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Notes -
See the wiki for example cases of it actually being enforced.
Yes and that's happened to adult pornography too.
You will also note from your article:
(If something is prosecuted so rarely that it's four cases in decades, most of them as a tacked-on charge involving other crimes, and they all get detailed on Wikipedia because they're that rare, then it's basically legal. There have been tens of thousands of prosecutions of real CP in the same timeframe.)
You will also note that unlike with real child pornography, the law you cited does not make strict liability possession illegal (only possession with the intent to distribute) which is a big difference.
Sorry, but you're just plain and simple wrong here.
For example, nhentai, which openly hosts thousands of lolicon doujins and is so well-known that you may have seen the meme even on Reddit and Twitter of a string of numbers being used to refer to a doujin (which also happens to feature drawn underage sex) in its catalogue (which is so popular it even has merchandise), is more popular than BLACKED.com, Bang Bros, /r/GoneWild, 4chan (which also openly hosts lolicon on its /b/ board), popular anime blog Sankaku Complex (which also hosts lolicon), Truth Social, and Mastodon (other than during its recent post-Elon spike), and is close to the most popular legal anime streaming site Crunchyroll. (That is, it is not some obscure site nobody knows about and is actually quite popular.)
It's been legally registered in the US since 2014. So, no, a few prosecutions tacked on to other charges doesn't change much unless you can point out an equivalent to the above for IRL CP.
This thread is basically becoming unreadable/unusable, which kind of sucks, because we're finally getting back to economics: apparently, these things can also be complements. It's a shame we're not going to get some good econometrics for how strong these various effects are. As I said before, it's probably silly to think that we can flood the market with cheap prescription opioids and not end up with problem users; it's probably also silly to think that we can flood the market with cheap fake child porn and not end up with problem users.
Okay but if by "cheap fake child porn" you mean erotic material of fictional children like lolicon (as opposed to AI-generated or whatever stuff that is indistinguishable from the real thing) then this has already happened as I've just proven. So whatever effects you're proposing should have been in place for decades now. So you'd have to define what "problem users" are and be specific about what you think should have already been the effects.
"Problem users" can take a few forms, but the most damaging form is those who find that real child porn is a complement for them. The effects could include things like causing enough people to think, "This isn't a real problem," that we have silly ideas percolating in academia which normalize sexual attraction being primarily oriented toward kids/fake kids.
Considering this gets into "Does GTA cause real violence (or maybe an increase in consumption of snuff films)?" territory and the answer to that overwhelmingly seems to be "No" then I think you'd need some serious evidentiary justification to think otherwise in this case.
It's implicitly biology that creates the norms of sexual attraction (the inherent and internal ones anyway, which are the most important as sexual attraction is primarily a psychologically endogenous phenomenon). You could put glossily-highlighted bottles of brake fluid in tiny thongs posed on silky red sheets on billboards for years and people still aren't going to become sexually attracted to them anyway because there's no internal impetus for it.
Thus, social structures can, for the most part, only stigmatize what is already there as far as I can tell. (And your response to this can be to say that certain things should stay stigmatized, but that's a different argument.) If viewing minors sexually is at risk of being destigmatized, then that must be because it's already relatively psychologically normal (per our brake fluid example, or perhaps maybe a reverse campaign to try to stop people from being attracted to something they inevitably will always be attracted to like nicely-shaped asses), and those same psychological impulses are almost certainly those that lead to the consumption of lolicon, etc. in the first place.
(If you had asked me I definitely would have told you that lolicon consumption and consumption of content of real children are by no means exclusive in many cases. I just see no reason to think that it's the lolicon somehow implanting a desire that wasn't there as opposed to the same inherent desire leading people to both (with it naturally leading people to real CP less because of course they're going to make a risk/reward analysis of consuming it and the fake stuff is much less risky, which has been my whole argument so far). If implanting sexual desire were significantly possible, then why haven't corporations used their massive media influence to give us all a findom-esque fetish for giving them money by now?)
You may be interested in these other replies I wrote on the subject:
https://www.themotte.org/post/181/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/32004?context=8#context (You may want to pay careful attention to the argument in the edit at the end of this post which I glossed over a bit in the main section but I think is crucial for predicting the social effects of the widespread consumption of any pornography.)
https://www.themotte.org/post/181/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/32330#context
There is no scientific basis for the claim that biological determinism of sexual attraction is true. Even my old queer theory prof (probably one of the most likely people, categorized by occupation, to support your political goals) said that she was agnostic on biological determinism.
There may be a spectrum between video games and opioids on the nature/nurture spectrum, but we have pretty much jack for good evidence on where anything is or how the spectrums are structured. I could sit here and propose a hundred plausible reasons why existing data on one looks different than existing data on others, but we wouldn't have the ability in this thread to devise/execute the necessary follow-on experiments to tease out any real answers.
To that end, I'm simply going to assert that I find it unlikely that we're going to flood the market with cheap fake child porn without having the result be some increase in the number of problem users. If you disagree, this is probably just a fundamental disagreement that is the crux, and which neither of us is going to have a chance of providing suitable data for convincing the other.
That said, if the cost of a substitute good is decreased, the price of a good will also decrease.
Really? Might I introduce you to my friend Mr. Darwin? If biology is not king here, then how did your millions of primitive ancestors who lived in no real society at all decide who was hot or not?
I don't think there's any way I can be both perfectly nice and perfectly clear about saying that there's probably no breed of "intellectual" I have less respect for (or value the opinion/"knowledge" of) than anyone involved in "queer theory". (And I will absolutely have to question your intellectual faculties if you took this class voluntarily.)
Almost certainly not, given that my political goals include the elevation of fascist/Aryan power and absolute masculine dominance over females, reducing them to property/chattel slaves.
Okay and you have not proven that's the case here even though what you thought hadn't happened yet already has. (If a legally registered site full of free lolicon being more popular than some of the most well-known porn brands in the world isn't the market being flooded, then what is?)
Mr. Darwin absolutely was not the final word on the nature/nurture debate. Like, at all.
It was right at the very beginning of when some of the principles of wokeism were starting to become more widespread (before the word "woke" existed to describe it). I couldn't quite figure out what the hell was going on with the ideas that were starting to be 'out there' and thought that maybe I could go find some core motte that made some sense. Spoiler: I did not.
You may be right that the market is already flooded. The market was flooded with prescription opioids long before it became commonly understood that we were causing a problem. "There are two ways you go broke: very slowly, then all of a sudden." Frankly, this paragraph is related to the last one. Wokeism was long-brewing, and even when it started leaking it was "just a weird group of losers in a small number of universities". Someone like you could have pointed to data on violent video games and sworn up and down that such a thing couldn't possibly sweep the world in such a fashion. I was early to the game of realizing that wokeism was a problem, late to the game of realizing that opioid prescriptions were a problem (was a 'normie' on that topic, not paying any attention to it, really), and maybe I'm just on the early side on this one.
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