Dude! Joe's Jottings, Mostly Junk

"My view is, would you go to a nightclub where they were shining extremely high-powered laser lights into your eyes, so you could see spots that would not go away? I don't think you'd do it. I don't think that people take their ears so seriously."

This is why I am opposed to the death penalty. I don't oppose it on moral grounds. I have no moral problem with the state putting to death a murderer. I oppose it purely on practical grounds - our legal system simply cannot offer the certainty of guilt to justify a form of punishment that can never be reversed. Too many innocent people are put to death.

And no, the fact that we now have DNA evidence does not change that analysis. It certainly makes things better, but there are lots of cases without such evidence and many more cases where it is mishandled or where the accused has no access to get it tested. Let us all be thankful that groups like the Innocence Project have managed to right so many miscarriages of justice. But the fact that there are so many that need to be righted in the first place should give us pause.

With the horrible things that are going on in Gaza right now, I've gotten a raft of antisemitic spam. Most of it has been through private mail, but some has been in comments on the blog.

I've mentioned plenty of times on this blog that I'm Jewish. Not Israeli. Jewish.

I'm not a member of the Israeli military. I am not a citizen of Israel. I don't get to vote in Israeli elections. I have no say in anything that the state of Israel does.

If you're the type of good-for-nothing coward who thinks that the correct way to handle a political conflict is to fling insults around at some random powerless blogger, you should at least bother to check that you're not shooting yourself in the foot with what you're saying.

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People have a hard time separating Jews and Israelis. Not just people like the assholes who triggered this post. As a child, I lived in a small town in Ohio for four long, miserable years, and constantly heard from people - including my schoolteachers - who couldn't figure out how I could possible be a Jew and an American at the same time - because Jews were Israelis.

It's really not a hard thing.

Judaism is a religion; being Jewish is a matter of belief, custom, and ritual.

Israel is a country. Being Israeli is a matter of politics and citizenship in that country.

You don't have to be Israeli to be Jewish, and you don't have to be Jewish to be Israeli.