One of the great ironies of our time is that one of the best things about our time is also one of the worst.

Very few would argue that the Internet isn't one of those best things, and one of the best things about it is that it has sparked a media revolution. You no longer need to jump through numerous, grey-faced and profit-eyed gatekeepers in order to have your ideas and opinions known to the multitudes. All you need is an online connection, and maybe some cash to pony up so you can have a site with no annoying pop-up ads, and you are suddenly linked to millions of people who might otherwise have never, ever heard of you.

Gone are the days of having to pay large sums of money to print newsletters that might only be half-read, and then wind up lining a birdcage. Gone are the reliance on others' willingness to put up with you and your blather. Decreasing is the need to buy ad space to get word about your "services" out to the critical, target audiences. Thanks to the internet, the lonely activists can hook up, the community can go worldwide, and the mice can roar like lions.

However, this lack of control is also one of the major drawbacks of the Internet, and - taken for all - a net negative on the information age as a whole. Simply put, any moron with an axe to grind can put their babblings and drool online, thus giving millions of other people 'information' that turns out to be as accurate as predictions of the moon being made of green cheese. And hey, "if someone wrote it, it's got to be true..."

In that sense, the Net is the most robust cancer patient you ever saw: the cancer is unaccountability, irresponsibility and a lack of professionalism. If there's no one above you and no one beside you, then you can say the most outrageous things imaginable and no one is going to check your act. Maybe your server will let you go if they get enough complaints about your content, but hey - you can either get another one, or pay someone to set up your very own service. And the chain of fools goes on and on.

That's why I really hate bloggers - especially the "conservative" blogonauts who like to proclaim themselves to be on the forefront of the great, anti-liberal media revolution. The vast majority of them are people who couldn't write their way out of a shoebox, and I've never seen such a conceited bunch of loudmouths in my life.

(Next to myself, of course. But at least I try to get my facts straight and keep things in perspective... unless I, too, have an axe to grind. Like right about now.)

Now, only a fool would deny there's some talent and stars out there. And many of these people got their start in more traditional forms of media, and still appear there. I am thinking of people like David Horowitz and Andrew Sullivan, here, amongst others. Even some of the amateurs aren't too bad, either.

But the growing herd of far-Right blogonauts are a sad, sorry lot of whiners, haters, imitators and masturbators. Their diatribes are unintelligible, unremarkable, ill-informed and derivative, often replete with spelling errors, bad grammar and bold leaps of logic that could make it across the Grand Canyon in one stride.

In times past, most of these people would not have been heard from, courtesy of the old-media's gatekeepers. While said guardians might have been a bit too profit-eyed for the liking of many, they also maintained a certain level of decorum and sensibility. You had to really work at it to get in the door, and you had to impress a whole lot of people to make it out with anything but increased frustration. This could be bad, but it also made sure that the people who got in were writers worth more than a plugged nickel.

You also had the ability to work with an editor, who could check your facts and tell you to check your act when you got out of line. And while it might have been galling to hand things back for rewriters, or fact-checks, it had the effect of making you a better writer (usually, anyway). You had a feeling that you were directly accountable to someone real - no pile of angry letters or occasional, phoned-in complaint from Saint Peter's to protest about how you bolluxed up the news of their upcoming taffy pull could ever compare to your mentor looking down their nose at something you handed them and asking, ever so politely, if you'd been getting any lately.

Hell hath no fury like an editor who wants your hide: just ask Anne Coulter...

But no - not for these brave bloggers! Such turning away at the door in times past was hardly seen as a sign that they needed some lessons in critical thinking or fact-finding, much less a spell-checker. Oh no. It was all a sign that the liberal media was acting against them. The liberal media hated them, rated them and wouldn't ever date them - and still does to this day.

So obviously - by their reckoning, anyway - what they have to say is too "taboo" for the establishment's lilly-liberal hands. It wasn't ever anything they did, or failed to do, you see. It's always the other guy's failure to recognize genius when it shows up on the door with a "Free Jonathan Pollard" pin on its lapel. That this is the same argument made by the "avant-garde" artist and the "experimental" writer, upon being rejected for much the same failures, does not register in the slightest.

No - Humility has been devoured by ideology. They wear their ejection from the gilded gates on their sleeves, these proud, brave blogonauts. They love every moment of it. And why shouldn't they? Their rejection by the "establishment" gives them their street cred. In the dark, vicious and Conservative back alleys of C-Space it's not so much what you've said as it is who you've managed to offend with it. Like Alex and his Droogs from "A Clockwork Orange" they lurk in their angry little forums, posting their angry little rants and getting high on one another's anal fumes.

But that's forgetting a prime principle - one that should be second nature to my fellow lovers of capitalism: the bottom line is that it has to sell. I've often come away from these dark corners of the blogosphere convinced that I've read better, more challenging things on bathroom walls. And if I can't produce work of similar worth, or find my own talents outshined by the work in question, then why the hell would I pay for it? That impulse alone keeps most blogonauts rotating in the lower circles of the internet, making their own media because no one would give them the time of day in theirs.

Maybe one day, some of these people might actually get somewhere. If they hone their skills just enough to not sound like the sort of person whose hate mail gets flushed after the very first sentence, they might be read and appreciated by someone whose opinions actually matter. Then, perhaps, if they play their cards right, they'll be able to get paid for their work, attract an audience and make it onto FOX News every so often when one of the regulars has PMS.

But to get there will probably require a wake-up call that can only be delivered by someone who stands over, or beside, them. And in the mass community of solipsists that is the Internet, such folks are hard to find.

My God pouts on the cover of the magazine - My God's a shallow little bitch trying to make the scene.

Starfuckers Inc. - Nine Inch Nails