Author: jonwuka

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Opinion

Pro-Wres Lab: A New Structure for Pro Wrestling (feat. AEW)

Bryan Danielson as AEW World Champion
Bryan Danielson as AEW World Champion

So this isn’t exactly a fantasy booking session. It’s a Pro-Wres Lab. I kind of did this before in The Agency System, Part 1. This isn’t part 2, it’s not the agency system. It’s along a similar line but not exactly the same thing. If I had to try to nail it down, The Agency System, Part 1 was kind of a fantasy meta-booking. What I’m going to do now is closer to a fantasy company strategy.

I don’t want to take a bunch of time to explain what the difference is supposed to be. Let’s just get into it.

The exercise here is to re-organize All Elite Wrestling into something that I think could actually compete against WWE. This is based on my idea that, in brief, “storylines are a con”. I haven’t fully fleshed this out yet in an article but I plan to. But to be a bit clearer, I think storylines have become the center of pro wrestling, to its detriment. Storylines cover over the exciting matches that are at the core of what makes wrestling a draw. Pushing storylines out as far as possible is the goal.

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Opinion

On Those Against Worldbuilding

This is really an anti-tweet, or something like that: it should be a tweet but I want to spend a little more time with it, so it’s going on the blog. I wanted to talk about being against worldbuilding and explanations.

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Opinion

The State Is Not a Cockroach: On Anarchism

This might be a pretty short blog, but I was on my way to do something else and I was suddenly compelled to kind of get my thoughts out about anarchism. I have a feeling that I will want to use them in the future.

Now your hackles may be up, and I would like to calm you down a little bit. I don’t plan to go into a fiery tirade against anarchism. I want to lay this out mainly as an explanation of the issues I have with anarchism as a theory or teleology (/end goal). That way I can explore this issue more and reference back to something concrete.

The image I have of anarchism is one similar, I think, to the idealized Marxist end goal: a stateless society. The anarchist concept is distinct, I believe, though I don’t know the specifics; most of my reading has been on socialist theory and I have not yet engaged much with anarchist theory. The reason for this is fairly straightforward. While Marxists believe the best society is a stateless society, they are not afraid to work within state structures and to employ the state to their end. Anarchists, in my view, have always opposed this on fundamental theoretical-philosophical grounds.

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Opinion

Wrestlers Are Best at Wrestling

I’ve been pretty out of the loop on wrestling recently, but I happened to need something to listen to so I put on the most recent Flagship Plus from Joe Lanza (patreon link). The theme of his monologue was inauthenticity in wrestling, talking about the fact that Samoa Joe – a guy who is past his prime, who isn’t a draw at this stage – is the most badass person in All Elite Wrestling today. It’s been a while since I’ve watched the show but that’s what I remember from when I was watching. As Lanza says: “The guy has an authenticity and an I· Will· Fuck· You· Up· energy that breaks through the walls of kayfabe and jumps right off the screen, YOU· BELIEVE· in Samoa Joe.” He’s real fired up about Joe and it’s hard not to be. Everything that Lanza says is absolutely true.

The specific line of thought that made me want to reflect on the monologue was Lanza feeling disconnected from AEW today, despite the fact that they put on what’s pretty uniformly thought of as great wrestling. Early on he says “This [Dynamite] had all three of the elements you look for in a great episode of Dynamite. … There are wrestling shows historically where maybe the boxes that need to be checked would be a bit different to constitute what a great show would be.” A couple of minutes later, he follows that up with “The problem is … I am struggling to connect with this promotion right now. Or maybe it’s the other way around, this promotion is struggling to connect with me right now, and I can’t really pinpoint why.”

That sentiment hit me hard because I have been extremely disconnected from AEW for a few years now. I know last year I was making an attempt to watch Dynamite weekly… but that didn’t succeed, did it? And the reason I stopped is largely because it began to feel like a chore. In the beginning, I was engaged because I was primarily using it as a launchpad to reflect on Lanza and Kraetsch’s thoughts about the shows. But if you’re doing it week after week, the show itself starts to loom larger, and the fact that I wasn’t really enjoying it became more critical.

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Opinion

A Review of the American Left Through Its Websites

I am going to lose my mind. I’m living through fascism and I’m watching everybody just live. And I do that, too. I put it out of my mind sometimes. But when is the time when people get serious about this stuff? When is it that people really think hard, really try to figure out a way past this nightmare of oppression?

After a long session screaming about the left (which you all deserved, I do not apologize), an idea popped into my head to look at the websites that represent some major tendencies on the left and see how they were handling this moment. Because if my issue here is that the left is effectively ignoring fascism, basically hoping that someone else is going to save them, then I should try and substantiate that. This is just a blog post, not a research project, so I’m going to basically take a look at their websites, check out a few articles, and give you my general impression.

Did I miss your website? Tell me about it! I’m not gonna update this list, but I am still starving for outlets which might actually give half a shit about the collapse of this government into outright tyranny.

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Opinion

Noticing Fascism

I saw a very recent tweet on Bluesky by Eli Valley, which goes: “This is the culmination of a longstanding demonization campaign against a Jewish professor—advanced almost a year ago by AIPAC Congressman Ritchie Torres, who shared a graphic produced by his friends at the fascist Canary Mission harassment group:” and then he links a picture. Here’s a link to the tweet. It’s not the link or the image I want to talk about, though, or even the situation. It’s the tweet itself.

It’s not like that. I’m pretty sure that I know what you’re thinking now and that’s not what I mean. I’ve got no issue with Valley’s sentiment or even his message. It’s more that it picks at something that I want to talk about.

“AIPAC Congressman Ritchie Torres”. “fascist Canary Mission harassment group”. That’s what I want to talk about.

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Opinion

Ten Songs: One-Offs

In lieu of a more “substantive” blog or a “finished story”, let’s do another music blog. This time, I grabbed ten songs that I really love but which wouldn’t be expected picks if you knew what my favorite bands are. Also, this is songs specifically, not albums; these are times when the album (or artist in general) actually doesn’t click with me that much, but this specific song has a special hold. I know the other music blog was a similar theme; I’ll do “songs I like from bands I like” soon, but for now I wanted to kinda cut down the amount of things I’d have to listen to as prep.

There’s also a bonus eleventh song, which is not really a promise of extra value because this is a blog but it does exist so there’s that. Also, I will be adding links but only for the songs that I listen to primarily on YouTube. The others are probably available but this feels more authentic to me, so this is what I’m doing. I invite you to check them all out however you can, though. Like before, this is in a rough order of how much I like them, but it’s only rough.

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Opinion

Chain of Death and Profit

“A strong rhyme to step to.”

I didn’t mean to not post last week, but I was busy writing a story. A fiction story. It’s set in a fictionalized West Africa involved in a multi-sided war. It’s about how the decisions of profiteers, focused only on their profits, can translate into widespread death and destruction.

Read “Chain of Death and Profit” on nearzone dot com

My goal is to get at least a couple blogs together this week, but I’m working on another story which will hopefully be done by the weekend, so we’ll see what happens.

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Opinion

Amateur Academics

I’ve bounced off of Ellul again. This time I was trying to go through Propaganda and I just kept hitting moments that made me go “hang on”. And it made me do something that I’m sure other people do but I never hear anybody talk about: the “_____ sucks” search. It is pretty much what it sounds like. I type “Ellul’s Propaganda sucks” and see what it comes up with. I tried this a couple different ways and came up with nothing but praise. It wasn’t until searched for reviews of his work on JSTOR that I found any skeptical opinions.

If you are the kind of academic that gets off on “academic pettiness” or things of that kind, it will be hard to beat the review of Propaganda made by Daniel Lerner in the American Sociological Review. He starts out with heat: “What this book tells us about propaganda is less interesting than what it tells us about Jacques Ellul, about the present state of mind of French social scientists, and about the ‘Cartesian method’ today.” But this isn’t what really grabbed me.

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Opinion

Defining General Fascism

It’s late, I just wrote a bunch about general fascism, it’s over at Journal of Cogency, go read it.

Defining General Fascism at Journal of Cogency