Apologies for the lack of links, but this has been squeaking out all over the place. Details can be found on Kiwifarms when its up, and some were posted to 8chan.moe a couple days ago. It's a shitshow.
Soyjak was a /b/-tier shitposting site that had a massive dark side. Despite the site often raiding loli boards on other sites and communities to brand lolicons as "pedophiles", it turns out that the admins of the site were running a sophisticated and secretive grooming operation behind the scenes. They would make kid-friendly memes and offer free Robux to entice kids to the site, where the site admins themselves were spamming CP when traffic was up to desensitize the kids to it. Then some were selected and invited into a grooming Discord, where they were pressured and eventually blackmailed into producing CP and cutting themselves. At least one suicide is confirmed but people who knew about it have claimed there were many more that weren't documented. This all got out because of mod chat leaks by a disgruntled member of the pedo group matched up the admins' IP addresses to ones that were all over the logs for CP spam, and people started digging. Come to find out the owner of the site is a gay man in court for child molestation in Tennessee.
They also had raid groups that used abandoned TF2 chat servers to coordinate attacks on streamers, minor e-celebs, and anyone who threatened to expose the group. They sent CP to peoples work emails disguised as spam so it would go unnoticed, and basically "gang-stalked" targets across the Internet. They wouldn't touch the person but would attack any community the target was in whenever the person went there, to make that community become hostile to the target and isolate them. One bragged about "targeting their mental health directly" with this tactic.
There were minor rumbles about all of this back in April, but apparently enough finally got out that it blew up a few days ago and the owner pulled the plug on the site in a panic. He's trying to sell the domain now. Several people in the chan-o-sphere have been noticing a large rise in secretive IRL pedo activity across swaths of the alt-site Internet over the past year, but this is the latest and loudest exposure of it that I'm aware of. Soyjak had been raiding 8chan off and on for months prior to this, notably with some emphasis targeting the GG threads with soyface.jpg and CP spam. All the while claiming that 2D loli art was what they were protesting against.
I'm beginning to think "don't trust anyone who vocally hates anime lolis, because they're guaranteed to be a fucking pedophile" is becoming an iron law. 8chan GG did a quick tally and there's been over 500 such cases just in the last few years, with the infamous Dr. Pizza being just one tiny but well known example.
You only think the equivalence is false because it torpedos your entire stance, and you know it. Playing Postal never made anybody want to go murder real people, and liking Prisma Illya cheesecake never made anyone want to abuse a real child. The entire argument is retarded on its face, which is why you knew you had to try and pre-emptively deflect it.
What I don't understand is why lolicon fans are attracted to it. Like what is sexually attractive about a hipless and breastless 5-year old character with all the physiological cues that say "protect and take care of me" instead of "fck me in the ass" like what happens in the doujins?
I'm not some big loli fan, though there are a handful of works and a couple specific artists that I've liked over the years. And as best I know its, "loli is just a subgenre of hentai, with the same appeal that normal hentai has." Nobody conflates it with actual kids any more than anyone conflates any other hentai with actual women, or poorly drawn Scooby Doo porn cartoons from the 90s with actual bestiality. Where it gets weird is when normalfags come out of the woodwork who clearly do conflate it with actual kids, which marks them as having some fucked up mental issues because lines on paper aren't people, and then these crazy people start yelling and judging and it gets ugly.
Imagine a bunch of old ladies barging in here yelling at everyone at how videogames are satanic and evil because you can play a mage in Skyrim "and thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." And fully and completely expected and demanded that you take them seriously. It comes across as the same level of insanity, but some normalfags are actually willing to lend an ear to their argument. Its dangerous not just to the Internet, but the whole scope of artistic freedom. And worse, it enables the pedos in their attacks on that subculture but the fart-huffing moralfags are too busy being smug to care.
Bro you wrote two paragraphs and never answered my question, which was what makes people find animated depictions of children sexually attractive? Like I'm setting aside my disgust for a second to just ask, "why?"
I answered you directly in the second sentence. People like it because its hentai, and they like hentai. If you're fishing for a philosophical dissertation on "why do people like a given genre of porn" I think you're looking for the meaning of life in a pile of leaves. Someone who likes hentai, and also likes Prisma Illya, is probably going to like Prisma Illya hentai (which would be loli) provided the specific work they're looking isn't using that person's anti-fetishes.
The rough equivalence to gratuitous violence is ephebophilia. We all joke about scoring points by running down pedestrians, and a man who finds no physical attraction to 17 years 364 days 23 hours 59 seconds 999 miliseconds old women has no inner monologue. Those are healthy impulses or invasive thoughts that don't correlate or have a common cause with other undesirable traits. You've got a dependable record of contribution to gamergate, so I trust that your occasional loli appreciation (iirc from one of your comments on this site) isn't anything more. However, the average person isn't dependable, and thus a random with a severe perversion is a danger of particular untrustworthiness. Be wary of unhinged individuals hijacking your website, just as normies have eternal september'd every sizable social phenomenon.
A fury gives off similar red flags to an HR drone putting up motivational posters and requesting pronouns; a lack of discernment, taste, or awareness, with a propensity for impressionability. Similarly, my concern with lolicon enthusiasts is that their minute preferences leak into other facets of their life, more than that a few can't separate fantasy from real life.
Don't give the pedos that inch. "But she's 17 years, 11 months, and 29 days old bro so I guess you're a pedo too bro." They want that so fucking badly, because they want to twist the label to cover as many human beings as possible instead of just their fucked up, child abusing selves. If everyone is a pedo then no one is, and that's what all their cage rattling is trying to accomplish because they know that it'll eventually get them a blank check, like how the blacks and the gays and the trannies have now.
Right, physical attraction. I wouldn't be involved with anyone under the age of 23. Heck, I couldn't stand most school-age girls when I was the same age. Many women remain emotionally immature past adolescence.