Quote - What is the purpose or point of a cartoon that shows gratuitous child abuse? What possible reason could it have just to exist?

That's a serious question, BTW.

Though I can't recall having ever seen an actual child that looked very much like a manga cartoon, I'm not going to defend its right to exist. What is the right of you just to exist? Or me? While I believe I do understand why you take offense, if you're claiming there actually needs to be a reason for something, anything, "just to exist," jeez, is that going to open up a can of worms ... !

As for other, and admittedly very serious, considerations, the notion that any sort of crime or urge can be effectively prevented, or even curtailed, by controlling media I just consider a bit wrong-headed. I understand the impulse of course. It's there, it's in your face, it's obvious, it's a simple explanation, but if media are the problem, how do we explain most of history, in which socially-sanctioned murder and underage incest, just for examples, were often greater than in modern times, and in which media often played an almost nonexistent role?

Just because some people will abuse their freedoms doesn't necessarily mean the solution is to take everyone's freedoms away. Solutions, while at times needed, nearly always bring with them a new and often equally bad, or worse, set of problems. Folks generally have to choose which set of problems they are more or less willing to live with. It is the nature of the human dilemma that there are no perfect answers, nor final solutions. That's just the human condition.

Just my 2 cents of course, but for anyone who wants to live in a society that allows them any sense of personal freedom for themselves, I can't help but wonder if maybe part of the price is having to deal with the reality that a few nuts and sickos will sometimes abuse those same freedoms and behave badly? And when they do, by golly let's punish them but good. But how about let's be a little bit reluctant to punish them for their thoughts and expressions, and far more readily for their actual behavior?