Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
It makes little difference in the real world; if you see a poisonous snake you kill it, it isn't important if you get the genus and species right.
If you must... personally, if I meet a poisonous snake I leave it alone and avoid it. Plenty of people get bit trying to kill a snake that was pretty much minding its own business.

Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
Noble all the same. The sad truth however is that the populace is almost always the net loser in this game. Government abuses populace, populace generates motive and will to resist, self-serving party hijacks populace for own agenda, new government abuses populace...(repeat as necessary)
True often enough... but in the death of Daffy we saw revolution in its pure state, unhijacked, unleveraged. Angry men with guns, fired up on that potent cocktail of adrenalin and testosterone, face to face with the face they despise. That's not about self-serving parties hijacking anything, that's about Daffy sticking around way too long and ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time. So it goes. One hopes a few others were observing.

Quote Originally Posted by motorfirebox View Post
The difference between saying "Oops!" after shooting him in the back of a truck, versus actually putting him on trial--even a kangaroo court trial--is the difference between lining up civilians against the wall versus actual integration of the winners and the losers into a whole (or wholer, or whole-ish, or not completely dominated by mass executions) society. Right now, we've got Gaddafi dead in the back of a truck... and civilians being lined up against walls.
You speak as though this happened by the decision was made by the NTC, or by some authority, or as though there was some conscious plan in all this. There isn't. The decision was made by an angry guy with a gun, and it's not likely he was thinking about international perceptions or trials or human rights or rules of war or what the NTC would think or say. It's likely he didn't even plan to pull the trigger until he did it.

These things are actually less likely to happen in a revolution waged by a structured movement with a military arm that's been fighting for some time: unstructured spontaneous revolt is a lot harder to control. Of course when a revolution waged by a structured movement succeeds, the structured movement almost invariably takes over as the new despot. Something similar may or may not happen in this case. We don't know: there's a lot yet to be seen. Realistically, though, trying to hold people accountable for all the nastiness that went down on both sides in the heat of the moment is probably going to be a perfunctory exercise that goes nowhere.