'From the river to the sea': Why these 6 words spark fury and passion over the Israel-Hamas war

[Igel]

100. Would Putin be the same asshole if he wasn't raised on

hearing about his family's horror against fascism and then been trained as a KGB officer.

Nature versus nature. I figure nature pushes you and sets broad channels, but nurture has a lot of influence. Maybe 50-50 (that's about where g, "general intelligence", has settled, so why not?).

Putin--or Netanyahu--might be assholes in an alt-reality, but I'd rather have them cutting me off in traffic or being mean to their kids than being what they are today.

Then again, who knows? I assume that "assholeriness" can be broken down into components--maybe there's a hard-ass driven version that would push hard to get to nuclear fusion but their "drivedness" instead of going towards "I want to fight this problem and defend the world" went instead to "I want to fight the _______ and defend my ethnicity."

In a perfect universe, perhaps one day we'd know.

As I tell my students, a quote from Babylon 5, "it's not a perfect universe."

Excuse me, La testament de Amelia by Lloret came up in my queue ... It immediately relocates me to a specific time and place. Gotta go.