A few raw links here to a couple of interesting issues that are loosely related:

Roger L. Simon points to Gregg Easterbrook's piece attacking Qentin Tarantino at The New Republic's site. Read Easterbrook's piece, then read the Simon take and comments. Thought provoking. I had a semi-coherent comment in there somewhere, which was probably re-stated more clearly by others further down. For some reason, I'm having trouble getting as excercised as some with the Easterbrook piece. Is it anti-Semitic? Probably. But it just strikes me as more of a sloppy, lazy anti-Semitism, than the overt, intentional stuff, or overt apologetics for (like the type of thing you'll find in the average Leftist British paper, for instance). This is the type of stuff that presents on opportunity for dialogue and education, rather than raving, it seems to me. I could be wrong! I'm interested in Easterbrook's response to this little tempest, if any. That will tell a lot. He certainly makes a stupid error in labeling a couple of Jewish executives by their ethnicity, then arrogating himself the right to dictate what they ought to be concerned with therefore, and tossing in the Holocaust (in not so many words) on top of it, in a "you'll be responsible for what you get" sort of way. Those are things that should only be addressed in carefully crafted pieces, not poorly-done, sloppy blog screeds. Easterbrook was begging for trouble - and maybe a little attention.

OK, as I write this, my heat meter is beginning to rise a bit, and that should tell me something.

On another subject, Simon points to this Anne Applebaum piece concerning a bit of German self-pitty and their penchant for conspiracy-theory. Hans Ze Beeman has some interesting observations from the ground in Germany.