Your justification was another, when the rules apply to me there is a built in special case exception.
There is nothing personal about it, I have no idea who you are, I am sure that you are a decent human being. I have a problem with hypocrisy. In the case of the duplicates you said "no wonder people think HN is broken" because someone submitted a duplicate story...and you did not mention that the fourth submission was yours. It seemed to me that your behavior was just as worthy of a "no wonder people think HN is broken" as the person who submitted the story for the fifth time.
There is nothing personal about it, I have no idea who you are, I am sure that you are a decent human being. I have a problem with hypocrisy. In the case of the duplicates you said "no wonder people think HN is broken" because someone submitted a duplicate story...and you did not mention that the fourth submission was yours. It seemed to me that your behavior was just as worthy of a "no wonder people think HN is broken" as the person who submitted the story for the fifth time.