Today’s Guardian editorial sings the praises of that “radical literary magazine,” The London Review of Books: 

So essential to Britain’s intellectual life… The editorial care taken is a cause for wonder and cheer.

The LRB is also praised for,

The standard it keeps up.

Those who diverge from the Guardian’s definition of standards may feel less enthusiastic. Let’s not forget the LRB’s default anti-Israel bias, perhaps best summarised by the magazine’s editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, who told the Sunday Times: “I’m unambiguously hostile to Israel because it’s a mendacious state.” There’s also the LRB’s history of excusing Islamic terrorism with wild inversions of reality. As, for instance, when Charles Glass fawned over the  “uncompromising programme” of Hizballah and its “intelligent” use of “car bombs, ambushes, small rockets and suicide bombers.” It’s always heartening to see literary intellectuals being titillated by random savagery and casually disregarding the openly genocidal statements of Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah. I suspect readers of the LRB will be studiously unaware that in 2003 Hizballah’s TV channel broadcast a 30-part “history” series based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But then this is the kind of “intellectual life” that sees fit to publish a breezy hagiography of – wait for it – Robert Mugabe. 

We’ve seen such things before, not least in the Guardian itself, and in such elevated organs as the New Left Review. As when the Marxist art critic Julian Stallabrass pondered the “spectacle” of terrorism and seemed more than a little aroused by the “vanguard politics” of “Islamic revolutionaries” who “harden themselves against mundane sentiment.” According to Mr Stallabrass, “the 9/11 attacks did no more than return to the US a taste of the force it has wielded across the globe.” A view shared by the Cambridge historian and LRB regular Mary Beard, who described the events of that morning as a “predictable outcome of US actions,” while putting the words terrorist and terrorism in ironic quotation marks. Ms Beard also pondered the feeling that “America had it coming” and likened jihadist terrorism to “extraordinary acts of bravery.” The Guardian’s then comment editor Seumas Milne also framed terrorism in quotation marks and said with eerie confidence, “Americans simply don’t get it.” This, on September 13, while human dust was still, quite literally, settling on Manhattan.

The London Review of Books is of course Arts Council funded.

In the Telegraph, Melanie McDonagh sings the praise of religious relics and their uncanny healing powers.

As it happens, the Church is fairly nuanced about relics. You venerate them as the remains of those who were holy in life, not as objects of worship. Thomas Aquinas argued that God may work miracles in the presence of those relics but it’s not bones that do the healing. And some people do obtain benefits from visiting relics or a shrine. Lourdes is littered with discarded crutches and we can argue the toss about whether it’s a result of psychosomatic healing or divine help. But a remarkable number of those miracles of healing have been independently verified by doctors with no church connections. And that’s a fact.

To which a reader replies,

Lourdes is littered with discarded crutches, but not a single prosthetic limb.

Touché, methinks.

Counting Cats in Zanzibar highlights the work of Professor Sabri Abd Al-Rauf and the importance of a fragrant bride:

The mother [of the bridegroom] and other female relatives may look at the bride’s hair and neck, and may smell her private parts… But the groom is forbidden to look at any part of her except her face and hands.

The video of Professor Al-Rauf being interviewed has an endearingly demented quality, as these things often do. But it’s probably worth noting that the professor previously appeared on Saudi Arabia’s Iqra TV, explaining to viewers the finer points of wife-beating. Specifically, that, “beating [one’s wife] doesn’t mean beatings with a rod or beatings that draw blood… The beatings are intended to instil fear… declaring that [the husband] isn’t satisfied with this wife.”

The Quackometer takes issue with the Society of Homeopaths:

The result of this careful study was that the homeopathic treatment was no better than a placebo. But the homeopath authors do not conclude that homeopathy did not work; they speculate the tablets had not been stored properly or that the wrong combination of sugar pills was made. At no point do they propose as a possibility that homeopathy can have absolutely no effect on a third-world child with [diarrhoea]. 

And Deogolwulf spies a contender for Greatest Comment Ever by a Guardian reader.

Hardly anyone is going to openly defend muddled thinking or disrespect for evidence. Rather, what people do is to surround these practices with a fog of verbiage designed to conceal from their listeners – and in most cases, I would imagine, from themselves as well – the true implications of their way of thinking. George Orwell got it right when he observed that the main advantage of speaking and writing clearly is that “when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.”

Further to this, this, this and any number of things in the archive, the following may be of interest. Here’s Alan Sokal, speaking in Stockholm, May 2009, on the scientific worldview – and its opponents. Targets include practitioners of pseudo-medicine, theologians and the priestly caste of postmodernist bamboozlers. It’s a long speech and Sokal’s own leftist reflexes intrude a little too often, especially towards the end, but there are nuggets to be had. There’s an amusing schtick involving the substitution of theological fuzzwords with something more direct, and this, on religious truth claims:

Michael Yon is in Afghanistan with the British military. 

  

Some people say the Taliban are cowardly for planting bombs, but I do not believe this makes them any more cowardly than the A-10s, Apaches, B-1Bs and Reapers make us cowardly. We didn’t come here for a fair fight. We came to win. Some troops even say that if you show up to a battle and find it’s evenly matched, you didn’t plan well. What most of us find cowardly and despicable are the enemies who hide behind children. The bombs they plant for us are fair play. But males who hide behind children are not worthy of respect.

His site really should be in your blogroll. Via Mr Eugenides.