JerryvonKramer

Victory, were you around when we had the big Andre debate on the board?

One thing I've wondered about is how much the tag list being there served to punish guys who are seen as tag workers. My mind is still stuck on Yatsu at #172: if you consider some of the guys who came after him, that one stands out for me. I don't know how many would seriously say Sting or Kerry were better workers if you ask the question directly.

Disappointed GOTNW didn't work in my "mugging for the camera" line.

Going to catch up on these soon. Grateful to Johnny and Kelly for flying the flag while I'm in GWE-induced slumber.

Hold your horses! You still need to get the closest to actual ratings metric. You won one battle but the war ain't over.

El-P really working his "that 90s guy" gimmick to the max here.

Colon was my 27th soldier.

Top class banter

I'm out with some friends and some of the objective/ subjective stuff came up. Hey, it's on my mind. Just thought I'd share a direct quotation and leave it standing there: "I'm a lawyer and in law 'objective' means: given this evidence, and these facts, what would the average, sane man in the street conclude?" I like that definition.

Waltman my 26th

Grey and Ki my 24th and 25th soldiers

Considering Yatsu finished at #172 it feels like Larry over-indexed. I think he's someone who is basically a greatest hits candidate whose career gets quite an easy ride in the evaluations. He ranked for me because my system was favourable to greatest hits candidates.

I can see the narrative already being written that the only reason Flair might finish #1 is because of the increased voter base. I just want to point out that on PWO-PTBN podcast list shows so far, he's had three #1 votes (Charles, Pete, me), two #2 votes (Marty, Kelly), one #3 vote (Chad) and another #5 vote (Child). Tim and Timothy will both have to remind me where they had Flair but it wasn't lower than #10 which is where Steven had him. This is just to say that the idea that Flair might finish #1 solely as a symptom of an increased user base just isn't true. If you take the podcast hosts as being reflective of the core PWO base in microcosm, he is doing pretty darn well. I'm putting this here now because there have been stirrings of that suggestion and it is pretty disingenuous. And I say that as the guy typically hauled over the coals for being one of the people who said two years ago that we shouldn't open it up.

Larry Z was my 23rd, I believe.

All I want for you to do is to admit that in order for your argument to hold, you also have to hold that someone could believe that El Gigante > Bryan and at the same time you have maintain with a straight face that they are not wrong, or nuts, or anything else. People can decide for themselves if they want to sign up to a statement like that. If they are prepared to, fine. I am not.

Russian Daydream - Great Muta did rank for me!

We agree on this. Excellent!

I might put this in my sig until it is explained. Seriously? He did every aspect of wrestling better and for longer with better results. Virtually everyone believes this and would co-sign it, so why isn't it an objective given that Bryan > Gigante? I see nothing gained by insisting on the hypothetical Gigante advocate in a world where 99.99%+ of wrestling fans would see it as a no brainier Bryan is better. The insistence on absolute subjectivity makes a mockery of what you just said. Why go to the extremes? I never said it was absolute subjective. However I also would never claim it's absolute objective. Middle ground, like all art, is where it's at. And it is the middle ground I've pushed for all of this time. I don't see people pushing for a middle ground, but insisting on absolute subjectivity.

I might put this in my sig until it is explained. Seriously? He did every aspect of wrestling better and for longer with better results. Virtually everyone believes this and would co-sign it, so why isn't it an objective given that Bryan > Gigante? I see nothing gained by insisting on the hypothetical Gigante advocate in a world where 99.99%+ of wrestling fans would see it as a no brainier Bryan is better. The insistence on absolute subjectivity makes a mockery of what you just said.

I might put this in my sig until it is explained.

I am not entirely sure what you think that could bring to the discussion. There is a discussion to be had around it, the one around tradition vs homage, self-conscious epics and so on. Anxiety of influence is less to do with critical consensus and more to do with how a writer has to grapple with all the great writers past when they write. There's a discussion to be had around it, but not convinced it has to do with GWE. In my eyes all of this is just cult of the new stuff. To me the question was always "who is the GWE?", which honestly has nothing to do with how novel someone is or how excited I feel about them. Me too. And honestly, that's so lame if that's the case (not Flair winning, although it is in a way, but Flair winning because of this). And so this starts ... Can you just explain one thing to me. Why is it near universal consensus that Daniel Bryan is a better wrestler than Giant Gonzalez? Explain that to me in a manner that does not point to shared agreed upon standards, and I will forever concede the debate.

What I wonder about. And I've wondered about this my whole life. Remember I spend my days sitting in an English Department. Is why it is that the vast majority of people in the scenario you outline would come out with Kobashi on top. Yes, you might get an outlier, but it fascinates me how in mediums that are supposedly so subjective, you get the same judgements being made with really outstanding levels of regularity. Like I'm a Shakespeare guy, at no time in the 400 years since he died has there ever once been a general consensus that Ben Jonson was the better playwright. Like not once, even in periods of history in which you'd expect them to prefer a neater, more by-the-book, more moralistic writer like Jonson. You might get the occasional person who stumps for Jonson, but that person is an extreme outlier. No matter the age, no matter who the people are debating. You see interesting consensus picks in film criticism. There are various different canons, but across all of them you get certain picks that recur with such stunning regularity that you wonder if it really can be a totally subjective thing. Can it? In this process we've seen the #1 Scott Steiner pick. It was one of the true highlights of the whole deal. But why was it such a surprise? Why didn't a single person nominate El Gigante? Why did no one put Mike Rotunda as their #1 pick? I don't have the answers to these questions and I've said before, one day, maybe I might write a book about this exact thing, but until then I'll always wonder and will always hold out from accepting "subjective medium" as code for "anything goes" -- it's clear that anything doesn't go. It's clear that certain works, certain artists, certain workers have a habit of hitting lots of people in a way that certain others don't. If that didn't happen, we wouldn't even have the idea of "critical consensus". These are things I think that are overlooked or explained away too readily -- not just by you, but by relativists everywhere. It is a real phenomena. And the fact remains that in this sample size of 152, some guys will end up with 140+ votes and others with 0. It's just an accident of subjectivity?

Just to clarify, I've never voted Tory in my life. I'm from Wales, it's not allowed.

Exactly. I think people mistake what I'm talking about when I say "objectivity", it has nothing to do with my list or with BIGLAV or anything like that, it has to do with pointing at evidence, whether input or output, a guy's career, what actually happened etc. etc. Objectively, Kenta Kobashi had more matches period than Magnum TA. This is a fact. Magnum TA's career was short. These are tangible, measurable things. Who had more "great matches" is a subjective value judgement, but most people who have seen a good chunk of both careers, would say Kobashi had more of them than Magnum. Again, this sort of thing is in the realm of objectivity. I have a hard time thinking about the argument that takes that evidence about both bodies of work and comes out with Magnum TA as the #1 worker. To me that goes against the grain of what is there. And, I'm pretty sure most other people here agree and have Kobashi above Magnum, if indeed they ranked Magnum at all (I did, he was my #100 guy). So lots of people looking at the same evidence all draw similar conclusions. That's objectivity. I hope it's clear how that has nothing to do with BIGLAV.

I'd also like to ask Tim if he ever actually bothered to read the first page of BIGLAV where many of the things he accused me of are dealt with pretty openly: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/32545-jvks-six-factor-model-for-gwe-rankings-biglav/?p=5712595 I'm only quoting that so Tim can see how completely off the mark that post he made was.