I wouldn't recommend it as a way to win a message board argument but some living in a society-of-really-not-laws tends to disabuse one of this particular considered opinion.

Yeah, I get what you say. I lived in Mexico for a while. Being a gringo helped some with the corrupt police, as long as I had the necessary cash. But eventually I got too worried about being targeted by kidnappers.

Still, a more-or-less lawless Internet is arguably distinguishable from lawless society overall.

Edit: Also, my perspective is colored by living with the War on Drugs for some decades. Having friends spend time in prison. Helping support others to avoid prison. Reading about millions more imprisoned, predominantly minorities. So I'm rather cynical about "society of laws".

A society governed by the rule of law can have bad or outright unjust laws. The orthogonality of these things is a bit counter-intuitive.

The War on Drugs has been far more than a "bad law". It's arguably fucked up at least two generations of minority Americans, mostly black men.

And some years ago, at perhaps the peak of that war, we had a US administration that dealt in illegal drugs in order to buy weapons illegally from declared terrorists, and then illegally provided said weapons to counterinsurgency forces, explicitly violating the express will of Congress. And then the Vice President, a former CIA Director, who was nominally in charge of the operation, was subsequently elected President. And some years later, his youngest son, with no obvious qualifications for office, was elected President for two terms, and broght to his administration many of the advisers and operatives who had carried out the drugs-for-weapons program.

I mean, it's hard to make up stuff this this!

What do you point to, from the 70s through the present, that exemplifies the "rule of law" in actual practice?