nonbinarypastels:

hot take: people in discourse don’t have “bad reading comprehension”, what they have is a bad habit of purposefully misinterpreting the words of anyone who doesn’t agree with them to hell and back in order to con their way into “winning” arguments by making the people they’re debating look as irrational or monstrous as possible and making themselves and their own arguments look better by comparison.

there’s a major difference between someone who reads text and genuinely does not understand what is being said and someone who reads text with no intention of even trying to understand what is being said because it doesn’t subscribe to their already held world views, who then goes on to reduce the text to the worst possible interpretation of it they can imagine (no matter how much they have to reach to get there) and attack that interpretation rather than what’s actually being said.