Leopards Considered Harmful

As a little treat post-US-election I let myself subscribe to r/LeopardsAteMyFace again, but as much as I enjoy the handful of cherry-picked “I voted Republican then lost my job to a Republican” stories, they’re ultimately kind of meaningless.

The “I voted for someone to do cruelty and then they did it to me” stories serve the same kind of dark lizard brain urge as the other subreddits for watching people make stupid decisions and then suffer.

The content doesn’t have to be accurate, or new, or true, or really anything more than a pithy headline that’s fun to say. I’ll make one up right now: “Man who voted for mass deportations is deported by accident” - ha ha! Isn’t that kind of satisfying to think about? Mmm, karmic retribution.

But the buyer’s remorse for Trump in the USA hasn’t set in at all, really: his approval rating remains imposingly high. His terrible agenda is popular: Americans crave fascism.

Following that kind of content will give you a false impression that justice will be done, that stupid, needless cruelty contains the seeds of its own destruction, that the USA will realize it is hurting itself and improve.

But karma doesn’t actually exist.

Worse, I think, that impulse to enjoy bad things happening to stupid people is actually wrought of the same nasty impulses that brought us here in the first place. That’s why I always leave that subreddit before long.