Mai Waifu

Great headlines write themselves.

Middlesbrough man creates legal history after being convicted of possessing illegal images of cartoon children

We happy few who take residence in Anglophone nations are fortunate enough to be heir to a proud legal tradition ground in common-sense jurisprudence. The common law with its juries and its precedents and its peer system strive for Aristotelean excellence by drawing on the wisdom of crowds at their most placid and reflective. It is true that law-by-tort can still err, but it does possess the distinctive feature of being able to correct errors through deliberation.

Dragging a dude before the court for the possession of hentai is a perversion of the common law. This is the substitution of matters of personal taste for matters of public interest. There is quite literally no victim, no crime being committed here apart from raising the bile of men with the authority to wield the truncheon of the state. I cannot press myself to identify the EE condition under violation apart from the shadow #7 I suggested some time back: "the transaction is not aesthetically offensive."

No other explanation can warrant this wanton disregard for the great tradition of English common law.