As long as we're going all Socratic, why does the question of which is "worse" even matter?

We know what mob rule looks like. It's a failure state of human governance. Supplementing an imperfect system that can be metaphorically likened to mob rule with actual mob rule is not progress. I am not advocating for peacefully standing by while being beaten; I'm saying this is a bad tactic.

If you are concerned about injustice in the world, you can't make a more just world by committing your own injustices. No two people agree on how bad an injustice is; even if you think such things can be objectively measured somehow it is obvious that people in the real world don't agree on those objective measurements. Group A hits for 1 point, Group B measures that as a 2 point injustice and strikes back with a 2 point injustice of their own, Group A sees that as a 3 point injustice and strikes back with 3, and so on forever, until someone breaks the cycle. No amount of retaliation will ever make the society of A and B just, even though in my hypothetical example both sides are acting with perfect restraint and proportionality. (As you might imagine, this is the most unrealistic assumption my model makes.) However you intend to get to a just society, that's not it.

Your second statement is at war with your first. Clearly, people can compare injustices, or else there would be no such thing as "more just". They don't have to be able to assign scores to injustices, they just have to reason that an injustice they can't choose can be replaced by one they can choose. That's pretty much how justice works.

Your example was also shit. While it is common to escalate injustice as a game strategy, that's neither a hard rule nor how it's usually done. In my experience, pardons are far more common, and are in fact closer to theoretical optima. Eventually, someone breaks the cycle (pretty unjust, right?), and the injustices in the world dramatically reduce. And then there's all the undervaluations of injustice you ignored - the traditional justification for secrecy.

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.

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.

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.

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).

One possibility is where a plurality of constituents agree either on a course of action, or believe an individual is qualified to act in their best interest. Obviously, this system has flaws (what happens when an elected person behaves selfishly?), but I'd argue it's more fair, in general, than a self-selected group executing their own agenda. We can't vote Anon out of power if we happen to stop believing their actions are just.

> Why is mob justice any worse than a justice system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge?

It's not, but are you insinuating that it's okay to subvert an unjust justice system using any means necessary? Or any means that work? Or am I reading into this? I don't think the US justice system is so broken that it needs to be fixed by extralegal means, but maybe I'm naive.

> Would altering or abolishing a system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge be a good thing?

Altering that system would be a great thing! Abolishing it, I believe, would not. If you're suggesting anarchy as a viable replacement, I'm honestly curious if you can point to any examples of large-scale anarchy that worked well? Again, I might be reading too much into your question, and you might have meant simply replacing it with another system that is not anarchy.

Thanks for your reply.

If you disagree with a comment that attempts to give thought to the issue at hand, please explain why you believe those thoughts to be wrong. This will force you to consider their thoughts and help others do so as well.

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