Welcome to Stupid, Evil, Horny, where we find 1 dumb, one awful, and one embarassingly aroused topic and do a little weekly recap. Just like the pandemic, it feels like this series is never going to end, will result in widespread destruction, and cost lives. If only it was as effective at exposing the contradictions of capital. It’s also run by complete incompetents, us!
Stupid: You Scream, We Scream, We All Scream At Nancy Pelosi
Awarded by: Carl
During times of stress and hardship, there’s just something that people from different walks of life can just come together on and, for the greater good, agree on. Right now, it’s that Nancy Pelosi is an out-of-touch piece of shit bragging about how much fucking $13 a pint ice cream she has while 22 million Americans are out of work.
That thumbnail will haunt my dream. It’s like looking at skeleton wrapped in parchment paper. I assume she eats all this ice cream through her secondary lizard mouth under the human skin suit.
I get why a moron like James Corden, a chimney sweep from an obscure Dickens adaptation, would run this incredibly tone-deaf segment: because content is content. Late night shows love crap like this because it “humanizes” politicians, but first you have to be human. Sorry Nancy, you don’t make the cut. But you get a nice shiny trophy magnet to put on your $24,000 fridge. Fucking resign.
Evil: Whole Foods, Whole Bullshit
Awarded by: Carl
Whole Foods has been handing out t-shirts that label their employees “hero” after a Portland employee has died of COVID-19 contracted in the store.
This is mainly just corporate propaganda and indifference, not the level of evil worthy of this award. Every company does some version of this.What tops this is that Whole Foods Market, the crunchy granola grocery chain of choice for liberals everywhere, is also running a “heat map” of stores most likely to unionize and detailing “risk factors” which sounds like something they should do to disinfect their stores instead, ya think?
So not only are they patronizing to their employees, they’re maliciously tracking their workers to stop them from making any demands with teeth. Any company that actively campaigns against unionizes should have one two days before yesterday. But oh, you won’t get a union, you’ll get corona and a t-shirt for the effort of stocking organic papayas for middle aged men with grey ponytails and their 19 year old girlfriends.
Parent company Amazon is an arch-nemesis of the labor movement, having recently fired Christian Smalls for organizing a walkout in an NY Amazon warehouse over workplace hazards such as lack of PPE and disregard for worker safety. Patronizing indifference plus active harm wins them the coveted prize for the week.
Horny: Put The Pussy On the Blockchainwax
Awarded by: Carl
My favorite part about the Sex & Blockchain: Are We Safe? panel which happened last night is that it takes place in VR. Because of course it does. It’s a story that has everything you’d want: titties, crypto, expensive VR hardware, all included in an event that can have a billion “safe sex” jokes the entire time.
Bitcoin for sex workers is a genuinely interesting but flawed idea, with an equal amount of positives and negatives. Since SESTA/FOSTA and other legislation/stigma make it impossible for sex workers to get a bank account or financial security, cryptocurrency remains a transaction medium that preserves anonymity and has few middle men. It’s not all boners and roses, though.
There’s a few technical hurdles to jump through. It’s a wildly unstable market. There’s also the fact that BC is technically Monopoly money that can’t be easily turned into actual money, except through third party companies or exchanges, which can be ripped off (and are all the time).
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.