In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.

The farmers’ movement has repeatedly been called “extremist” and “Khalistani” by the government as a tactic to create rifts between different factions of the protesters. It’s an age-old scheme to discredit dissent erupting out of farmers’ groups, and it’s high time protest leaders recognize and fight it.

*

This week, a bunch of Reddit users decided to challenge Wall Street head-on and ended up making a sizeable profit by betting on the shares of a video game company on its way downhill, GameStop. Nobody knows how this (historic, some are calling it) battle will end.

*

As we slowly see the light at the end of the tunnel that is the incredibly dark Covid19 pandemic, there exists an entire category of friendship that is now missing, and perhaps impossible to go back to — the barista at your regular coffee shop, the coworker you take smoke breaks with, the friends you only hit up to go out with. As we were forced to conserve our energy and pick who we wanted to remain in touch with, there may be tens of people we have now lost.

*

Zindagi Tamasha, a film created by celebrated Pakistani director Sarmad Khoosat, gave rise to a fundamentalist controversy so intense that it transformed him from a beloved screen presence to one people wanted to behead. Now, as the film’s put up for an Oscar nomination, its makers have to entertain hope with a whole serving of fear from their own.

*

“Those of us who inhabit today’s homosexual subjectivities will need to do more than assume that our cocksucking makes us radical” — a historian comments on how we perceive modern homosexuality and the role capitalism has played in forming that perception.

*

There’s no such thing as a “dream job” and no value to the “labor of love” argument, author Sarah Jaffe’s argues in her recent book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. Do people really love their jobs, or has capitalism conditioned them to do so?

*

One consumer product that has somehow never caught the interest of our capitalist overlords is urinals for females — they have seen a constant ebb and flow in public popularity over the decades, but remain elusive. Why?

*

Pamela Anderson has quit social media, in favor of serenity and freedom, she writes in her last Instagram post. It might be the best argument yet to quit it ourselves.