For years, I’ve been hearing anti-porn types make all sorts of claims about the deleterious effects of watching porn. To hear them tell it, porn does everything from shrinking people’s brains to murdering love itself.

I’ve never been persuaded by their arguments, but to be fair, that might be because I’ve watched so much porn at this point that my brain has shrunk to the size of a peanut. (I’d be more alarmed about this likely cerebral shrinkage, but my brain was only about the size of a peanut M&M to begin with, if I’m being honest.)

Recently, though, my own research has led me to conclude that the mere existence of porn does have one very clear negative effect – and you don’t even have to watch porn to suffer its impact. You just have to be elected to public office, or be appointed to a government sinecure by one of those elected officials.

I could sit here all day and cite one piece of evidence after another to support my claim – but doing that sounds time consuming and effort intensive and I’m a very lazy man who has a LOT of college basketball to watch today.

So, instead of citing a litany of instances in which the existence of porn has clearly caused a government official to lose his/her/their mind, I’m just going to focus on the latest one to land on my radar. Surprisingly, this example of governmental madness has nothing to do with the legislatures of Florida or Arizona, two wellsprings of legislative lunacy I’d previously thought to be without peer. But as it turns out, Florida and Arizona have nothing on Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong, the cybersecurity and technology crime bureau has launched an investigation… into a fake statement issued in the name of Secretary for Culture, Sports and Tourism Kevin Yeung Yun-hung, congratulating Erena So, an adult performer who is originally from Hong Kong, “after she became an exclusive actress for a Japanese adult filmmaker and online pornography platform,” according to the South China Morning Post.

Per the Post, a spokesman for the Culture, Sport and Tourism Bureau “sternly clarified that the fake press release was not issued via the government news and media information system and the case has been reported to the police.”

Obviously, investigating a fake press release like the one at issue here is an excellent use of police resources, regardless of the country or state in which the egregious act of satire was committed. No reasonable Secretary of for Culture, Sports and Tourism can be expected to sit idly by while his good name is tarnished by a false claim of congratulations, especially when that same Secretary’s solemn, important duties include issuing real statements of congratulations to actresses who have just won Oscars.

As the Post reports, the fake release was “written in the same style as a genuine one from Yeung that congratulated Malaysian-born actress Michelle Yeoh, who became a star in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 90s, after she won the Oscar for best actress for sci-fi comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once this week.”

The Post article also notes that the cybersecurity and technology crime bureau is already investigating other recent hoaxes – but those hoaxes involved trying to scam money out of people, something the fake press release congratulating Erena So did not include, so far as I can tell.

I’m not familiar with the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, to use Hong Kong’s full moniker, so I’m not certain what sort of crime the unknown satirist involved here might face.

The Post article does state that “no arrests have been made so far”, so I assume we can all rest easy knowing that at some point, the diligent officers of the cybersecurity and technology crime bureau will bring this heinous criminal to justice – assuming they haven’t already watched so much porn that their brains are too small to be effective in their jobs.

“Crazy” image by Eva Bronzini from Pexels