[jerf]

"Your second statement is at war with your first."

You missed the switch to differing valuations between two different people, it seems. You spoke as if either we're only talking about one person doing the comparison or you've casually assumed there is the objective metric I explicitly mentioned in play. No contradiction.

"Your example was also shit."

And you're just looking for reasons to tear something apart without doing the hard work of examining what was actually being said. Your nits are irrelevant to my point. I didn't give a treatise on the full value of how to create justice in the world, I'm speaking to the example at hand of how "Anonymous" retaliated and how people are applauding it when they shouldn't be. No wonder you consider it "shit", you're not even willing to grapple with what I said. You haven't fairly valuated it in the first place.

[sesqu]

You missed the switch to differing valuations between two different people, it seems.

No, I refuted the importance of it. My point was that while there might not be a universal, metric, objective measure of injustice agreed to by all involved, we don't actually need one to make social decisions (funny how three of the four qualifiers I used are essentially the same). Near Pareto efficiency exists for justice, and beyond that, numerous partial orderings have been developed over the millenia, based on perceived necessary conditions for the existence of societies.

Your nits are irrelevant to my point.

Then I must have misunderstood your point. It seemed to me that you claimed retaliation is always unjust and perfectly proportional retaliation is one-upmanship, and I don't agree at all. Since that's how I saw your argument, that's what I replied to.

[jerf]

"Then I must have misunderstood your point."

You still are. The core point is different people will measure things differently. The point is that what Person A sees as a minor injustice that he committed against B, B sees as a major injustice because it happened to him. There's an old quote attributed to Mel Brooks where I found it online, though the core quote has been around longer than that: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die." That's the part of my point you're missing (and I do not think merely disagreeing with), people valuate injustices that happen to them much higher than things that happen to other people, let alone their enemies. Part of why I think you can't be disagreeing with it is this is undeniably true; people are not neutrally scrupulously fair on any level when it comes to their own possessions or desires. Everybody carries around an enormous self-bias, for various reasons, not all of them even bad.

Yes, society has come to some basic agreements, but that's not relevant to my point. I explicitly stated that retaliation isn't always unjust, and for another I also explicitly said that while each side perceived its retaliation as just the net effect is an unjust spiral. The perceptions are not the same on all sides. Every major conflict in the world is between a righteous and holy side that only commits justifiable and regrettable retaliation against the bad guys who inexplicably engage in acts of pure, unadulterated evil just for the fun of it and just won't leave us alone... and this describes the beliefs of both sides. Sticking the happy side of this label on "our side" with Anonymous is not something I'm ready to do, not ready to overlook the means to their ends, however wonderful the ends may be.

And none of this is a refinement of or a contradiction of anything else I've already said, just trying to lay the same basic point out yet more clearly.

[sesqu]

people valuate injustices that happen to them much higher than things that happen to other people

That doesn't matter. Sure, people do disagree on things that involve them personally, but they aren't the only ones acting. Very often, people make judgements about matters that may later involve them or people they empathize with, on either side. These future people may or may not have had previous experience with the thing, but all that is required for them to act so as to lower expected injustice is that they empathize with someone on both sides. This act can be both unjust and reduce injustice, as long as the process is ongoing (so that the expected injustices and participants materialize).