trying to figure out what year exactly it was the US championed human rights but no one can ever tell me 
the entire moral justification of US imperialism–which we'll define as 600-1000 military bases & the default belief the US has the legal/moral right to bomb where ever they want whenever they want––is based on this notion of "human rights" that has no fixed application or meaning
in a secular age, human rights replaced divine right or overt (and I stress overt) white supremacy as the moral basis for meddling all over the world and this strikes me as exceedingly convenient and dubious and the media almost never interrogates this moral framework.
if US is a "leader" on "human rights", as CNN casually asserts, this means that, by definition, they cannot be acting in opposition to them. The whole assumption is not only is the US the most logical arbiter of human rights but that theyre more or less squeaky clean on the issue
the rub in the whole human rights discourse is what constitutes "human rights". Most notably, the total lack of economic or social rights or anything broaching decolonization. These simply don't matter to "Western" (see:white) countries.
I write about this a lot because I really think it's a key propaganda axiom that even some leftists accept and it's very loaded and patronizing and I think it needs to be interrogated. It's simply taken for granted, as a matter of course, by liberal media w/ zero critical thought
