The Honest Courtesan

People who aren’t total moral imbeciles often make the mistake of believing that politicians create, support, or vote for laws because they believe those laws will accomplish something positive.  Time and again we’re told that statutes which grant cops new powers to harass, spy upon, invade the privacy and homes of, defame, brutalize, rob, rape, abduct, maim, and even murder peaceful citizens for doing normal, consensual things politicians have decided to “send a message” about are “well-intended“, regardless of how many facts, studies, and witnesses they are presented with to demonstrate that empowering sociopathic thugs in the aforementioned manner accomplishes nothing except more violence and societal harm.  The politicians who mastermind such prohibitions are evil megalomaniacs who openly want to harm those they’re bigoted against, but there aren’t enough of them to ram these abominations down the throats of their subjects; to accomplish that, they need the support of others whose moral compasses are so dysfunctional they can’t even manage to be consistently or effectively evil.  These people operate way down in moral stage one or two; they say whatever they think will get them elected, and aren’t even capable of a more complex moral calculus than “things that make me rich, powerful, or well-liked are good”.  One easy way to tell a politician operating from this moral ooze is that they often assume everyone else’s brains are as primitive and undeveloped as theirs are, and will therefore respond to promises of material gain or the collectivist warm-fuzzies that come from being part of a “winning team”.  Remember the bizarre competition among politicians to claim their state or city was “one of the top sources/destinations for sex trafficking”?  A reasonable person would think twice before bragging about such a dubious distinction (if it were true), but as I pointed out above, we aren’t discussing reasonable people.  To those operating in this moral basement, being “top” at something – anything – is a pure good, even if it’s “most carceral”, “most authoritarian”, “most violent”, “most inhospitable”, “cruelest”, “most hateful”, “most ignorant”, etc.

All this may help y’all to understand why politicians compete to produce the strictest, most draconian, most brutal laws on any given topic, as in this recent example:

The article provides examples of both of the types of moral atavisms described above.  The ones who opposed making exceptions for the life of the mother are typified by people like John Jacob, who probably regularly forgets how to walk upright; in arguing that the law should condemn women with dangerous pregnancies to slow death, Jacob vomited out the moronic slogan, “Not her body, not her choice.”  But it’s unlikely that the majority who voted for the bill are so unambiguously fanatical; most are probably like Wendy McNamara, who told reporters she supported the ban because it “makes Indiana one of the most pro-life states in the nation.”  And to a mind so unaccustomed to independent thought, being part of a group that can be said to be the “most” at anything is something to be proud of.