An ordinary Turk that saw "revolution" in Egypt, Syria, and Libya would be crazy to want it

[Renew Deal]

for themselves.

I can't imagine a reasonable person could see what happened in Syria and elsewhere and want to go down that road.

[MADem]

1. There have been a half dozen coups in Turkey in the last half century or so.

They do it differently there. They simply take over for a bit, stabilize things, then hand the government back to the civilians.

Thing is, though, if this fails--and it is looking that way -- the president will EXECUTE troublemakers and do yet another purge of the military.

He'll replace sane secularists with fundy nut-jobs.

[Igel]

2. Coups are not revolutions.

They are different kinds of beasts.

It's like somebody saying they saw how the pet panther their neighbors got for their small child turned out, so they don't want a pet pet guppy for their kids.

Recently we've tried to redefine some "coups" as revolutions, if the coup had sufficient public backing so that we like it.

We've also tried to redefine anything we don't like as a "coup," even if it's more like a revolution.

The old definitions said what happened. The new definitions often just say how we feel about what happened.