Tea & Two Slices is a long-running news round-up by NEEDS frontman and veteran restaurant dishwasher Sean Orr, who lives and works in Gastown. He is very aware of his privilege, so there’s really no need to remind him of it.

According to the CBC, Visible minorities are now the majority in 5 B.C. cities. This is a good opportunity to use one of my favourite quotes. “Why are white people afraid of becoming a minority? Are minorities treated badly or something?”

Still, without any analysis of class, this type of demographic study is masturbatory at best and a dogwhistle at worst — By the Numbers: Metro Vancouver’s Increasing Inequality and Division.

We like to think of Metro Vancouver as a multicultural place to live, but these charts show us that diversity is greatest in low-income neighbourhoods, and high-income neighbourhoods are the whitest.

And it goes waaaay back: Settler Fragility: Why Settler Privilege Is So Hard to Talk About.

It’s important to emphasize that like white privilege, settler privilege is systemic, so just denying that one doesn’t possess it doesn’t mean one isn’t complicit in it. This is about deeply questioning all the assumptions we have been raised with in a society built on imperialism, private property (which includes slavery), and capitalism. Even for Native people who don’t live in their ancestral homelands, the questions need to be asked: who are the original people of the place where I live, and what are my responsibilities to them?

Settler fragility is seeing a road sign with Chinese on it and concluding that they are taking over:

These are now the signs in @CityofVancouver . Where is the #French? @Ciry is discriminating against RVERY other nationality in this city now. Other people BESIDES #Chinese should have their basic rights fulfilled. Some signs don’t even have #English on them #discriminatory #wrong pic.twitter.com/BVCrYE0DhY

— VANOPINIONS (@vanopinions) November 14, 2018

“Hey, let’s ask Steven Harper what he thinks!” said nobody ever: ‘I have no time for illegal immigration,’ Stephen Harper says on U.S. podcast. Wherein our former Prime Minister, sipping from a mug branded “Leftist Tears”, goes on an alt-right nationalist podcast and actually says, “I would agree that if you get far-right nationalism that’s essentially racial or ethnic in character, it could become a different kind of beast. But frankly, conservatives don’t advocate that kind of nationalism…” Riiight, keep telling yourself that.

I mean, the leader of your old party has ties to Rebel Media, which has hosted, among others, the founder of the Proud Boys.

I’ll just put this here: FBI labels Proud Boys as extremist group with ties to white nationalists, but no similar move in Canada.

This guy also just endorsed one of the most racist referendums of all time: Andrew Coyne: What would possess Andrew Scheer to endorse this Brexit madness? Again, the answer is dogwhistles to the alt-right. “Scheer is aligning himself with Trump in a way that permits him plausible deniability, keeping moderate Conservatives from breaking ranks. It’s a delicate operation made even more difficult due to Maxime Bernier’s rebellion”. – Nicholas Ellan

Also in the National Post: In a world bereft of meaning, there’s no point in pretending to be hopeful. Holy shit, this article is insane! The end of the world, black metal, suicide and, of course, Gritty.

More on Gritty: The Bread we Get Must be our Freedom: A Gritty Manifesto.

Fascism thrives off the frustrated orgone of youth, repressed and entombed by the patriarchy, existing in suppression and misdirection. As an earth elemental, Gritty cannot help but exist as an undefinable accumulator of orgone, a beneficial container of free, unregulated sexual energies that are beholden to none. Fascism aligns itself as the arbiter of measured responses and control (in the guise of self-control), calling out any opposition as irrational, emotional, unreasonable. What could be more irrational, more emotional, than the expression of pure pleasure and enjoyment in the face of unhospitable environs?

Don’t read the comments of the day: BC to offer publicly-funded lower-body surgeries for trans people. Wherein somehow people actually believe that these surgeons are being whisked away from emergency rooms in the middle of a life-saving operation and forced to work on a trans person’s genitals. That’s saying nothing, of course, of other publicly funded elective surgeries like weight loss operations and the obesity epidemic’s burden on the medical system. “Oh, but why can’t they fund eye exams?” Because they aren’t fucking mutually exclusive, you dolt. We want that covered too. Jesus.

‘It blows my mind’: How B.C. destroys a key natural wildfire defence every year. What, we don’t rake our forests like they do in Finland either?

Bizarre tweet of the day:

Damn, I need to get over to Cap more often. https://t.co/VaralaMQoH

— Simon Little (@simonplittle) November 16, 2018

RIP: Vancouver’s only classical record store calls it quits after 40 years.

Bonus: Vancouver Gothic.