So Thailand has suffered from it's first coup d'etat in 15 years1 and it's all going rather peacefully. No-one has died, the press has been left relatively free and the deposed government are free to come back to Thailand as regular, albeit now un-employed, citizens. Better yet2 they'll be elections for a new government in under two weeks. Which got me thinking, maybe having coup d'etat's every 10 or 15 years is a far better way of doing things than the current system.
Ideally what would happen would be this, someone is elected prime-minister for an indefinite period of time. He, together with his cabinet, have a fair amount of power. After four years in office the chief general in the land starts rolling two dice every week. If he hits two sixes it's time for a coup. If there's been no coup for six years he starts rolling every morning. Eventually some way they'll be a coup and when there is everyone gets a two week holiday as the country shuts down. Then after two weeks elections are held and if the people still like the old government they can vote them back in. The element of randomness will keep both the government and the opposition on their toes and everyone can look forward to a two week holiday.
Obviously this system wouldn't work if a corrupt government got in, so we'd have to introduce some control type system whereby if enough people txted in saying they wanted the government out then there would be a forced coup. This would keep everyone happy.
So in summary, living in fear of a military take-over = excellent.
1 Previous coup d'etat's in Thailand; the 1932 absolute to constitutional coup, the 1947 democracy-is-involved-in-regicide coup, the 1976 democracy to bloody revolution coup, and the 1991 brief period of military law coup. There was also a revolution in 1973. Impressively the same monarchy has managed to remain more or less the same through all this.
2 Well, better than a free press and a lack of punishing the old government. Not really better than no-one dying though.
I don't know whether it's because i'm tired, or what, but all of that went way over my head.
Oops. Also, because I too am tired, insert joke about Beth's height here
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