u/jrralls

I don’t mean a strategy game that was simply bad, buggy, or badly marketed and has since acquired a cult following. I mean a game that tried something genuinely innovative in strategy (diplomacy, economics, AI, logistics, politics, asymmetric factions, grand strategy, real-time/turn-based hybrids, whatever) and either flopped commercially or was dismissed at the time, only for later games to essentially prove that the underlying idea was good.
Maybe the interface was too complicated for the era. Maybe computers couldn’t really handle what the designers were trying to do. Maybe it demanded too much from players. Maybe it came out on the wrong platform, or at a time when everyone wanted Command & Conquer clones rather than whatever strange thing it was attempting.
And I’m especially interested in games where you can draw a line from the failed experiment to something that became normal 10 or 20 years later.
What’s the best example and what exactly was it doing that was ahead of its time?

I somehow made it through the entire 1990s without ever watching a full episode of either Hercules: The Legendary Journeys or Xena: Warrior Princess, even though both always seemed like shows I probably would have liked. I was in college for a lot of their run and was busy, but what’s really bizarre is thar I briefly long distance dated an older woman who looked a decent bit like Xena and owned a Xena costume, and …I still didn’t watch the show. No idea how that happened, but it did.

Now twenty-five years disappeared in that horrifying way it can and Xena still is just something I knew almost entirely through nerd osmosis.

Now I’ve been sick for about a week, I’m exhausted, and I need television that asks almost nothing of me beyond lying under a blanket and occasionally remaining conscious.

That got me thinking about an idea I’ve wanted to try for a while: speedrunning television shows. The idea is not to watch the ten highest-rated episodes (because the highest-rated episode of a six-season show is often the one where four years of storylines finally pay off and would be nearly meaningless to somebody who has no idea who half the people are).

Instead I wanted to find the ten episodes of Hercules and ten episodes of Xena I should watch if (as very well might be the case) these are going to literally be the only episodes of either show I would ever see. (not guaranteed! I could fall in love with it, but there’s a hell of a lot of other TV shows to watch so it’s possible!)

I went through fan rankings, episode ratings, old discussions of favorite episodes, and especially threads where people were recommending episodes to complete newcomers.

This is the order I’m going with:
01 Hercules S02E01 - The King of Thieves

02 Hercules S01E12 - The Gauntlet

03 Xena S01E03 - Dreamworker

04 Hercules S02E07 - The Mother of All Monsters

05 Xena S01E10 - Hooves & Harlots

06 Hercules S02E08 - The Other Side

07 Xena S01E22 - Callisto

08 Hercules S02E17 - The Apple

09 Xena S02E12 - Destiny

10 Hercules S03E01 - Mercenary

11 Xena S03E02 - Been There, Done That

12 Hercules S03E03 - Love Takes a Holiday

13 Xena S03E13 - One Against an Army

14 Hercules S03E12 - Surprise

15 Xena S03E18 - Fins, Femmes and Gems

16 Hercules S05E19 - Once Upon a Future King

17 Xena S04E08 - Crusader

18 Hercules S04E15 - Yes, Virginia, There Is a Hercules

19 Xena S04E21 - The Ides of March

20 Xena S06E18 - When Fates Collide

I’m about to start and I’m gonna be really curious how this works out. Can I watch 10 episodes of two series each with 100 episodes or more and actually get what people really love about them? Or do all the filler episodes make the great episodes great?

I have zero nostalgia here and if you think I missed anything that I really should include, let me know. No promises that I’ll throw it on, but I’ll see how I feel after this TV speed run!

I somehow made it through the entire 1990s without ever watching a full episode of either Hercules: The Legendary Journeys or Xena: Warrior Princess, even though both always seemed like shows I probably would have liked. I was in college for a lot of their run and was busy, but what’s really bizarre is thar I briefly long distance dated an older woman who looked a decent bit like Xena and owned a Xena costume, and …I still didn’t watch the show. No idea how that happened, but it did.

Now twenty-five years disappeared in that horrifying way it can and Xena still is just something I knew almost entirely through nerd osmosis.

Now I’ve been sick for about a week, I’m exhausted, and I need television that asks almost nothing of me beyond lying under a blanket and occasionally remaining conscious.

That got me thinking about an idea I’ve wanted to try for a while: speedrunning television shows. The idea is not to watch the ten highest-rated episodes (because the highest-rated episode of a six-season show is often the one where four years of storylines finally pay off and would be nearly meaningless to somebody who has no idea who half the people are).

Instead I wanted to find the ten episodes of Hercules and ten episodes of Xena I should watch if (as very well might be the case) these are going to literally be the only episodes of either show I would ever see. (not guaranteed! I could fall in love with it, but there’s a hell of a lot of other TV shows to watch so it’s possible!)

I went through fan rankings, episode ratings, old discussions of favorite episodes, and especially threads where people were recommending episodes to complete newcomers.

[EDIT! Thanks to some suggestions from the lovely people on this group I have made some changes to my list which I'm editing into the original post below]

This is the order I’m going with:

01 Hercules S02E01 - The King of Thieves

02 Hercules S01E12 - The Gauntlet

03 Xena S01E03 - Dreamworker

04 Hercules S02E07 - The Mother of All Monsters

05 Xena S01E10 - Hooves & Harlots

06 Hercules S02E08 - The Other Side

07 Xena S01E22 - Callisto

08 Hercules S02E17 - The Apple

09 Xena S02E12 - Destiny

10 Hercules S03E01 - Mercenary

11 Xena S03E02 - Been There, Done That

12 Hercules S03E03 - Love Takes a Holiday

13 Xena S03E13 - One Against an Army

14 Hercules S03E12 - Surprise

15 Xena S03E18 - Fins, Femmes and Gems

16 Hercules S05E19 - Once Upon a Future King

17 Xena S04E08 - Crusader

18 Hercules S04E15 - Yes, Virginia, There Is a Hercules

19 Xena S04E21 - The Ides of March

20 Xena S06E18 - When Fates Collide

I’m about to start and I’m gonna be really curious how this works out. Can I watch 10 episodes of two series each with 100 episodes or more and actually get what people really love about them? Or do all the filler episodes make the great episodes great?

I have zero nostalgia here and if you think I missed anything that I really should include, let me know. No promises that I’ll throw it on, but I’ll see how I feel after this TV speed run!

Tony Soprano was born August 22, 1959, and died (probably, using clues here and there) on December 2, 2007. So if you do the math, Tony Soprano lived exactly 17,634 days. Well, today I am exactly 17,634 days old too.

I was 29 when *Made in America* aired, and I remember Tony seeming old. Not Uncle Junior old. Not THAT type of old, but yeah, to my late-twenties mind somebody in his late 40s was kinda-sorta-old. Tony had a house, a wife he'd been married to forever, two college-aged children, a business, a psychiatrist, high blood pressure and dead friends. I had NONE of that at 29, so to me he seemed like a man who had already lived most of his life and was somewhere in the long final section. I don't remember consciously thinking that while I watched the finale, but looking back, I'm pretty sure that's how 29-year-old me saw him.

Now I'm sitting at exactly 17,634 days myself, and that idea seems insane. I'm 48 and I have a house, a wife I've been married to long enough that our marriage could vote, two kids who aren't in college but aren't that far away from it either, a business, a psychiatrist, high blood pressure and dead friends. The checklist is actually disturbingly similar. But I don't feel finished. I don't even feel particularly close to finished.

Because I'm a facts-and-figures type of guy, I looked at the actual numbers, and they're much more brutal than my 29-year-old perception of Tony. Roughly 89 percent of American men born around the same time as Tony lived longer than he did. The average man from his cohort lived well into his seventies and the median got close to 80.

Obviously, Tony Soprano was not exactly running the longevity build. The man was obese. He drank heavily. He smoked cigars. He used cocaine. He ate like every meal might be his last. He barely exercised, slept badly and lived with the kind of chronic stress where failing to notice the wrong guy walking into a restaurant could and did get him killed. So I don't think Tony was making 80 either.

Fine. Knock ten years off. Hell, knock fifteen years off. Assume all the Scotch, cigars, gabagool and sitting around Satriale's eventually sent Tony a very large bill even if the guy in the Members Only jacket never did. He still probably lost a decade and loosing even a decade sounds gigantic to me That's the part I couldn't understand at 29. Ten years viewed from 29 looking toward 48 seemed like something you could casually subtract from the old end of somebody's life. Ten years viewed from 48 looking forward feels gignommous.

If I could somehow sit 29-year-old me down tonight and tell him that I'm exactly Tony Soprano's age, I'm pretty sure he'd look at 48-year-old me the same way he looked at Tony: older guy, wife, kids, house, blood pressure medication, most of the interesting stuff probably already happened. And I'd want to tell him how completely he misunderstood the view from here. Because being much more aware that there -will- be credits eventually hasn't made the rest of the show seem less important. It has made me almost desperate to make sure the damn story gets somewhere before they roll.

There are things I still want to do that no longer feel like vague “someday” stuff. Books I want to write. Places I want to go. Projects I want to finish. Things I want to build. Things I still want to prove to myself I can do. I want to see who my kids become and what my marriage looks like decades from now, and I want enough time to meet whatever version of me exists after work and raising children stop taking up so much of the screen. At 29, all of that existed in some enormous unlimited future that I assumed would be there whenever I finally got around to it. At 48, the future feels both more real and less guaranteed, and somehow those two things together make me want it more.

I don't want the series cancelled halfway through. I want the arcs to pay off. I want the stupid side quests completed. I want to see what happens to all these characters I've spent decades getting attached to. And I want the big things I keep casually assigning to Future-Me to actually happen, because Future-Me isn't some theoretical guy with unlimited seasons ahead of him anymore. He's just me, a little older, assuming I get there.

At 29, I thought Tony had already lived most of the interesting part. At 48, I feel almost the opposite. I can finally see the shape of the things I still want clearly enough that losing them wouldn't feel like missing the epilogue. It would feel like somebody shutting off the television in the middle of--

The guy screaming in terror that he didn’t see any light …he didn’t see any light! … has lived rent free in my head for 25 years now (and part of me fears that’s what I’m gonna be shouting on my death bed) but is that the character that you got the most? If not who is?

Ok, art is subjective so there is no official "Best Commercial of All Time" but the Coke commercial is incredibly famous and incredibly influential and incredibly revered in the world of advertising, so...

How does Peggy and Joan and Roger and Pete etc etc feel about the fact that Don, the man they worked for/with for so long was the man who created is widely regarded as The BEST Commercial of All Time?

Have any of the old episodes of MST3K ever been uprezed?

As a total non-expert my sense is that the general theory of relativity is the last time physics had a really big KA-POW moment that mostly came by someone looking at the already available data and just thinking really really hard and really really well and coming up with something that was a total huge game changer and they did it with all the evidence that everyone else had already had but One dude just thought big brain thoughts better than everyone else. *

Sooooooooooooo …. If we’re trying to figure out if a AI could ever come up with useful science in the future would it be a good test to train one ONLY on data before 1908, and then probe it and see if it could come up with something approaching the general theory of relativity?

Give it Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, special relativity, the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass, Mercury’s anomalous perihelion precession, Michelson–Morley, contemporary astronomy, and the mathematics that existed at the time. Then ask it to construct the best possible theory of gravitation -consistent- with those facts.

Basically a historical blind reconstruction test. Would that be useful one way or the other?

* And physicists have been chasing that high unsuccessfully for the last hundred plus years.

Not which character do you think was the most loyal, but which character do you think faked that they were loyal the best?

MST3K has actually covered two of the four original Deathstalker movies ( one of them was only in live format but it was pretty darn good ).

Seord and sorcery MST3K films are my favorite genre for them to riff so I definitely want them to finish both the Deathstalker series and the Ator series.

What about you? What film series do you want them to go back to the well for?

Working on a possible novel about Austro-Hungarian right now.

Although exact numbers are of course hard to find doing some preliminary research a reasonable guess for the total number of people who died violent deaths in the area of A-H between July 27, 1883 and July 27 1914 is somewhere in the neighborhood of 45,000 to 70,000 death by violence (of all sorts) over that 31 year period. This is a reasonable historical estimate.

And once again, exact numbers are hard to come by but if you look at that exact geographical area and try to figure out the number of violent deaths between July 27, 1914 and July 27, 1945 it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 6.5 million violent deaths (of all sorts) over a 31 years period. This is a reasonable historical estimate.

So most probably there was literally OVER 100 times more violent death in the -same- geographical area over the -same- amount of time.

To put this into perspective, this is the rough equivalent of supposing that over the next 31 years 61 million people are killed by violence (of various sorts) in the area that currently encompasses the United States of America.

From the perspective of 1914, the people of 1945 really did live in a post-apocalyptic society.

Regardless of what it was trying to emulate, what is the most realistic strategy game you have ever played? The one where you personally think it most accurately captured what it is actually like to make strategic decisions? In whatever field it was trying to simulate.

This question is only for those who don’t know the answer.

There is only one episode of the Sopranos, which was directed by a woman. Without googling or looking at the answers below, write the episode title that you think was directed by a woman.

Her biggest hobby is drugs and clubbing while on drugs. Other than her physical body, was there anything that really drew Artie to her?

Over the last ten years what was the biggest POSITIVE strategy game surprise for you? Nothing negative, something that surprised you in a good / happy / fun way?

Looking at the Great Revolution of the modern era I got to thinking about how things turned out in terms of the goals for the people _who actually fought and lead them_.

The American Revolution, judged this way, is INSANELY successful. Imagine being an ordinary Patriot soldier in 1805, thirty years after Lexington and Concord. You are older now. Your hands hurt. Your teeth are probably bad because this is still 1805 and history is disgusting. You remember hunger, mud, smallpox fear, unpaid wages, worthless paper, officers yelling, Congress promising things it did not always deliver, and the basic fact that “liberty” in practice often meant “please keep freezing in this field while rich men argue about finance.” And yet! The British are gone. The republic exists. Washington did not become king. Washington did not become dictator. Washington did not even try for a third term, which is one of those facts we repeat so often that we forget how weird it is. Adams loses power. Jefferson takes power. Nobody storms the capital with an army. Nobody guillotines Adams. Nobody declares Jefferson the Great Helmsman of Virginia Thought. The newspapers are insane, the parties hate each other, but the basic soldier’s promise has held, we fought to become independent republicans, and thirty years later we are still an independent republic. The American revolutionary elite have pretty much THE best results in the history of serious revolutions? Washington dies revered. Adams becomes president. Jefferson becomes president. Madison and Monroe are waiting their turns. Hamilton dies stupidly but he is not killed by the revolution. He is killed by Burr being Burr and Hamilton being Hamilton. So the American Revolution being judged by “did the people who fought for it like the outcome thirty years later?” America is freakishly good.

Europeans often don’t take the American Revolution that seriously because they always look at the French Revolution. Well if you are an ordinary revolutionary soldier in 1819, thirty years after 1789, your answer is not simple (because the French Revolution did accomplish huge things!). Feudal privilege is gone. The Napoleonic Code survives the Bourbon Restoration in large part, which means the old France cannot simply climb out of the grave, dust off its lace cuffs, and pretend nothing happened. So the soldier can say, honestly, “We changed the world.” But then he has to keep talking. Because he has also spent most of his adult life marching across Europe. He has fought Austrians, Prussians, Russians, British, Spanish guerrillas, maybe half the continent depending on where his regiment got thrown. Napoleon rose, crowned himself emperor, conquered, bled France white, invaded Russia, lost, came back, lost again, and now the Bourbons are back. So what does the average pro-revolutionary soldier think in 1819? Probably something like: “We destroyed the old social order, but we did not get the political freedom we thought we were getting. We got glory, law, promotion, exhaustion, and graves.” The revolutionary elites? Mostly a murder chart. Robespierre dead. Danton dead. Desmoulins dead. Saint-Just dead. Hébert dead. Brissot dead. Napoleon alive but caged on Saint Helena. France is a revolution that partly succeeds for institutions and fails for almost everyone who personally tried to_help_ the Revolution.

The Russians fought for “Peace, Land, Bread,” and thirty years later the ex-Revoutionary soldier has found himself living through famine, collectivization, terror, purges, forced labor camps, and the memory of a world war that killed on a scale almost beyond human comprehension. Imagine being an ordinary Red soldier or revolutionary worker in 1947. Yes, the Tsar is gone. Yes, the Soviet Union survived. Yes, Nazi Germany was defeated. But if you were there in 1917 thinking the revolution meant ordinary people would finally stop being crushed by autocracy and war, 1947 is a very hard place to be happy with. The land did NOT become yours in the simple peasant sense. It became collectivized. Political disagreement did NOT become freedom. It became death. The party did NOT become the people. The party became the state, and then Stalin became the party. The revolutionary elites are almost comically doomed; Lenin dies from a stroke but that probably wasn’t helped by him being shot in 1918, Trotsky is expelled and murdered in Mexico. Bukharin is executed. Zinoviev is executed. Kamenev is executed. Rykov is executed. Russia is the revolution that most perfectly demonstrates the terrifying possibility that winning the revolution can be one of the worst things that ever happens to the _revolutionaries_ themselves

China in 1975 is more complicated than Russia because the revolutionary state is still led by Mao, and for many Communist elites that matters. But if you are an ordinary Communist soldier who fought through the final phase of the Chinese Civil War and you look around thirty years after 1945, you can point to real achievements. China is unified. Foreign domination has been broken. The People’s Republic exists. Literacy, public health, state capacity, and national sovereignty all look different from the chaos of warlordism, Japanese invasion, and civil war. That is the pro-revolutionary case, and it is not nothing. But then comes the rest of the ledger which is a horrible god awful nightmare. The Great Leap Forward produces catastrophic famine ( death toll above 20 million or higher). The Cultural Revolution then gives a huge wide spread death or imprisonment to teachers, officials, intellectuals, old cadres, local leaders, even loyal Communists can suddenly find themselves denounced, humiliated, beaten, exiled to labor, or politically erased. The Communist elite scorecard is mixed in a very Chinese-Communist-revolution way: Mao remains the towering figure, Zhou survives near the center, Deng has been purged and rehabilitated and purged again, Liu Shaoqi dies after persecution.. So yea, unless you were Mao, the results ain’t that great.

Iran . . . A lot of people talk as if the Iranian Revolution was just “the Islamists overthrow the Shah.” That is not really right. The revolution that brought down the Shah was a coalition, and coalitions are dangerous because everyone thinks they are using everyone else. The clerics thought they were using the liberals, the liberals thought they were using the clerics, the Marxists thought history was using everyone, the bazaaris wanted the Shah and his modernizing state off their backs, students wanted freedom, workers wanted dignity, nationalists wanted sovereignty, religious radicals wanted Islamic justice, secular leftists wanted anti-imperial revolution, and ordinary people wanted the SAVAK state and royal arrogance gone. In 1979, that could all fit under one enormous anti-Shah tent. By 2009, thirty years later, the tent is gone and only the Islamists matter. And that really really _matters_ because DURING the revolution the non-Islamic elements were not minor decorative accessories. Liberals around the National Front and Freedom Movement mattered to the success of the revolution. Marxists and leftist guerrillas mattered to the success of the revolution. Secular students mattered. Oil workers and bazaar networks mattered. The anti-Shah coalition was genuinely broad. But after the revolution, the Islamic Republic consolidates power and pushes aside, suppresses, bans, imprisons, exiles, or destroys pretty much every other revolutionary partners. So if you are an ordinary non-Islamist revolutionary in 2009, watching the Green Movement protests after the disputed election, your thirty-year answer may be bitter: “We helped overthrow a dictatorship and got a worse kind of authoritarian state.” If you are an ordinary Islamist revolutionary, your answer may be more satisfied, the Shah is gone, American influence is reduced, the Islamic Republic survives, and clerical power holds. But the most interesting scorecard is the revolutionary elite. Khomeini’s clerical faction wins enormously. The secular left loses. The National Front loses. So yea, the elite of one faction does alright but the every other elite in the Iran revolutionary coalition gets eaten for lunch.

So my ranking changes depending on whose eyes I borrow, which is probably the whole point.

For the average soldier or ordinary fighter FOR the revolution, I would rank them, America, because the republic actually resembles the promised republic. Next France, because the social/legal revolution survives even though the political dream mutates into empire and restoration. Next, Iran, but only if we separate Islamist revolutionaries from the broader coalition. Next China, because national unity and sovereignty are real but the Maoist campaigns are god-awful. Next Russia, because “Peace, Land, Bread” turns into one-party terror, famine, WWII and Stalinism.

For revolutionary elites, America is first by a mile, then Iran (But ONLY for the clerical faction), then China, then France and Russia dead (literally) last.

All in all the American Revolution still looks shockingly unusual because thirty years later, most of the people involved could look at the result and say, “I’m happy with this.”

That is pretty damn rare in revolutions.

Looking at the Great Revolution of the modern era I got to thinking about how things turned out in terms of the goals for the people _who actually fought and lead them_.

The American Revolution, judged this way, is INSANELY successful. Imagine being an ordinary Patriot soldier in 1805, thirty years after Lexington and Concord. You are older now. Your hands hurt. Your teeth are probably bad because this is still 1805 and history is disgusting. You remember hunger, mud, smallpox fear, unpaid wages, worthless paper, officers yelling, Congress promising things it did not always deliver, and the basic fact that “liberty” in practice often meant “please keep freezing in this field while rich men argue about finance.” And yet! The British are gone. The republic exists. Washington did not become king. Washington did not become dictator. Washington did not even try for a third term, which is one of those facts we repeat so often that we forget how weird it is. Adams loses power. Jefferson takes power. Nobody storms the capital with an army. Nobody guillotines Adams. Nobody declares Jefferson the Great Helmsman of Virginia Thought. The newspapers are insane, the parties hate each other, but the basic soldier’s promise has held, we fought to become independent republicans, and thirty years later we are still an independent republic. The American revolutionary elite have pretty much THE best results in the history of serious revolutions? Washington dies revered. Adams becomes president. Jefferson becomes president. Madison and Monroe are waiting their turns. Hamilton dies stupidly but he is not killed by the revolution. He is killed by Burr being Burr and Hamilton being Hamilton. So the American Revolution being judged by “did the people who fought for it like the outcome thirty years later?” America is freakishly good.

Europeans often don’t take the American Revolution that seriously because they always look at the French Revolution. Well if you are an ordinary revolutionary soldier in 1819, thirty years after 1789, your answer is not simple (because the French Revolution did accomplish huge things!). Feudal privilege is gone. The Napoleonic Code survives the Bourbon Restoration in large part, which means the old France cannot simply climb out of the grave, dust off its lace cuffs, and pretend nothing happened. So the soldier can say, honestly, “We changed the world.” But then he has to keep talking. Because he has also spent most of his adult life marching across Europe. He has fought Austrians, Prussians, Russians, British, Spanish guerrillas, maybe half the continent depending on where his regiment got thrown. Napoleon rose, crowned himself emperor, conquered, bled France white, invaded Russia, lost, came back, lost again, and now the Bourbons are back. So what does the average pro-revolutionary soldier think in 1819? Probably something like: “We destroyed the old social order, but we did not get the political freedom we thought we were getting. We got glory, law, promotion, exhaustion, and graves.” The revolutionary elites? Mostly a murder chart. Robespierre dead. Danton dead. Desmoulins dead. Saint-Just dead. Hébert dead. Brissot dead. Napoleon alive but caged on Saint Helena. France is a revolution that partly succeeds for institutions and fails for almost everyone who personally tried to_help_ the Revolution.

The Russians fought for “Peace, Land, Bread,” and thirty years later the ex-Revoutionary soldier has found himself living through famine, collectivization, terror, purges, forced labor camps, and the memory of a world war that killed on a scale almost beyond human comprehension. Imagine being an ordinary Red soldier or revolutionary worker in 1947. Yes, the Tsar is gone. Yes, the Soviet Union survived. Yes, Nazi Germany was defeated. But if you were there in 1917 thinking the revolution meant ordinary people would finally stop being crushed by autocracy and war, 1947 is a very hard place to be happy with. The land did NOT become yours in the simple peasant sense. It became collectivized. Political disagreement did NOT become freedom. It became death. The party did NOT become the people. The party became the state, and then Stalin became the party. The revolutionary elites are almost comically doomed; Lenin dies from a stroke but that probably wasn’t helped by him being shot in 1918, Trotsky is expelled and murdered in Mexico. Bukharin is executed. Zinoviev is executed. Kamenev is executed. Rykov is executed. Russia is the revolution that most perfectly demonstrates the terrifying possibility that winning the revolution can be one of the worst things that ever happens to the _revolutionaries_ themselves

China in 1975 is more complicated than Russia because the revolutionary state is still led by Mao, and for many Communist elites that matters. But if you are an ordinary Communist soldier who fought through the final phase of the Chinese Civil War and you look around thirty years after 1945, you can point to real achievements. China is unified. Foreign domination has been broken. The People’s Republic exists. Literacy, public health, state capacity, and national sovereignty all look different from the chaos of warlordism, Japanese invasion, and civil war. That is the pro-revolutionary case, and it is not nothing. But then comes the rest of the ledger which is a horrible god awful nightmare. The Great Leap Forward produces catastrophic famine ( death toll above 20 million or higher). The Cultural Revolution then gives a huge wide spread death or imprisonment to teachers, officials, intellectuals, old cadres, local leaders, even loyal Communists can suddenly find themselves denounced, humiliated, beaten, exiled to labor, or politically erased. The Communist elite scorecard is mixed in a very Chinese-Communist-revolution way: Mao remains the towering figure, Zhou survives near the center, Deng has been purged and rehabilitated and purged again, Liu Shaoqi dies after persecution.. So yea, unless you were Mao, the results ain’t that great.

Iran . . . A lot of people talk as if the Iranian Revolution was just “the Islamists overthrow the Shah.” That is not really right. The revolution that brought down the Shah was a coalition, and coalitions are dangerous because everyone thinks they are using everyone else. The clerics thought they were using the liberals, the liberals thought they were using the clerics, the Marxists thought history was using everyone, the bazaaris wanted the Shah and his modernizing state off their backs, students wanted freedom, workers wanted dignity, nationalists wanted sovereignty, religious radicals wanted Islamic justice, secular leftists wanted anti-imperial revolution, and ordinary people wanted the SAVAK state and royal arrogance gone. In 1979, that could all fit under one enormous anti-Shah tent. By 2009, thirty years later, the tent is gone and only the Islamists matter. And that really really _matters_ because DURING the revolution the non-Islamic elements were not minor decorative accessories. Liberals around the National Front and Freedom Movement mattered to the success of the revolution. Marxists and leftist guerrillas mattered to the success of the revolution. Secular students mattered. Oil workers and bazaar networks mattered. The anti-Shah coalition was genuinely broad. But after the revolution, the Islamic Republic consolidates power and pushes aside, suppresses, bans, imprisons, exiles, or destroys pretty much every other revolutionary partners. So if you are an ordinary non-Islamist revolutionary in 2009, watching the Green Movement protests after the disputed election, your thirty-year answer may be bitter: “We helped overthrow a dictatorship and got a worse kind of authoritarian state.” If you are an ordinary Islamist revolutionary, your answer may be more satisfied, the Shah is gone, American influence is reduced, the Islamic Republic survives, and clerical power holds. But the most interesting scorecard is the revolutionary elite. Khomeini’s clerical faction wins enormously. The secular left loses. The National Front loses. So yea, the elite of one faction does alright but the every other elite in the Iran revolutionary coalition gets eaten for lunch.

So my ranking changes depending on whose eyes I borrow, which is probably the whole point.

For the average soldier or ordinary fighter FOR the revolution, I would rank them, America, because the republic actually resembles the promised republic. Next France, because the social/legal revolution survives even though the political dream mutates into empire and restoration. Next, Iran, but only if we separate Islamist revolutionaries from the broader coalition. Next China, because national unity and sovereignty are real but the Maoist campaigns are god-awful. Next Russia, because “Peace, Land, Bread” turns into one-party terror, famine, WWII and Stalinism.

For revolutionary elites, America is first by a mile, then Iran (But ONLY for the clerical faction), then China, then France and Russia dead (literally) last.

All in all the American Revolution still looks shockingly unusual because thirty years later, most of the people involved could look at the result and say, “I’m happy with this.”

That is pretty damn rare in revolutions.

Looking at the Great Revolution of the modern era I got to thinking about how things turned out in terms of the goals for the people _who actually fought and lead them_.

The American Revolution, judged this way, is INSANELY successful. Imagine being an ordinary Patriot soldier in 1805, thirty years after Lexington and Concord. You are older now. Your hands hurt. Your teeth are probably bad because this is still 1805 and history is disgusting. You remember hunger, mud, smallpox fear, unpaid wages, worthless paper, officers yelling, Congress promising things it did not always deliver, and the basic fact that “liberty” in practice often meant “please keep freezing in this field while rich men argue about finance.” And yet! The British are gone. The republic exists. Washington did not become king. Washington did not become dictator. Washington did not even try for a third term, which is one of those facts we repeat so often that we forget how weird it is. Adams loses power. Jefferson takes power. Nobody storms the capital with an army. Nobody guillotines Adams. Nobody declares Jefferson the Great Helmsman of Virginia Thought. The newspapers are insane, the parties hate each other, but the basic soldier’s promise has held, we fought to become independent republicans, and thirty years later we are still an independent republic. The American revolutionary elite have pretty much THE best results in the history of serious revolutions? Washington dies revered. Adams becomes president. Jefferson becomes president. Madison and Monroe are waiting their turns. Hamilton dies stupidly but he is not killed by the revolution. He is killed by Burr being Burr and Hamilton being Hamilton. So the American Revolution being judged by “did the people who fought for it like the outcome thirty years later?” America is freakishly good.

Europeans often don’t take the American Revolution that seriously because they always look at the French Revolution. Well if you are an ordinary revolutionary soldier in 1819, thirty years after 1789, your answer is not simple (because the French Revolution did accomplish huge things!). Feudal privilege is gone. The Napoleonic Code survives the Bourbon Restoration in large part, which means the old France cannot simply climb out of the grave, dust off its lace cuffs, and pretend nothing happened. So the soldier can say, honestly, “We changed the world.” But then he has to keep talking. Because he has also spent most of his adult life marching across Europe. He has fought Austrians, Prussians, Russians, British, Spanish guerrillas, maybe half the continent depending on where his regiment got thrown. Napoleon rose, crowned himself emperor, conquered, bled France white, invaded Russia, lost, came back, lost again, and now the Bourbons are back. So what does the average pro-revolutionary soldier think in 1819? Probably something like: “We destroyed the old social order, but we did not get the political freedom we thought we were getting. We got glory, law, promotion, exhaustion, and graves.” The revolutionary elites? Mostly a murder chart. Robespierre dead. Danton dead. Desmoulins dead. Saint-Just dead. Hébert dead. Brissot dead. Napoleon alive but caged on Saint Helena. France is a revolution that partly succeeds for institutions and fails for almost everyone who personally tried to_help_ the Revolution.

The Russians fought for “Peace, Land, Bread,” and thirty years later the ex-Revoutionary soldier has found himself living through famine, collectivization, terror, purges, forced labor camps, and the memory of a world war that killed on a scale almost beyond human comprehension. Imagine being an ordinary Red soldier or revolutionary worker in 1947. Yes, the Tsar is gone. Yes, the Soviet Union survived. Yes, Nazi Germany was defeated. But if you were there in 1917 thinking the revolution meant ordinary people would finally stop being crushed by autocracy and war, 1947 is a very hard place to be happy with. The land did NOT become yours in the simple peasant sense. It became collectivized. Political disagreement did NOT become freedom. It became death. The party did NOT become the people. The party became the state, and then Stalin became the party. The revolutionary elites are almost comically doomed; Lenin dies from a stroke but that probably wasn’t helped by him being shot in 1918, Trotsky is expelled and murdered in Mexico. Bukharin is executed. Zinoviev is executed. Kamenev is executed. Rykov is executed. Russia is the revolution that most perfectly demonstrates the terrifying possibility that winning the revolution can be one of the worst things that ever happens to the _revolutionaries_ themselves

China in 1975 is more complicated than Russia because the revolutionary state is still led by Mao, and for many Communist elites that matters. But if you are an ordinary Communist soldier who fought through the final phase of the Chinese Civil War and you look around thirty years after 1945, you can point to real achievements. China is unified. Foreign domination has been broken. The People’s Republic exists. Literacy, public health, state capacity, and national sovereignty all look different from the chaos of warlordism, Japanese invasion, and civil war. That is the pro-revolutionary case, and it is not nothing. But then comes the rest of the ledger which is a horrible god awful nightmare. The Great Leap Forward produces catastrophic famine ( death toll above 20 million or higher). The Cultural Revolution then gives a huge wide spread death or imprisonment to teachers, officials, intellectuals, old cadres, local leaders, even loyal Communists can suddenly find themselves denounced, humiliated, beaten, exiled to labor, or politically erased. The Communist elite scorecard is mixed in a very Chinese-Communist-revolution way: Mao remains the towering figure, Zhou survives near the center, Deng has been purged and rehabilitated and purged again, Liu Shaoqi dies after persecution.. So yea, unless you were Mao, the results ain’t that great.

Iran . . . A lot of people talk as if the Iranian Revolution was just “the Islamists overthrow the Shah.” That is not really right. The revolution that brought down the Shah was a coalition, and coalitions are dangerous because everyone thinks they are using everyone else. The clerics thought they were using the liberals, the liberals thought they were using the clerics, the Marxists thought history was using everyone, the bazaaris wanted the Shah and his modernizing state off their backs, students wanted freedom, workers wanted dignity, nationalists wanted sovereignty, religious radicals wanted Islamic justice, secular leftists wanted anti-imperial revolution, and ordinary people wanted the SAVAK state and royal arrogance gone. In 1979, that could all fit under one enormous anti-Shah tent. By 2009, thirty years later, the tent is gone and only the Islamists matter. And that really really _matters_ because DURING the revolution the non-Islamic elements were not minor decorative accessories. Liberals around the National Front and Freedom Movement mattered to the success of the revolution. Marxists and leftist guerrillas mattered to the success of the revolution. Secular students mattered. Oil workers and bazaar networks mattered. The anti-Shah coalition was genuinely broad. But after the revolution, the Islamic Republic consolidates power and pushes aside, suppresses, bans, imprisons, exiles, or destroys pretty much every other revolutionary partners. So if you are an ordinary non-Islamist revolutionary in 2009, watching the Green Movement protests after the disputed election, your thirty-year answer may be bitter: “We helped overthrow a dictatorship and got a worse kind of authoritarian state.” If you are an ordinary Islamist revolutionary, your answer may be more satisfied, the Shah is gone, American influence is reduced, the Islamic Republic survives, and clerical power holds. But the most interesting scorecard is the revolutionary elite. Khomeini’s clerical faction wins enormously. The secular left loses. The National Front loses. So yea, the elite of one faction does alright but the every other elite in the Iran revolutionary coalition gets eaten for lunch.

So my ranking changes depending on whose eyes I borrow, which is probably the whole point.

For the average soldier or ordinary fighter FOR the revolution, I would rank them, America, because the republic actually resembles the promised republic. Next France, because the social/legal revolution survives even though the political dream mutates into empire and restoration. Next, Iran, but only if we separate Islamist revolutionaries from the broader coalition. Next China, because national unity and sovereignty are real but the Maoist campaigns are god-awful. Next Russia, because “Peace, Land, Bread” turns into one-party terror, famine, WWII and Stalinism.

For revolutionary elites, America is first by a mile, then Iran (But ONLY for the clerical faction), then China, then France and Russia dead (literally) last.

All in all the American Revolution still looks shockingly unusual because thirty years later, most of the people involved could look at the result and say, “I’m happy with this.”

That is pretty damn rare in revolutions.