I can't even get AoV's politics or world view out of him

Me either, but if we argue about the same topic I will get the same responses back from him every time. And trust me, we have argued the same topics many times. I don't need to agree to find the principle still endearing.

I believe I already told you (maybe it was someone else, though) that if it were up to me, I'd ban loli from everything but Honeypots so we can identify and monitor the pedos to keep them away from children.

As such, while I disagree with this idea its at least a tangible, logical idea that is far more than most anti-loli discussions end up with.

If you think it's failure was inevitable because the failure of "moral crusading" is inevitable

I didn't say that, but I can see how you'd take it as such. I consider moral crusading doomed to failure because it fails to properly act and gauge its target objectively. It always ends up running through emotion instead and overshooting its target because it cannot properly and objectively quantify itself and its goals. Prohibition for example just hard shut down alcohol with no ifs and or buts and then told people to kick rocks if they didn't like it. A more valid crusade would have been understanding what causes people to enjoy alcohol, offer alternatives and minimize destructive gateways while transitioning it out of society over time.

And I think the "war on drugs" is a living example of the failure of it on hard drugs.

What is it that you think is a failure about that?

Christianity was a rising religion in Japan back in the middle ages. But the Hideyoshi Shogunate considered them a threat and foreign influence, so when he shut Japan off from the outside world he forced all of them to denounce it, or be horrifically tortured and killed. Many were literally crucified and left to die in public as a warning.

While it decreased the numbers, many still practiced. They just went underground, so underground it became part of their religion to this day to be secretive about it. So when in the 1900s Japan opened up again, there were still Christians. Less of them, but still enough to have churches everywhere filled with hardier, more devout ones.

So not only a failure of a moral crusade, but a good example of why "banning" something always fails to actually remove it.

Are we any freer now those moral codes have fallen?

I don't think we are. I am a firm believer in culturally enshrined morality as the dominating decider of behavior being the best option. As in, you feel shame and social consequences as the primary negative response when you do something wrong, rather than SWAT teams and jail that comes from legally enshrined morality.

One of the strengths of that is that you are "Free" to do things, but you probably shouldn't. The choice is there, and that's freedom enough while not being fully Leftist hedonism.

The replace of one set of codes with anther doesn't lend itself to the theory that restrictions will inevitably fall

The tighter you grip things, the more they slip away. People will always rebel against authority. Not all of them, but a certain number in every population. They will crack every loophole wide open. They will never accept being told what to do. When you take something away from them, they will replace it with something else. Usually worse. That's why "spirit vs letter of the law" is a long going debate going back centuries.

Restrictions might not completely fail directly everytime, but the spirit of them will. If you ban porn, for example, you won't stop coomers. They will just masturbate to something else, possibly going out and committing acts of peeping tom (a crime that has fallen off with the rise of easily accessed porn) or groping molestation in crowded places.

This is a problem independent of the hands on the lever, though those hands will change how effective or error prone the restrictions are.