Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Flying Rodent's all down on blogs again:

Some readers might point to intelligent, well-written blogs run by reasonable individuals, but frankly, pish and tush. British blogs run at roughly 5% sober budget analysis to 95% face-raping crackheads.

Never mind blogs as a primary news source, I'm struggling to think of a handful of bloggers who would merit even the fabled fifteen minutes of fame. That's particularly ironic, since the vast majority of them certainly deserve chemical castration, and that's being charitable.

Iain Dale's running his annual Blog Awards wankathon as we speak - I defy any reader to deny that the world would be a richer, more rewarding and more just place if each of the top ten writers on his final list had been ripped to pieces by enraged mako sharks three seconds after they logged in to their first Blogger accounts.

You can see his point. I immediately went over to Iain Dale's blog to see what the fuss was about, but before I could find anything on the blog awards I came across this, and so had to spend the next half hour picking little flecks of vomit out of my keyboard:

I don't mind admitting that I am a complete prude where drugs are concerned. I have never taken an illegal drug and will never do so. It's never wise for someone with a vaguely addictive personality to put themselves into that situation!

Well aren't you a bloody card? This is blogging as the outlet for all those cutesy "No, but I would have inhaled" answers that Iain would like to be giving if only anyone were interested.

Where FR slightly loses me is the idea that this is anything peculiar to the internet. He's worried about what happens when we stop reading newspapers and start reading blogs:

This is why stories along the lines of Newspapers in terminal decline tend to fill me with horror. The idea that blogs might become one of the world's primary news sources was popular when I started my own, and the prospect fills me with the same mind-numbing, gibbering dread now as it did then.

Make no mistake - the day that blogs become the primary news source for a plurality of the populace will be a cataclysm at the species level, like Spanish Flu or the Black Death.

I'm sorry, but if newspapers are our last and best defense against the forces of chaos, we're fucked already. Click through on that link, and the top story is that DMGT is losing ad revenue. How is that a bad thing? If the Mail and the Standard went tits-up tomorrow, it wouldn't really matter if their readers started buying the Telegraph, following Iain Dale or just muddled on as usual and formed a cult devoted to hastening the arrival of the Child of Littlejohn and Phillips who will purge the country of all but the chosen elect of white suburban, home-owners.

Blogs are not a forewarning of the apocalypse. 95% of blogs are shit for the simple reason that 95% of everything is shit.