Actually, it would. Just like America's did before it gave voting rights to blacks, and just like it did before it gave voting rights to women. Just like Athens was a democracy even though only adult male Athenians who'd completed military training were enfranchised.

No, they don't choose where they're sent, but they choose to sign up knowing the likelihood is they're going to be sent to massacre peasants, not defend their country.

Yeah, that's still a democracy, kid. Life's tough when you learn it's not as black and white as you thought, huh?

There was such a thing as units which got luckier than others, even during WWII. The average unit might have been decimated at least, but to reach that average there have to have been some squads which were almost untouched. That's Captain America's in the MCU.

Yes, these people joined up and went to a horrible war and kinda sorta saved the world, but they weren't any different from any troops who've served before or since. They are/were human and they don't need halos of righteousness for what they did.

I certainly do get to "impose" my standards on others, at least if you consider calling out illiterate adult children on being an illiterate adult child imposing my standards.

What an inane comment. Yes, I am calling you a child. That is a perfectly valid thing to say. There's irrelevant, mean name-calling and there's calling shit as it is. If you only read children's books I will call you a child and feel quite correct in doing so.

No, it doesn't. You are imagining holes in it.

I have no idea what I'm meant to understand by that.

There's also a difference between choosing not to always read at your highest reading level and never, ever even bothering to try to read at higher levels. I read YA; I'm re-reading one of my favourite YA novels right now, The Amulet of Samarkand.

I'd suggest that Hemingway is rather easy to read, and not very good to boot, yes.

Yeah, fuck off you tatty hipster. Non-conformism is fine, but not for non-conformism's sake. That's just pathetic.

Go ahead and assign young adult literature to young adults. There IS worthy, thought provoking, even literary YA stuff out there, and unlike a lot of traditionally assigned reading, it's often genuinely fun to teenagers too. It's just harder to come across than in adult fiction, or the canon of "classical" assigned…

I don't think anyone is arguing for a moral duty to read literature appropriate to their age, or the terrible immorality of reading only YA. We're just saying it's an intellectual disgrace and a pity. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, and yes, I do think reading nothing but YA when you are perfectly capable of…

Complexity is one of many things which are part and parcel of quality.

It is different by definition. Young Adult literature is written to a lower Flesch-Kincaid reading level, one appropriate for young adults, hence the name. A thirty year old who reads nothing but YA is directly comparable to a 16 year old who reads nothing but The Very Hungry Caterpillar and its ilk.

I've read plenty of YA to come to my conclusion, thanks. I don't need to accept new submissions to be perfectly reasonable in thinking that YA has a far, far higher ratio of crap to worthwhile.

I can get why it's tempting to feel how you do in your last paragraph, but honestly, to me, it feels like you've just lowered your expectations out of resignation. To me, it sucks that so few people read, and that many of the few who do only read pop culture YA sucks only very, very fractionally less, to the point I…

Of those I've only read The Hunger Games, and I'd say it's hackneyed, heavily derived from better literature and written to a child's standard. By the way, that last comment is objectively, factually correct, not an opinion. The Hunger Games has a Flesch-Kincaid reading level appropriate to your average 11-13 year old.

This. Books written to a lower Flesch-Kincaid reading level, and usually with less complex plots and characters, are for children, and adults who solely read children's novels should be mocked. At the very least, for not taking the logical next step and going "well, if I like children's fantasy, maybe I'd like fantasy…