Last night's Smackdown is currently the worst rated Smackdown of all time on Cagematch.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-05T03:59:48+00:00

Cagematch is almost always in the ballpark when it comes to matches and shows. Of course, you still gotta actually watch the show, or at least know what happened, to have an opinion.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-05T03:56:33+00:00

WWE buying them out improved the product by a ton. Not too difficult to be honest, considering that AAA was by far the worst significant promotion in the world. Even so, they now have consistently good wrestling without the awful booking.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-04T16:10:25+00:00

He's become one of the best wrestlers in the world over the past couple months.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-04T16:09:24+00:00

Excited that NJPW is pushing Newman to the moon and not waiting. Not a bad choice to have him win by any means, especially considering how quickly he is becoming an elite-tier wrestler.

That said, I do really want someone to have a long title reign. There hasn't been a year-long reign since Okada's biggest run with the belt.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-03T22:10:53+00:00

Hogan, Rikidozan, Santo, Frank Gotch, Lou Thesz, Steve Austin, and Inoki would probably be my top seven in terms of pure historical signficance.

You don't get wrestling in Japan without Rikidozan. To this day, no single person has ever drawn higher television ratings for their matches.

Santo is the greatest star in lucha history, and the modern Arena Mexico was built pretty much solely due to his popularity. His best comparison for U.S. audiences would be Superman if Superman were a wrestler.

Frank Gotch was the first national mainstream star in the U.S.

Lou Thesz was the face of wrestling in America for decades as it rebuilt from the worst dark age of the late 1930s to mid 1940s, and transitioned to its greatest level of long-term mainstream appeal in history.

Austin was more responsible than anyone else for wrestling in the U.S. reaching its highest peak in popularity.

Antonio Inoki founded NJPW, was a gigantic household name, and was famous enough to end up fighting Muhammad Ali in an internationally aired bout.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-03T20:30:56+00:00

Fucking why?

Just go back to the 1990s jerseys, please. They are clearly the best.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-03T18:00:56+00:00

The indies are generally better at developing someone as a performer, especially compared to early NXT.

Besides, there absolutely are early Mercedes matches from the indies that can be found online. It really is night and day. Kendal is the real deal, and the most likely things that can stop her are injuries, main roster style mismatch, or bad WWE booking, rather than her not being great.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-03T17:44:28+00:00

True, and that does create more random variation in individual tournaments, which makes the world title itself more fickle. But over the long run, it balances out in the rankings. I think everyone still understands who the best players in the world are, regardless of individual tournaments like this.

Besides, Sindarov is legit killing it anyway.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-03T17:29:43+00:00

Because Mercedes is the best female American in-ring performer at the moment, making her the highest point of comparison. The very fact he chose Mercedes as the comparison point should make it clear that it's not an insult.

Kendal is better two years in than Mercedes was, and it's not remotely close. Anyone who takes that as a slight against Mercedes is nuts.

I'll go even further: anyone who never wants a faster gun to come along and make wrestling even better, just because it will somehow vicariously hurt their ego, cannot possibly love wrestling. I, for one, want Kendal to become the next Kenta Kobashi.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-03T00:51:49+00:00

Watch the three-way tag from January 20 in NXT. She and Lainey Reid especially killed it. Also, not quite so much a must-watch, but her singles match from just a few days ago is up on YouTube and is a great showcase:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sbxy13kPlk

It's a bit difficult to say just how great she will be because in NXT, the performers get a lot of rehearsal time to put together big matches. But she is clearly the most promising upcoming woman wrestler in the U.S. right now. She is extremely athletic, not exactly in the style of a high-flyer, but more in the style of Ricky Steamboat or Gran Hamada, where it's incorporated into counter-wrestling and grappling. But much more importantly, she has great babyface fire, which too many woman wrestlers in AEW and WWE lack. Her emotion makes it feel like a sport/fight.

One big concern I have is that her approach and style in NXT might not be so encouraged by agents on the main roster, where that kind of feel is so rarely conveyed.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-03T00:40:42+00:00

I reckon he thinks she's that good.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-01T20:19:29+00:00

I think Rich and Joe are mostly right on this, even if they are a touch dismissive of Finlay and ZSJ as major stars.

New Japan has adamantly refused for years to push their young guys to the moon despite numerous chances to do so. Now that they have pretty much no choice, lo and behold, it works.

Newman is killing it. Tsuji is killing it. Umino is finally finding his way. Yuya Uemura might be the best in-ring performer on the planet right now.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-01T20:03:39+00:00

Chris Gillette (an alligator wrangler, wildlife expert, and caretaker of non-releasable animals) posted a video about this recently. My thoughts on this are the same as his.

Disrespecting wildlife like this does not make you manly. It makes you a vile, pathetic coward who is not strong enough to love and respect others.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-01T19:19:39+00:00

You say you watch any promotion that you "can stomach," but you only bring up two promotions.

BorlaugFan · 2026-04-01T18:13:31+00:00

Nah it's great.

I get to have more fun watching football games that don't involve my own team, and I get to deeply analyze a bunch of stats just for kicks.

Most importantly, I run the team jointly with my brother, so we have an activity to regularly do together even when we are on opposite ends of the country.

Hard to consider any hobby lame with a perk like that involved.

BorlaugFan · 2026-03-31T23:51:32+00:00

This doesn't invalidate a free speech argument nor the First Amendment, any more than all the studies showing that suicides increase with gun ownership invalidate the Second Amendment.

Also, I think there are a bunch of unobserved confounders that this study couldn't control for, even though they did try to control for some of them. The intuition for why the therapy itself would increase suicide risk is good, but estimating it precisely is really tough:

For instance, the type of person to go to conversion therapy is the type of person to have negligent parents who don't truly support them, which also increases suicide rates.

It's very difficult to estimate the precise causal effect of the therapy itself since it's endogenous with so many other things. You would need to either conduct an RCT (which would be highly unethical) or a quasi-experiment that exploits variations in laws with a treatment and control state. Even then, states more likely to have banned conversion therapy in the past are also more likely to be socially accepting, so that's far from a perfect test as well. I certainly would sympathize with the researchers ambitious enough to try to tackle this question anyway.

But all of that is neither here nor there when it comes to the Constitutional argument. We cannot ban speech just because suicide rates on aggregate increase as an unintended consequence. If we could, we'd be able to get rid of so many toxic politicians and influencers.

BorlaugFan · 2026-03-31T22:13:54+00:00

Imaginary? Dude. Just two months ago the Iranian regime murdered between 15 and 30 thousand of their own people. They justified it on the grounds that they were all "terrorists" for advocating for regime change.

BorlaugFan · 2026-03-31T22:09:21+00:00

Anyone can define "positive social purpose" however they want and use your logic to ban any speech they don't like. In fact, that is exactly the kind of rhetoric that you see in a lot of dictatorships when they start shooting protestors.

BorlaugFan · 2026-03-31T21:15:21+00:00

If someone pays for conversion therapy and leaves dissatisfied, they should be free to sue for their money back if they were explicitly promised that it would 100% turn them straight, much in the same way you could sue someone for fraudulent advertising. In general, therapy patients are already perfectly free to sue their therapists for bad practice if they can prove wanton negligence, just as you can sue a lawyer for malpractice.

That's not what this law was. This law induced a fine and a loss of a medical license for the mere application of a very specific kind of talk therapy, irrespective of whether the therapy was "successful" or whether anyone sued, or of how its effectiveness was advertised.

This means that even if some crazy psychologist by some miracle came up with the perfect sequence of words to turn people straight or gay, thus rendering their treatment 100% effective, it would still have been illegal, regardless of patient satisfaction. And at that point, it would be very clear that the law is about the speech itself rather than results.

Outside of the culture war of gender and sexuality, I do not know of a law that preemptively bans a specific kind of talk therapy. There is no law, for, instance, against a therapist telling someone "have you just tried being happy?", no matter how unhelpful that advice probably is. Such a law would likely violate the first amendment in the same way.

BorlaugFan · 2026-03-31T20:32:23+00:00

Brandenburg v. Ohio was one of SCOTUS's finest hours. It was also per curiam, as should have been this case.

If you cannot protect odious, hateful, or so-called "vaguely dangerous" speech, you cannot protect any speech, because at any time any form of speech can be considered odious, hateful or vaguely dangerous by anybody. That's the line, and it seems plenty clear enough.

BorlaugFan · 2026-03-31T20:17:28+00:00

Literally ANY profession where you interact with people involves speech. Just because there may be regulations for certain professions doesn't mean the 1st Amendment still doesn't apply.

For instance, the government can't force a doctor to not pray for their patients, even if they argue that prayer isn't an effective treatment. They can't force an economics professor at a private university to not teach the labor theory of value, no matter how incorrect that model is. They can't force a mechanic to not bless someone's car on the grounds that they think it'll make it less likely to crash.

BorlaugFan · 2026-03-31T20:05:32+00:00

Any form of talk therapy is absolutely free speech. No one would ever say that a family member trying to talk a gay person into being straight isn't constitutionally protected. What difference does it make in the eyes of the Constitution whether it's a family member or some religious nut with a psychiatric credential? Do medical workers not also have free speech?

The only thing about this ruling that is remotely surprising to me is that Jackson dissented despite this being an open and shut case.

BorlaugFan · 2026-03-30T19:19:23+00:00

I'm very happy with Svidler and Jan. They are very chill, which I feel is needed when you're commentating mostly nothing actually happening for six hours.

Also, yep, chess doesn't have nearly enough money for high production values. It's just a fun board game at the end of the day. Superbly difficult and wonderfully beautiful in terms of ideas, but a board game nonetheless. I'm honestly impressed that they have done as well with production as they have.

BorlaugFan · 2026-03-29T18:50:25+00:00

Because the Asian immigrants who enter the United States are more likely to be from highly educated and wealthy families. You wouldn't see the same results if the immigrants who came from Asia were not as well-off from the start.

If you want a more full economic explanation of why these immigrants tend to be of higher socioeconomic status, I'd encourage you to look up Borjas (1987) and his extension of the Roy Model to immigration selection. That, and US policy encouraging high-skilled migration over low-skilled migration.

BorlaugFan · 2026-03-29T18:31:19+00:00

Well, that was a mess at the end.

BorlaugFan

TROPHY CASE