Embrodak

I said it was a free form discussion *of a specific thing*, dude. Telling you to shut up because you’ve turned the whole thread into a litigation of your badly-argued and mostly incoherent points, points that aren’t even relevant to this thread’s (admittedly sometimes loose) main focus, is *more* on topic than anything you’ve been talking about for pages now. You know we’re all far left because we told you your opinions are bad and aren’t particularly interested in a granular discussion of why; we know you’re conservative because you developed a persecution complex over something asinine in the course of like a day. Suck it up and move on. Go read Norman Finkelstein’s “The Holocaust Industry” if you want actually intelligent engagement with the political motivations and economic incentives that organizations like the Auschwitz Museum consciously and unconsciously operate from; this ain’t an example of it.

I was actually probably being too mean to Corny, his cohost is Jewish and wouldn’t stand for this foolish line of discussion, but nevertheless.

Dude, please just shut the fuck up and let it go. The topic of the thread is whether the WWE has intrinsic problems that will undermine its seeming dominance, as well as a free form discussion of the various backstage happenings and dramas that may or may not be indicative of such, not whether your rants are being read charitably enough by the woke mob of PWO. Everybody understands your weird positions, you’re not converting anybody to them, and nobody gives a shit that the mods are censoring you. Go join the Jim Cornette Facebook group if you want to have weird Boomer arguments about whether the Auschwitz Museum is acting proportionally and in good faith. (No hate to Corny, for the record, but I cannot imagine a less attractive corner of the IWC than an official Facebook group for him started in 2023.)

That Dante Martin bump was so depressing, honestly. The only potentially viable alternative wrestling company in America, and you’re having/letting a promising young talent do *that*? On a program where it doesn’t even stand *out* because your guys are doing ridiculous, dangerous stunts all the time?

On the topic of this thread, I have a weird feeling that wrestling is still operating on borrowed time, despite this Wrestlemania’s success and the sale. TV is only going to continue to decline over the next few decades, and rights fees are going to slowly dry up as a revenue source, especially if the advertising industry falls off the cliff I’ve seen whispers it may be heading for. Streaming hasn’t really proven itself economically viable as an alternative media ecosystem, and even if it does, part of wrestling’s weird longevity and viability is the *live* nature of it, which is more difficult to generate a sizable premium on in a streaming context. All of which suggests that wrestling may reach an impasse where it’s dependent primarily on ticket sales to fund itself once again, and it seems very questionable to me whether that is even possible anymore, at least on anything like the scale and with the production quality we’re used to. Idk, between this sale and AEW doing Wembley, there are real “JCP is doing so great that we bought an expensive private plane” vibes in the ether.

I really think there’s a lot of overthinking going on here. A clip of Auschwitz as synonymous with prison is not something the white supremacist far right really vibes with. These are, by and large, people who have convinced themselves that the Nazis never attempted to liquidate the Jews and that every bit of evidence of that is a Jewish psyop. Far more likely is that it was saved in some repository of stock footage they asailed wwe public domain under an inconspicuous file name and pulled ignorantly from there. Not good, but the racist right doesn’t even *like* Trump anymore, mostly because he listed way too much to Jared in his first term. The notion that Vince’s friendship with him is an infinite proof of any and all assumptions of racism is just wishful thinking more than anything.

Did Bron Brekker turn heel? Saw a gif of him giving Carmelo the Mark Henry salmon suit special.

I understood that he was joking, my point is that there is genuine tension between the desire for Justice on social and political problems and the fact that certain aspects of the legal system, like presumption of innocence and standards of evidence, were introduced for good reasons, too. It’s a tricky problem.

The first 10% or so of the Vince book is good. Not greatly-written, kinda dime store Perlstein, but well-researched. Excited to read the rest. Vince really is a Rosetta Stone for contemporaneity.

The justice system is shit, but I also don’t think a coherent, morally satisfactory vision of a post-liberal system of justice has been articulated, either.

Vince hates his facial hair and carries an electric shaver around with him to eliminate five o’clock shadow, what in the CTE fuck convinced him that the moment of arguably his greatest triumph (or at least his personal apotheosis) was the time to whip out the worst mustache in wrestling history? Even judging him in a purely “beyond good and evil” sense, it’s like Caesar celebrating his post-Civil War Triumph with a toupee that doesn’t match his hair color.

I really think people are overthinking this. I just listened to that Tim Hornbaker “Death of the Territories” book and JCP, at the height of its powers, put off massive payoffs for the sake of stringing the audience along and trying, fruitlessly, to get bigger returns by extending stories beyond their natural life cycle. Trips is a JCP mark, this is just him letting his inner Dusty run wild, if it’s not Vince being a weirdo.

Really depends how you structure your list, I think, whether it's based on concrete achievement or on a perceived abstraction drawn from said achievements, or on a combo of the two. For example, Roman has had the benefit of being at the top of the card for a long time and having had a lot of thought and craft put into his matches by the most experienced and talented agents his company has. I'm sure he'd do well if you just plopped him down in a ring and told him to go, probably much better than a meticulous planner like a Kenny Omega, but I think there are probably a lot of wrestlers, historically and contemporarily, that could have done so better but don't have as many great matches to their name. After the obvious point that people disagree about the relative merits of various matches, I would imagine that where one sits in the concrete/abstract XY plane is a large source of variation in how individual lists get made; it's a big reason why Macho Man ranks highly on some lists and is low or absent on others, for example.

Laughing to myself at the idea of Cody escaping the Codyverse, only for it to follow him like Michael Myers and merge with the WWE right at the moment when he was supposed to win the big one.

I think the only thing that hurts Roman is he can have kinda samey matches, but then he pulls out something like that Riddle match. He’s also one of my favorite Danielson opponents, which is something considering the career Dragon has had; those two have off the charts in-ring chemistry. I think he would have to go on the lower end of a fair list, he’s more of an overall package guy than an in-ring guy specifically, but he may be the exemplar of what it is possible to achieve as a worker having only worked in the WWE system. Bron Brekker has a lot to live up to.

Maybe they’re going for Okada/Tanahashi, the new ace choking at the last minute and needing more time in the crucible before he’s ready to step up. Wouldn’t surprise me if they ran Cody vs Roman again for Summerslam, despite the stip for the tag match last night.

Yeah, it’s odd how criticism of Corny so often revolves around misrepresentations of what he says, when there’s plenty to criticize about what he *does* say, if one is so inclined.

Remember when people were worried that Sami being against anybody but Roman was a betrayal

I would expect he could keep his fucking yap shit at a wrestling convention while his son is still in developmental, but like I said, I know the Steiners are crazy and have terrible impulse control. If nothing else, this puts WWE in a position of having to not mention or promote Bron’s connection to his dad, Stephanie is certainly immersed enough in woke corporate social circles to think that much.

I know the Steiners are both batshit crazy, but you would think Rick cared enough about his son’s burgeoning career, his importance to it, and his newly renewed personal relevance as a result of it not to make a bigoted ass of himself in public. I guess reading Daily Wire and getting mad at phantoms is more important.

Cody was a weird egomaniac ending racism in America, putting himself through flaming tables, and getting Arn to tell him about shooting gang bangers with glocks in AEW. It does seem clear that he was the best backstage leader, but Tony wasn’t going to get anything salvageable out of him on-screen moving forward. He needs the strictures of a big company and careful handlers to get him to his current stratospheric level. I sincerely hope MJF jumps for the same reason. Haitch wouldn’t put him in a position to do weird promos about totaling a car while he was getting blown, or let him do that if he asked to.

Jesus, Mox ain’t gonna have a long career if he’s not smart enough to let doctors dictate his healthiness instead of shallow visual indicators like “is that guy walking funny”. Big E is fucking ready to go, by that logic!

Why would Dave not be at liberty to share something that was told to him anonymously? I get why Punk would have to take his post down if he was violating the talent handbook, but unless Dave really *is* on the AEW payroll like the Corny stand are always joking, why would he have to play footsy with that rule?

Also have we talked about how it’s extremely weird that TK would ask the person who is probably the highest paid guy in the company to wrestle when he wasn’t cleared? Like setting aside Meltzer’s deceptive reporting, why the fuck would you jeopardize a high ticket asset like that if you’re TK? Was he listening to the Jericho-Moxley brain trust telling him that it was fine since it wasn’t a “real” match?

Depends on if you think those people deserve to have problems taken with them or not!