it's important to offend intentionally to cast light on the source of the offense. If society is functioning in a certain way because when someone does something outside of the norm it is considered "offensive," it's worth analyzing that. If you can offend, and do it in a public way, it opens up both sides of the debate to public study. Did the offender really do something so awful? Are the mores of the offended really those that we value in our society, or do they only represent one distorted view? Do we pass laws recognizing the views of the offended, or do we need to protect those of the so-called offender?
The Black Panther Party had an important role in the civil rights movement in the United States, but you bet your ass they started out by offending people. Gandhi offended. Nelson Mandela offended. When Renaissance thinkers stole cadavers for the purpose of dissection and published drawings of the inner workings of the human body, they were doing something so repugnant to most people of the day that they were called ghouls and imprisoned. You see my point.
Funny, then, that the generally acknowledged best ST movie (Wrath of Khan) was nothing more than a revenge/action movie without a single philosophical monologue to be seen.
Eh? What about "needs of the many outweigh," and all that...? I mean, they fricken killed off Spock, though deep down we all knew he was coming back.
Actually, though, Wrath of Khan was more of a traditional naval-battle movie set in space. It worked so well in the "Balance of Terror" episode of the original series that they brought it back for a movie.
Re:Free needs to be combined with demand
on
The "Dangers" of Free
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
One person's free is another person's litter.
Very true. Businesses should never underestimate the capacity of something that is "free" to annoy the customer. I thought a little bit about this when Sun Microsystems started talking about how it could monetize JRE downloads by offering the installer as a marketing channel to advertisers. I've often heard people gripe about how annoying it is when, every time you download another JRE update, you have to un-check the little box that says "download and install the Yahoo toolbar too." Most people who download software updates just want the software updates. They don't want some other add-on junk that they never asked for. So here's Sun going to different companies, telling them, "We have millions of downloads a month, you could reach all of those people!" What Sun isn't telling the potential marketers, though, is that if they use that marketing channel, the same customers they are trying to reach will hate them for it.
Yes, people often post useful information anonymously when they don't want to be recognized by their employer or for some other reason. It's part of what has made Slashdot a success, so just get used to it. You might also want to read up on the moderation system.
And, occasionally the trolls are very funny, IMHO.
OK, but the argument here is that videogames aren't taken seriously because they're "juvenile entertainment." As the submitter admitted in his post, above, pretty much nobody in our society with the exception of hardcore gamers believes videogames rise to the level of high art. But Lolita and Ulysses were both recognized as literature by a great many people in society at the time of their publication, despite the fact that some people considered them obscene, and they were both products of the "serious literary world," so-called. They were declared obscene because it was felt that the dissemination (no pun intended) of the ideas that they contained was harmful to society. In other words, they were declared obscene because they were taken seriously as literature. I really don't think that's the same thing as when people decry offensive material in videogames, which by and large are marketed to immature minds (I mean that literally, not as a term of disrespect) for the primary purpose of entertainment. I'm not saying I agree with censorship, but I simply don't believe the motives are the same -- and comparing videogames to literature only weakens the argument, because to most people the two are so vastly different. Except, as I noted before, to hardcore gamers.
The attempt to censor nudity is an attempt to make sex shameful. It is an outright attempt to twist the minds of a population against sex. It's a beg help when it comes to population control as well as STD control. Far better than silly "Abstience only" programs.
That seems kinda silly. I mean, if fighting future Vietnam wars (as you suggest) is the point of all this mind control, then how are we supposed to do that if people aren't having sex? The rich power elite need to preserve a thriving underclass if they are to maintain their power, not annihilate the human race.
Consider instead: what better way to "mind control" people, as you put it, than to string 'em along with sex? Sex is everywhere in our society. Advertising is rife with it. You have 12-year-old girls walking around with their thongs hanging out of their jeans. By making sex "taboo" -- so-called -- you actually make it more alluring. It becomes more effective as a tool of mind control.
Not saying I actually believe this as such, mind you -- but it seems a lot more logical than your conclusion.
So you make my own point. These great novels were never considered "juvenile self-indulgence," as you put it. They were considered obscene, which if you know anything about the history of censorship and obscenity law is hardly the same thing.
For that matter, the publisher who released Lolita in the United States anticipated a lot of controversy, but it never actually happened. While Lolita met with controversy in Britain, in the U.S. it became a bestseller almost immediately upon release, having already been recognized as an exemplary work of art by Nabokov's peers.
Ulysses, on the other hand, was serialized in literary journals over the course of seven years. That's hardly indicative of juvenalia. Joyce had already been recognized as an important writer before he wrote Ulysses.
Does anyone read To Kill a Mockingbird or Scarlet Letter for entertainment? Hardly.
What?? Hawthorne is annoying as hell, but To Kill a Mockingbird is a great read.
Agree with the rest of your post, though.
On a side note, I sometimes think it's a shame that they pick great books to force kids to read in school. Most English teachers seem to be so ill-equipped to make learning enjoyable that they can crush the life out of just about any great literature. I HATED The Catcher in the Rye until I was about twenty-five.
Often, the best option is to re-cast the sentence such that the pronoun is not necessary:
"A friend who touches you where you don't want to be touched is not your friend."
I would only use "he or she" in unusual circumstances. I would never use (s)he, s/he, he/she, or anything else that adds punctuation to a sentence. I would not use "she" as the sole pronoun because that's never been the custom in the English language, though I know some writers who use it. I WOULD use "he" as the sole pronoun because that was how it was always done for most of my life, but usually there are copy editors who catch that type of thing and want you to fix it.
Personally, I think it's all a little silly. Europe, for example, has no such hang-ups -- and not because they have different attitudes toward women, but because their languages regularly use arbitrary genders for nouns of all kinds. In French, a computer is a male but a table is a female. In German they even specify a third gender (neuter). None of it means anything.
One of the biggest merits of going to any college is that after 18 years of hand-holding in the home and public education spheres, the college is not going to baby sit you, beg you to pay your fees on time, order you to attend lecture (though sadly some professors attempt to to artifically give merit to their poor instruction in the form of attendance-grades)
Actually, when I was attending the California community college system (last year), instructors were required to take attendance. A lot of them spent considerable time in the early days of class telling students over and over that it really didn't matter, they didn't care if you showed up or not, they were going to grade you on your work, showing up was your responsibility but if you didn't want to it was no skin off their nose... but that they would get in trouble with the school if they didn't turn in attendance reports. So we spent the first five minutes of a 50-minute class reading roll call.
This is a very strange kind of troll. It's either extremely well done or just downright bizarre. I have decided to respond.
1. 'Illustrations' pass for washed-out commercial hackwork more suited for truck stop restrooms, and nothing else.
I think you mean that the other way around. But without calling out the names of any particular artist whose work you find distasteful, it's kind of hard to respond to your comment.
2. 'Illustrations' do not consist of POW!, BOOM! RATATATATT!, BLAM!, or any other such nonsense.
Roy Lichtenstein thought they did. But it's strange that you should bring this up, since comparatively few modern comic books bother to put in the sound effects anymore. They don't often do thought balloons, either. It's a stylistic preference that I suspect comes from the influence of film on the medium. Anything labeled a "graphic novel" is even less likely to include sound effects than the common comic book. When's the last time you saw one of these things you claim to hate so much?
3. 'Storylines' are shallow, simplistic, cheap, generic, and recycled from comic book to comic book.
That's true. But not from graphic novel to graphic novel. Who was it who told you that nobody made a distinction between the two?
4. Sold with the intent to maximize profits and minimize costs.
This seems to be a goal of just about any business in existence. If you're claiming that comic book publishers do this more than anyone else, however, you seem to be arguing ad hominem. Got any evidence?
5. So simple even a 2nd grader could read and follow it.....And they do.
You mean like Anne of Green Gables? Then again, that's sold over 50 million copies. Talk about maximizing profit for minimal costs!
Overall your post seems very strange and disjointed. You claim that comic books are not graphic novels -- and most sensible people agree -- but then go on to claim that graphic novels are nothing like real novels and that real novels are more like episodic gag newspaper comics. I have to question what your experience of reading novels has been if you believe this to be the case. Calvin and Hobbes, for instance, while being a fine example of truly brilliant cartooning, has none of the characteristics of a novel.
Novels are like fine wines, whereas comic books are the literary equivalent of bathtub gin, while good graphic novels compare favorably to prose novels.
But then, as I said earlier, I know you're just trolling.
BTW, if art that resembles more classical illustration is your cup o' tea, you should head to Europe sometime and check out the Franco-Belgian comics scene.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, feel free to speculate. But have you ever been to San Francisco? It's commonplace here. Most of the Chinese-operated massage parlors are semi-tolerated brothels. Law enforcement has ongoing concerns about human trafficking, but it's hard to prove when the proprietors and the sex workers all deny it. (And why wouldn't they?)
Of course nobody is going to post an ad on Craigslist that says, "Truckload of Chinese virgins! Bulk pricing! Serious buyers only!"
The fact that so many "enlightened, sex-positive people" are so willing to wish this kind of stuff into the cornfield is precisely what makes the sex trade so insidious. But if you come to my city -- or any city -- walk its streets and really get to know it, you'll understand that the realities of prostitution for most of the participants are not nearly as pretty as the "independent sex worker entrepreneur" crowd will tell you.
I'm willing to bet that the ability to post ads on Craigslist really does cut down on some of the danger and crime associated with prostitution for some women. That still doesn't make me comfortable with it.
Sorry, but those things have existed forever, and will regardless of any laws or lack thereof. You are always going to have trafficking, weirdos, drug abusers, etc. Your entire argument is bullshit.
So because they exist, we should have ads for Chinese brothels in glossy magazines? On TV?
Legalize (safely) prostitution as is already being done in NV across the country and watch the impact.
I specifically said I was willing to make the assumption that legalized prostitution was the answer. (I don't really believe in anything so simplistic, but I'm willing to accept it for the sake of argument.) So, having missed my point completely, what's yours?
Yeah, but you missed my point. Prostitution isn't legal and you can't get coke at a pharmacy. So let's lobby for the right things here. Lobby for legalized prostitution, lobby for free cocaine for everybody for all I care -- but don't lobby for Craigslist to be allowed to support the existing black markets for coke and women. Whether you consider vice crimes to be victimless crimes or not, right now there are a lot of really rotten people who profit from those markets, and some of the profits go towards other things that you might like a lot less than you like hookers n' blow.
You're worried about that when he got both the title of the book and the name of the publisher wrong?
It's not like legalizing this would lead to the collapse of society... even the Church at one point allowed it.
If by "this" you mean prostitution, rather than the posting of ads, then I venture that the collapse of society isn't the whole issue here.
Does society collapse when a hooker gets beaten up by a weirdo? Does society collapse when a bunch of Chinese girls get brought over in a shipping crate to work in a brothel? Does society collapse when a college girl's boyfriend tells her that if she wants to keep the coke coming she needs to turn a few tricks, and it will only be just once or twice? Or, when these things happen, does society just keep on humming the way it always has and nobody needs to give a damn, yet alone raise a finger?
The problem I have is not with prostitution per se, but with half-assed attempts to decriminalize prostitution that contribute to making the situation worse. There's a lot of human misery involved in the sex trade right now. Maybe legalizing prostitution will do away with all of it -- for the sake of argument, let's assume that it will. But until prostitution is really and honestly legalized, for Craigslist to allow posting of prostitution ads now is to support the sex trade as it exists right now, and I can't say I'm really for that.
I never understood what was the point of putting these things in places where turnover is a few minutes.
Think Wi-Fi in McDonald's is weird? Just the other day I saw a big sign advertising "Free Wi-Fi!!!" ... on the door of my local Safeway. Now who on Earth goes to the supermarket to surf the Web? And why is it in Safeway's interests to encourage that?
I once heard that the reason McDonald's used to outfit its restaurants with hard plastic bench seats colored garish orange and yellow was for that reason -- so you wouldn't want to stick around too long. Has it changed its mind recently?
Maybe MS Office really IS the best office system in the world - but it should stand on it's own merits, and not rely on all the rest of the MS monopoly.
I don't completely understand this comment. I have used OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, Lotus Symphony, and Google Docs, and not one of them has persuaded me to quit using Microsoft Office. You're welcome to read/write my .doc files using any of the above if you prefer, but I am going to continue to allow myself to be bludgeoned by an unfair monopoly, as you put it -- as do a whole lot of other people. How is that not "standing on its own merits"?
Drifting completely off-topic now, I re-read The Great Gatsby just this year and I thought it was a very good book indeed. I didn't totally hate that one when I read in school, either, though. I've also read Moby-Dick, and while I enjoyed that, too, I thought it was a little overrated. It reads pretty much like one of Melville's longer short works with a primitive treatise on whaling interspersed between the chapters that actually drive the plot forward, and the characters aren't much to speak of, either. I remember that the chapter all about how great it is to eat clam chowder made me hungry, though! ;-)
I hear lots and lots of anecdotal stories about people using their work PCs to surf porn. I know somebody who lost his job because of it. Then you hear of cases where an employee -- and I mean big-level management, now, not just some schmuck -- turns a laptop in to IT because "it has viruses" and the IT staffers find that the hard drive is completely full of porn. Of course the exec protests: it must have been his kids getting into his computer. But sure enough, firewall logs show that it was probably all him, from the office. Whether this is because people are unwilling to pay for broadband at home, they just lack common sense, or there really is such a thing as "porn addiction," I'd venture is open to speculation.
Well, it does use the same concurrency model as Erlang, but Erlang has no concept of classes.
Neither does Axum.
Or for that matter, go to Customize, pull up "Commands Not in the Ribbon," and assign "ToggleFull" to the F11 key (the same key that is used in Firefox). Voila! No wasted screen real estate.
BTW -- the obvious counter-argument here is that none of the people I mentioned were really doing what they did explicitly to offend. They all had some higher purpose in mind. But that's what you say. What if someone else -- someone in a position of power -- claims that they don't have any higher purpose? Who gets to decide? The usual argument in favor of "the right to offend" is that no one voice, whether democratically appointed or not, can truly speak for everybody.
You didn't respond to what I said. If someone's goal is to offend, they're a troll.
That's not true. Sometimes it's important to offend intentionally to cast light on the source of the offense. If society is functioning in a certain way because when someone does something outside of the norm it is considered "offensive," it's worth analyzing that. If you can offend, and do it in a public way, it opens up both sides of the debate to public study. Did the offender really do something so awful? Are the mores of the offended really those that we value in our society, or do they only represent one distorted view? Do we pass laws recognizing the views of the offended, or do we need to protect those of the so-called offender?
The Black Panther Party had an important role in the civil rights movement in the United States, but you bet your ass they started out by offending people. Gandhi offended. Nelson Mandela offended. When Renaissance thinkers stole cadavers for the purpose of dissection and published drawings of the inner workings of the human body, they were doing something so repugnant to most people of the day that they were called ghouls and imprisoned. You see my point.
Funny, then, that the generally acknowledged best ST movie (Wrath of Khan) was nothing more than a revenge/action movie without a single philosophical monologue to be seen.
Eh? What about "needs of the many outweigh," and all that...? I mean, they fricken killed off Spock, though deep down we all knew he was coming back.
Actually, though, Wrath of Khan was more of a traditional naval-battle movie set in space. It worked so well in the "Balance of Terror" episode of the original series that they brought it back for a movie.
One person's free is another person's litter.
Very true. Businesses should never underestimate the capacity of something that is "free" to annoy the customer. I thought a little bit about this when Sun Microsystems started talking about how it could monetize JRE downloads by offering the installer as a marketing channel to advertisers. I've often heard people gripe about how annoying it is when, every time you download another JRE update, you have to un-check the little box that says "download and install the Yahoo toolbar too." Most people who download software updates just want the software updates. They don't want some other add-on junk that they never asked for. So here's Sun going to different companies, telling them, "We have millions of downloads a month, you could reach all of those people!" What Sun isn't telling the potential marketers, though, is that if they use that marketing channel, the same customers they are trying to reach will hate them for it.
Yes, people often post useful information anonymously when they don't want to be recognized by their employer or for some other reason. It's part of what has made Slashdot a success, so just get used to it. You might also want to read up on the moderation system.
And, occasionally the trolls are very funny, IMHO.
OK, but the argument here is that videogames aren't taken seriously because they're "juvenile entertainment." As the submitter admitted in his post, above, pretty much nobody in our society with the exception of hardcore gamers believes videogames rise to the level of high art. But Lolita and Ulysses were both recognized as literature by a great many people in society at the time of their publication, despite the fact that some people considered them obscene, and they were both products of the "serious literary world," so-called. They were declared obscene because it was felt that the dissemination (no pun intended) of the ideas that they contained was harmful to society. In other words, they were declared obscene because they were taken seriously as literature. I really don't think that's the same thing as when people decry offensive material in videogames, which by and large are marketed to immature minds (I mean that literally, not as a term of disrespect) for the primary purpose of entertainment. I'm not saying I agree with censorship, but I simply don't believe the motives are the same -- and comparing videogames to literature only weakens the argument, because to most people the two are so vastly different. Except, as I noted before, to hardcore gamers.
The attempt to censor nudity is an attempt to make sex shameful. It is an outright attempt to twist the minds of a population against sex. It's a beg help when it comes to population control as well as STD control. Far better than silly "Abstience only" programs.
That seems kinda silly. I mean, if fighting future Vietnam wars (as you suggest) is the point of all this mind control, then how are we supposed to do that if people aren't having sex? The rich power elite need to preserve a thriving underclass if they are to maintain their power, not annihilate the human race.
Consider instead: what better way to "mind control" people, as you put it, than to string 'em along with sex? Sex is everywhere in our society. Advertising is rife with it. You have 12-year-old girls walking around with their thongs hanging out of their jeans. By making sex "taboo" -- so-called -- you actually make it more alluring. It becomes more effective as a tool of mind control.
Not saying I actually believe this as such, mind you -- but it seems a lot more logical than your conclusion.
So you make my own point. These great novels were never considered "juvenile self-indulgence," as you put it. They were considered obscene, which if you know anything about the history of censorship and obscenity law is hardly the same thing.
For that matter, the publisher who released Lolita in the United States anticipated a lot of controversy, but it never actually happened. While Lolita met with controversy in Britain, in the U.S. it became a bestseller almost immediately upon release, having already been recognized as an exemplary work of art by Nabokov's peers.
Ulysses, on the other hand, was serialized in literary journals over the course of seven years. That's hardly indicative of juvenalia. Joyce had already been recognized as an important writer before he wrote Ulysses.
Compare to videogames.
At one point Lolita and Ulysses were nothing more than "juvenile self-indulgence" ...
Um, since you bothered to link to Wikipedia, need I say more than "citation needed"?
Does anyone read To Kill a Mockingbird or Scarlet Letter for entertainment? Hardly.
What?? Hawthorne is annoying as hell, but To Kill a Mockingbird is a great read.
Agree with the rest of your post, though.
On a side note, I sometimes think it's a shame that they pick great books to force kids to read in school. Most English teachers seem to be so ill-equipped to make learning enjoyable that they can crush the life out of just about any great literature. I HATED The Catcher in the Rye until I was about twenty-five.
Disclaimer: IAAE (I Am An Editor)
Often, the best option is to re-cast the sentence such that the pronoun is not necessary:
"A friend who touches you where you don't want to be touched is not your friend."
I would only use "he or she" in unusual circumstances. I would never use (s)he, s/he, he/she, or anything else that adds punctuation to a sentence. I would not use "she" as the sole pronoun because that's never been the custom in the English language, though I know some writers who use it. I WOULD use "he" as the sole pronoun because that was how it was always done for most of my life, but usually there are copy editors who catch that type of thing and want you to fix it.
Personally, I think it's all a little silly. Europe, for example, has no such hang-ups -- and not because they have different attitudes toward women, but because their languages regularly use arbitrary genders for nouns of all kinds. In French, a computer is a male but a table is a female. In German they even specify a third gender (neuter). None of it means anything.
One of the biggest merits of going to any college is that after 18 years of hand-holding in the home and public education spheres, the college is not going to baby sit you, beg you to pay your fees on time, order you to attend lecture (though sadly some professors attempt to to artifically give merit to their poor instruction in the form of attendance-grades)
Actually, when I was attending the California community college system (last year), instructors were required to take attendance. A lot of them spent considerable time in the early days of class telling students over and over that it really didn't matter, they didn't care if you showed up or not, they were going to grade you on your work, showing up was your responsibility but if you didn't want to it was no skin off their nose ... but that they would get in trouble with the school if they didn't turn in attendance reports. So we spent the first five minutes of a 50-minute class reading roll call.
This is a very strange kind of troll. It's either extremely well done or just downright bizarre. I have decided to respond.
1. 'Illustrations' pass for washed-out commercial hackwork more suited for truck stop restrooms, and nothing else.
I think you mean that the other way around. But without calling out the names of any particular artist whose work you find distasteful, it's kind of hard to respond to your comment.
2. 'Illustrations' do not consist of POW!, BOOM! RATATATATT!, BLAM!, or any other such nonsense.
Roy Lichtenstein thought they did. But it's strange that you should bring this up, since comparatively few modern comic books bother to put in the sound effects anymore. They don't often do thought balloons, either. It's a stylistic preference that I suspect comes from the influence of film on the medium. Anything labeled a "graphic novel" is even less likely to include sound effects than the common comic book. When's the last time you saw one of these things you claim to hate so much?
3. 'Storylines' are shallow, simplistic, cheap, generic, and recycled from comic book to comic book.
That's true. But not from graphic novel to graphic novel. Who was it who told you that nobody made a distinction between the two?
4. Sold with the intent to maximize profits and minimize costs.
This seems to be a goal of just about any business in existence. If you're claiming that comic book publishers do this more than anyone else, however, you seem to be arguing ad hominem. Got any evidence?
5. So simple even a 2nd grader could read and follow it.....And they do.
You mean like Anne of Green Gables? Then again, that's sold over 50 million copies. Talk about maximizing profit for minimal costs!
Overall your post seems very strange and disjointed. You claim that comic books are not graphic novels -- and most sensible people agree -- but then go on to claim that graphic novels are nothing like real novels and that real novels are more like episodic gag newspaper comics. I have to question what your experience of reading novels has been if you believe this to be the case. Calvin and Hobbes, for instance, while being a fine example of truly brilliant cartooning, has none of the characteristics of a novel.
Novels are like fine wines, whereas comic books are the literary equivalent of bathtub gin, while good graphic novels compare favorably to prose novels.
But then, as I said earlier, I know you're just trolling.
BTW, if art that resembles more classical illustration is your cup o' tea, you should head to Europe sometime and check out the Franco-Belgian comics scene.