I think one of the reasons that I am terrible at operational math is that I either know the answer or I do not.

No amount of reasoning will get me from the problem to the answer as I don’t really reason about anything in math, or with words, or even with any sort of related problems in general.

I just look at something and it’s just obvious or I’ll never know it. In areas with muscle memory — like playing music — that is not true, luckily. I do learn there, especially if it’s to do with my hands.

So that’s why I sometimes look like a mega-genius and other times like a complete dunce. That problem you were working on for six hours? Yeah, I’ll just walk over to your desk and tell you how to solve it in 15 seconds. The answer’s just obvious to me. I don’t know where the solution came from. It’s just there. No thought required.

But ask me to solve a math problem, and even if you explain to me a thousand times the steps it takes to do it, it never makes any impression and similar problems never look equivalent enough to me to guess that I should use the same methods. And I never know why I should use those methods and not others, or what the differences are between dissimilar problems, or why I shouldn’t just use some ligatures to make the numbers look prettier, nor why I just can’t abandon the whole futile enterpise and instead endeavor to ascertain why I’m even attempting to solve such boring garbage in the first place.

That’s when I look like an utter oaf.

What makes The Handmaid’s Tale so correspondent to reality is that the right and the left both often base their political imperatives on withdrawing and trading away the rights of women.

The men and the authoritarian theocracy in THT have a mixture of (mostly) right-wing ideas with some left-wing pragmatism and language tossed in. Reminds me very much of many of Donald Trump’s supporters, and that is not accidental.

Many of the left’s “compromises” betray women every opportunity they get, by the way.

It’s not just the right. Nope.

I think about 80% of right-wing men and 60% of left-wing men would be perfectly happy to live in a society similar to Gilead.

So, yes, the right is worse. But it’s not alone. “Not worse” doesn’t mean at all great.