Gadhafi's Oldest Son, Saif-al-Islam, Captured

Murderous thug and eldest son of Moammar Gadhafi, Saif-al-Islam has been captured with his convoy in the Libyan desert.  His name alone, which translates to "Sword of Islam", reflects the blood-thirsty religious extremism of his father and both he and his father constantly used religion as a tool to advance their violent, self-centered agendas.  Those who knew Saif compared him to the most ruthless Mafia godfathers, making him pretty much just like his father, only with fewer personal foibles and less hair.

One can take comfort in the fact that the rebels who captured him will almost certainly not refrain from hooking jumper cables to his genitals and cranking their car batteries until they run out of juice or his pathetic little appendage burns up and falls off.  After that he will surely be tried, as a formality, and executed.  As I have noted before, I have no problem with capital punishment for those who are very clearly mass murderers, and torturers themselves.  Simple minds have a hard time understanding this concept, but there is nothing "hypocritical" about saying that we don't allow people to wantonly kill others, but that, if a person breaks this rule we will put them to death, in self-defense.  A person who breaks the rules forfeits his right to claim protection from those rules. Without a principle of self-defense we would be at the mercy of psychopaths who know no limits of self-restraint.

This is yet another demonstration of the sham of so-called "absolute morality".  Absolute morality says that the context doesn't matter in deciding what is right and wrong.  Necessarily then, those who claim to believe in absolute morality have committed themselves to saying that you cannot kill for any reason.  When they then proceed to carve out all kinds of special exceptions, saying it's okay to kill "bad" people and okay to kill to defend themselves, they are actually smuggling "situational ethics" into their absolute morality without realizing it.  It is better and more honest to simply acknowledge that, of course, the situation matters.  It is actually grossly immoral to say that the situation has no bearing upon our moral decisions, because it forces our decisions to be made from a position of ignorance of the facts and motivations which give meaning to the action.  It works no better to take morality "out of context" than it does to take the Bible or any other writing out of the context that defines it.