SunRuanEr:
Sometimes, with friends, the most shocking thing with politics is when you didn't realize that your friend was part of Politic Group Whatever You Don't Like, and then find it out at a later date. Now, you'd think that most people would be able to (it seems in this day and age) pretty reliably guesstimate where people stand, but sometimes they can't. Sometimes they're willfully ignorant. Sometimes, they convince themselves otherwise, and when informed in no uncertain terms that they were wrong - they lose it.
For sure. The core of the matter is that one has to be very,
very lucky to be so unaffected by politics as to treat it all as a logic puzzle. Sometimes it's less Politics You Don't Like and more Politics That Will Get You Killed, and some people don't want to reckon with their own place in an unfair world that doesn't
have to be if they'd just put their backs into changing it.
As a non-political example, the linguistic bias of the English language that enshrined an official male default in certain Anglophone countries in the 1930s/40s led to no-one ever thinking to make female-shaped crash test dummies or bulletproof vests, causing a higher percentage of female-shaped human beings to subsequently be killed in crashes/shootings. That's no one person's fault, no grand conscious conspiracy to murder that category of person, just a lot of men unconsciously spending their lives cradle to testing-room thinking 'he' was the default state of a human with nothing to snap them out of it, due to a language and culture that prioritised their bodies and their participation in nascent automobile safety. Those car-crashed or war-shot women who might have been anything had they lived no longer exist, and didn't have to die. Passive bias doesn't make those people
any less dead than someone with active hatred and an axe, though.
So social bias is a variable one has to take into account here, like...does this chemistry teacher have a lifetime's experience of being born a [person type] if they're talking about policy that disproportionately affects that type and the "reputable" sources are all [other person type with typically greater access to academia] taught on books written by [that type] with 0 years experience being [affected type]. If so, the decades of practical rather than merely theoretical experience needs factored in above all else. If not, then they're just a chem teacher spouting off.
With apologies to praguepride if those ex-friends were terrified to a truly remarkable extent by the big S, it's just that I've met an awful lot of bad faith "debate lovers" who can't apply that bit of basic scientific rigour, and thus can't actually
be politically debated any more than someone who's looked at lots of pictures of cars driving around can be trusted to fix one, and had to add that.
Also, that if someone wants other people to cease to exist for how they were born - actively or passively, axe or deliberately cultivated ignorance - then they cannot and should not be respected or tolerated. Desiring harm to others, no matter how nebulously, for nothing they have done or chosen to be - that is, deliberate and baseless cruelty - is incompatable with being a good person.